Still got the blues - Eric Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall

Picture: ericclapton.com

On occasion I am inclined to regale anyone who’ll listen with my affection for and affliction to the area I grew up in, and to where I returned after galavanting around the world for two decades. This stems from the discovery, relatively late in life, that the south-west London suburbs of my origin actually had more going for them than I ever knew or even suspected as a child. I’ll spare you for another post, another time, the myriad musical connections to the area around Kingston-upon-Thames, but the one that always stands out is Eric Clapton.

Time’s mists have increasingly clouded the place Clapton holds in the pantheon of absolute rock legends, and while he is flesh and blood like the rest of us, the famous ‘Clapton is God’ meme, spray-painted onto an Islington wall somewhere in the mid-’60s - which may have been, then, just cheeky hype - was applied to a young man who, arguably, would turn British rock music on its head through sheer virtuosity alone. 

Clapton had barely left Surbiton’s Hollyfield School when he joined The Yardbirds in 1963, signing his contract in a now defunct pub in New Malden (actually, one once located just a mile from the house in which I was born). Having taught himself guitar, sitting alone on the village green of rural Ripley learning blues songs by the likes of Big Bill Broonzy, the teenage Clapton, armed with a Hoyer guitar bought from Bell Music in Surbiton, found an outlet in the riverside pubs of nearby Kingston. South-west London was emerging as the home of the English blues, with districts like Ealing and Richmond becoming a Mecca for young white locals channeling the music of America’s impoverished South. Within this realm, Clapton formed one corner of a triangle of Surrey-born guitar legends, being eventually replaced in The Yardbirds by Carshalton’s Jeff Beck, who in turn introduced another prodigy, Epsom’s Jimmy Page.   

By the summer of 1966 the 21-year-old Clapton had already been in two seminal bands (the other being John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers) when he joined a third, Cream, providing an excoriating platform for him to expand his God-given talent for blues-based rock guitar, becoming the most feted musician of his peer group, a friendly rival to the equally gifted Jimi Hendrix. Cream would last all of two years - the blink of an eye in musical history terms, but just as The Beatles were only an entity for, effectively, ten years, the legacy would last much longer.

That legacy was in effect last night at the Royal Albert Hall, the Victorian wedding cake that has effectively become Clapton’s spiritual home, having first played there in 1964 with The Yardbirds, and then memorably appearing there for Cream’s farewell concert in 1968. This was the fulfilment of a personal ambition of mine: year in, year out, tickets have gone on sale for Clapton’s May ‘proms’ at the venue only to see them snapped up in seconds, not helped by the old drum’s seating capacity of just over 5,000. And, yet, here is the guitarist that I desperately wanted to emulate, especially once I discovered his local origins. I even bought an Eric Clapton-signature Fender Stratocaster in the hope that it would make me play like him. But, strangely, in all my 54 years I’ve never found myself in the same space as the man himself. I wasn’t disappointed.

Opening with a gentle version of Gary Brooker’s Lead Me To The Water in tribute to the Procol Harum frontman, who died in February, Clapton and his now familiar band of supporting players (including singer and organist Paul Carrack, bassist Nathan East and keyboard player Tim Stainton), got straight into the blues with the Chicago standard Key To The Highway. In fact, this was to be, largely, a parade of Clapton’s best known songs - a funked up I Shot The Sheriff, followed by a personal treat for me, Cream’s White Room and, later, Badge and his signature interpretation of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads. 

Indeed, it was quite refreshing for Clapton to use the show - which had, like so many others, been postponed by Covid (and let’s not go near his apparent conservative views on that subject…) - as a run through of what the crowd, which appeared to be largely in the guitarist’s septuagenarian age group, had come for. More contemporary songs, like Pilgrim and River Of Tears provided textured reminders of Clapton’s writing skills (albeit both being co-written with Climie-Fisher’s Simon Climie), as well as his underrated, soulful singing voice, highlighting a point that he isn’t just a raucous blues soloist. Indeed, that became even more apparent with the mid-show acoustic set, drawing on the 1992 MTV Unplugged performance that brought Clapton a new audience (and gave a notable fillip to the acoustic guitar industry), with playful versions of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out, accompanied by Andy Fairweather Low, and the old Charlie Chaplin/Nat King Cole chestnut Smile. Then the two highlights of that MTV special, the shuffle-arrangement of Layla and the still poignant Tears In Heaven.

A quick reset of the stage, and we were back to the electric Clapton, with the aforementioned Badge leading into the tender Wonderful Tonight (references to drunken buffoonery not withstanding, this was a timely rendition for my wife and I to enjoy on our one-month wedding anniversary...) and then back on the heavy pedal for Crossroads and another Johnson song, Little Queen Of Spades. Some in the  venerable Albert Hall crowd must have had advanced warning as to what came next, as from our eerie we sensed something of a stage rush (though clearly slowed by hip replacements, arthritis and other advanced-year hindrances) which heralded a second performance of the night for Layla, played out in its full Derek and the Dominos form, replete with its freewheeling coda. With that, and an encore of the Joe Cocker song High Time We Went - voiced by Carrack (a welcome opportunity for him to demonstrate arguably the UK’s finest vocal cords), the 77-year-old Clapton was off. There was little ceremony and, as had been the case for most of the night, no great interaction with the audience.

That appears to have always been his MO. Apart from the occasional brisk “thank you!”, and shoutouts to individuals in the band, Clapton has, from those teenage performances in the pubs of south-west London, through his legend building to now, mostly let his fingers do the talking. Like many of his other peers still going, here was proof that age is, broadly, just a number. I’ll admit that, as the world came to a halt two years ago, I wondered how many of these legends I would ever get to see again live. Clapton himself had suggested as long ago as 2014 that he might retire, as nerve damage to his fingers as well as other age-related ailments started to make performing less enjoyable. There was nothing, however, in last night’s display to suggest that he’s about to pull the plug on his 60-year career. 

In my last blog post (several weeks and a wedding ago) I came to the conclusion that Genesis had, finally, come to the end of the road, with their visibly aged and ailing lead singer. At the Albert Hall was  a guitarist (and Phil Collins’ former mucker) nearing his eighth decade and showing every bit of the fretboard dexterity that first blew the London music scene away in The Roosters, The Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers and then Cream before he’d even turned 21. 56 years on, that God-given talent is still there. Last night we cherished it.

Getting back to when they really were Fab

At risk of appearing late to the party, I’ve finally found the time to consume all eight hours or so of Peter Jackson’s sumptuous Beatlesfest, Get Back. You’ve surely heard about it by now: the first part appeared on Disney+ last Thursday, with parts 2 and 3 released progressively over subsequent days, and given its collective length it’s been quite a challenge to find so much time to indulge it. 

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not trying to confect an image of a busy urban sophisticate with little room for frivolities like a mammoth documentary about a pop band, but you find anyone with so many spare hours with which to sit exhaustively through as much 52-year-old footage of musicians sitting around smoking and strumming. 

That last statement, however, fundamentally misses the point of Jackson’s incredible project. It also brushes aside the justifiable deification of the four musicians themselves, but I’ll get to that later. Because Get Back transcends any experience or expectation you may have of a music documentary. It is more than a biopic, more than a concert film, more than a retrospective. It is, perhaps inadvertently, a near-forensic examination of a band, but conducted through the narrowest of apertures - just 29 days in January 1969. 

To this end, it is no more than a blood sample drawn over the course of one month in the entire lifetime of The Beatles, so it shouldn’t be construed as an attempt to tell their story in its entirety. It's like carbon dating an oak tree by a tiny sample of one of its rings. But in capturing even a brief window of time in The Beatles' history, Get Back depicts the state of a band that would, officially, split up just 15 months after Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot the original footage, 56 hours of which have been distilled by Jackson down to the eight.

From one angle, it depicts the mundanity of life in a band (there are plenty of shots of Ringo Starr watching on while John Lennon and Paul McCartney finesse a new song, reflecting the famous Charlie Watts quote about life as the Rolling Stones’ drummer comprising of five years’ work and 20 years spent hanging around). From another angle, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras capture the dynamics between the quartet. There is the still-symbiotic relationship between Lennon and McCartney, with one scene depicting them discussing leadership of the group, the seemingly unspoken hierarchy that relegated the younger George Harrison to a lesser writing role, and the older Starr to, at times, merely making up the numbers (which isn't true, but there goes another well established Beatle trope).

In this mix we see Yoko Ono, rarely not at Lennon’s side, and studio visits from Linda (Eastman, as was) and a delightful cameo from her daughter Heather. Maureen Starkey and Pattie Boyd, then wives of Ringo and George, also make appearances. They provide, somewhat, glimpses of normality, of domestic maturity in stark contrast to the screaming adulation that met the formerly fresh-faced Mop Tops with their cherubic smiles, bum freezer suits and polite bowing after each number. Now, they’d become shaggy-haired men in the second half of their 20s (Lennon was 29 at the time), with kids and a collective business interest, Just seven years separate these two images.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In case you’ve missed the memo, or have been self-isolating to hermit-level media avoidance, the premise of Get Back is that it depicts the band supposedly writing, rehearsing and recording what was meant to be their eleventh studio album, while - perhaps not explicitly - opening themselves up to the possibility of live performance again. It opens on 2 January 1969 with the band assembling at Twickenham Film Studios where, on a chilly, cavernous 7,500 square-foot sound stage (the same space where they had earlier made Help! and A Hard Day’s Night) they sit in a semi-circle and attempt composition in a ‘live‘ setting. But the atmosphere appears febrile, not helped by the cold of the studio, with Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras and microphones picking up every comment, every sideways glance, with unrestricted access.

To some extent, the exercise was envisaged as a tentative return to the live performances they’d given up at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966. That had left them jaded, but the net result was that concentrating on work as a studio band alone focused The Beatles on what is now considered their most creative, free-wheeling phase, which led to the critical high of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the childishly enjoyable Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, their retreat to India, the supposed ‘grown-up’ step of forming Apple Corps, and then the eclectic brilliance of The Beatles, better known as ‘the White Album’.

As Get Back captures, Twickenham proved to be unfulfilling, even if there is oodles of output (and embryonic snippets of songs that would eventually find their way into solo repertoires, such such as Lennon’s Jealous Guy and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass). However, Twickenham established the principle of returning to a more stripped-back rock sound, with a simpler set-up in the film studio - Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sat in a semi-circle, Starr completing the arrangement, with guitars plugged into amps. No embellishments. But, as transpires, there’s an uneasy vibe, which culminates in Harrison standing up and declaring “I’m leaving the band,” and walking out muttering “I’ll see you in the clubs.”. The remaining Beatles respond by going for lunch. “We may as well get in Clapton,” jokes Lennon uneasily as they return to work, unwittingly and ironically referencing the-then hottest British guitarist who would eventually fall in love with, and marry, Harrison’s wife Boyd. 

Productivity shifts up a gear when they leave south-west London and reconvene in Mayfair, in the basement studio of 3 Savile Row, their ‘corporate’ headquarters. Harrison returns (Savile Row was his condition for doing so, along with the inspired addition of augmenting their sound with keyboard player Billy Preston, who not only relieves any residual internecine tension, but adds soul to the music, giving it a looser feel).

That, then, is ultimately what Get Back is about: the music. Before our very eyes, we get a unique insight into the gestation of what would much later become the Let It Be album. We see and hear McCartney inadvertently strum the opening chords to the song Get Back on his iconic Hofner Violin bass, and he and Paul spar gently over various attempts to arrive at the line “Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner…”. But what’s even more remarkable is that we are ultimately watching something of a failure. Even after the work at Savile Row had ended, the album ended up on the back burner, and here might lie the source of the popular belief that it was a process beset by acrimony.

Much myth and falsehood has been generated about The Beatles’ demise. Even now, Fabologists debate the sequence of events and who said what to whom during the denouement. There is, though, little-to-no traces of true discord in Get Back. If anything, it depicts the dull normality of life in a band making records. No wild and crazy drug and booze-fuelled sessions - just endless cigarettes, and copious trays of tea and toast. Band members turn up for work in the morning, break for lunch, go home in the evening. They chat, they joke, they play endless arrangements of their songs, adopting Goon-like funny voices (Peter Sellers makes an awkward appearance in the Twickenham scenes) and lark about with much the same banter you find in any office. There are tedious repeat attempts at playing songs, with arrangements being tweaked and phrasing adjusted, interspersed with impromptu jams of rock’n’roll standards like Twenty Flight Rock and the ribald Liverpudlian folk song Maggie Mae. Even when looks are cast at each other, the body language suggests nothing more sinister than the mild irritation of disagreeing with a colleague over how a PowerPoint presentation might be structured.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In fact, amid the clouds of cigarette smoke, the Fabs looked like they were having fun. Towards the end we see the infamous rooftop concert, staged at 3 Savile Row in lieu of an earlier plan to perform the new songs at an open -air show on Primrose Hill. The performance is, notoriously, interrupted by fun-free PCs Ray Dagg and Ray Shayler (other christian names were available in the 1960s to Met officers…) from West End Central nick to shut down what a couple of local numptys had branded a breach of the peace. It marks the end of The Beatles as a performing entity, but you can see in that footage of them, carefree and taking them back to Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller and Liverpool’s Cavern almost a decade before.

If there were cracks, Get Back doesn’t really depict them. But something was up. Glyn Johns was given the task of assembling the album from the combined Twickenham/Savile Row sessions, but things started unravelling. The album was abandoned (although the single Get Back was released in April 1969). Four weeks after the rooftop concert the band reconvened at Abbey Road, to make the record that would take that studio’s name. In the orthodox chronology, Abbey Road became the final album to be recorded by The Beatles, but the product of their work in January 1969 would eventually be released in May 1970, nominally one month after McCartney had declared himself out of the band. To boot, the tapes Johns had worked on had been handed over to Phil Spector to ‘re-produce’, adding elements that McCartney would eventually strip out with the Let It Be…Naked album released in 2003. Some - me especially - will maintain that it’s the better album as a result.

There is, though, probably more to The Beatles’ end story than Jackson’s epic captures. John Lennon, for example, had brought in the New York businessmen Allen Klein to manage the band’s affairs, against McCartney’s knowledge. Klein gets no attention in Get Back, which leads to some suspicion of Apple Corps’ creative control over the project. Then again, Get Back is not about the break-up of The Beatles. either. Ultimately, it’s a snapshot (albeit a gargantuan one) of 29 days in January 1966 when the Fabs got together and produced music of a richness and longevity that can be enjoyed almost as new today. We get to appreciate, through raw, unedited scenes, unencumbered by voiceovers or cutaway interviews, just what John, Paul, George and Ringo brought individually to the band, arguably dispelling some of the convenient, cartoon-like tropes that we’ve conditioned into accepting down the years. That Lennon was the caustic rocker, that McCartney was the benign, anointed one, that Harrison was the ‘Quiet One’ with the uncanny gift for song, and that Starr was that drummer’s cliche, the class clown who sat at the back and didn’t get involved. 

Get Back shows them all in a much more engaging light: Lennon was cool and surprisingly warmer than we’d expected (his interaction with the young Heather McCartney is delightful, as is Ringo’s). McCartney was and is blessed with a unique ear for melody that comes out with The Long And Winding Road and his improvised Get Back riff. You see how Harrison contributed far more than the few songs that made it onto the albums, but you also see a somewhat diffident soul. Starr was (and could still be) a remarkably exquisite drummer, capable of fills and improvisation equally as good as the more lauded tub thumpers of the rock era.

“We only think we know The Beatles,” director Peter Jackson recently told Uncut magazine while discussing the project. “We’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night and Help! We’ve seen them perform on stage in The Cavern [Club] and Shea Stadium. We’ve seen interviews or press conferences. When you think about it, those are all performance situations.” Get Back, he says, presents things differently. “When they don’t know they’re being filmed you are getting a 100 percent pure look at the real guys, which doesn’t really exist on film, particularly, anywhere else.”

Pictures: Twitter/@TheBeatles

Ultimately, Get Back is a masterclass in music making. The Beatles are or were musical deities, and over the 29 days Jackson has condensed into his film, even the most seasoned fan will come to appreciate their music even more. I won’t, though, leave it just there. Because the other thing about Get Back is that it shines a light on the accelerated timeline that The Beatles’ career ran on. When they walked into Twickenham Film Studios on the second day of January in 1969 it was less than seven years since Love Me Do. Seven years. Don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all that different in 2014 to how I am now. But in October 1962, The Beatles’ music, their haircuts, their suits, everything was in stark contrast to the beards, long hair and maturity of the men seen approaching their 30s in 1969. 

Paul McCartney and his daughter Mary at the London premiere of Get Back
Picture: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Disney 

Stretch their timeline to its full extent, and just ten years, more or less, separates their formation in August 1960 and McCartney’s announcement in April 1970. Ten years in which they evolved from chirpy beat poppers into prototypical rock stars, a transition that, arguably, enveloped the most remarkable library of popular music that the genre has ever experienced.

51 years on, we’re getting to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, what a band of brothers The Beatles were. You could argue “So what?”. Five times more years have elapsed since they split up as they were together. But the influence The Beatles have still today is almost immeasurable. Some misanthropes will still dismiss them as purveyors of children’s songs, but in the grand scheme of things, their body of work remains beyond comparison with anything past, present and, probably, future. Get Back is not the key to understanding that bold statement, but over eight utterly engrossing, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck hours, it goes a long way to reinforcing it.

The Beatles: Get Back is streaming now on Disney+

When the mountains and canyons started to tremble and shake

Spent my days with a woman unkind

Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine.

Made up my mind to make a new start.

Going to California with an aching in my heart,

Someone told me there's a girl out there,

With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.

Took my chances on a big jet plane

Never let them tell you that they're all the same.

The sea was red and the sky was grey,

Wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today.

The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake

As the children of the sun began to awake.

Led Zeppelin, Going To California

Has anyone ever asked you what period of history, if time travel was possible, you would want to visit? No, me neither. But if they did, my Tardis fantasy would be to return to the year of my birth, 1967. Not for that event, which would be just weird (“Paging Dr. Freud!”), but to a bucolic corner of California where a particular sub-culture of the free spirit flourished in the Summer Of Love. 

My interest was piqued when Barney Hoskyns, ertswhile rock scribe and founder of the Rock's Lost Pages website, brought out his wonderful (and lengthily titled) 2005 tome Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys In The LA. It not only captured a remarkable time, but also a remarkable place - the seismic valleys of the Hollywood Hills, and the incredible body of music that nestled within amid a haze of drugs, bed-hopping and hippyish idealism. Covering the denim-clad years that were the first nine of my own existence, Hoskyns charted the fortunes of, frankly, an incredible group of musicians living, mainly, in and around Laurel Canyon, a semi-rustic community barely a ten-minute detour from the gaudiness of Sunset Boulevard. 

With Mulholland Drive running through it, the canyon has always attracted Hollywood royalty, seeking escape from the bright lights of Tinseltown, but in the period in question it became the epicentre of artistic idealism, exemplified by the presence of Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Steven Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne (who shared a house with Glenn Frey, with the two of them writing early song for the Eagles, like Taking It Easy). Another figure in this internecine cauldron was Linda Ronstadt, who would run into the likes of Frey and Don Henley ‘down the hill’ at West Hollywood's Troubador, a legendary venue that played a huge part in the careers of Mitchell and Taylor (with whom she had a relationship, as did Crosby), the Eagles themselves and sometime member JD Souther, The Byrds, Elton John and Carole King. Another figure inextricably linked to this web was David Geffen, a prominent figure in Hoskyns’ book for his own colourful life, as well as the ambition that made him one of the most powerful figures in showbusiness.

Five years prior to Hoskyns’ book, Cameron Crowe stepped back into the same place and time with his semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, recalling his own experiences as a teenaged Rolling Stone writer, mixing with the likes of Poco, the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin and [again] the Eagles during their wildest period of LA hell-raising. This was clearly a time of arch decadence and louche behaviour, but it should never be forgotten that there was also some sweet, sweet music that came out of it. 

Which brings me to a new film (well, a new film in the UK), that celebrates the countrified rock (or folkified pop - take your pick) that poured out of LA’s canyons from the mid-60s onwards, becoming known, invariably, as ‘the California Sound’. Echo In The Canyon, directed by former music journalist and record executive Andrew Slater, captures the fertility of both the time and a locale that intoxified so many rock luminaries, many of whom came to stay and enjoy Laurel Canyon’s various pleasures.

The film features interviews with the late Tom Petty (in his last filmed interview), Brian Wilson, Eric Clapton and Graham Nash, all of whom fell under the canyon’s spell (a “legendary paradise,” - Petty, a “heavenly place,” - Clapton). Crucially, it examines the "avalanche" of music that poured down the mountainsides from the likes of Buffalo Springfield, the Mamas And The Papas and the various bands and artists they were associated with. "The music that came out of the Laurel Canyon scene was inspiring to my generation of songwriters," says Jakob Dylan - Bob’s son and both the film’s anchor and executive producer. "The best test of songwriting is that it transcends its moment in time," Dylan explains, "and there is no doubt that the songs we explore in this film are as powerful today as they were in 1965."

The documentary, which has finally appeared theatrically in the UK, two years after I first came across its US release, also includes interviews with Stills and Crosby, ex-Mama-and-Papa Michelle Phillips, The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and even Ringo Starr, who became enamoured by the canyon scene’s romanticism himself. Indeed, critics have claimed that the film spends too much time in the company of the Beatle and Beach Boy Wilson, under-representing many of the names and actual residents of the LA canyons that contributed to the richness of its musical and artistic output. But, in fairness, it only takes the canyon story up until the year in which I popped into the world. In the process, it also revisits the richness of canyon’s musical output, with new recordings of Pete Seeger’s The Bells of Rhymney by Beck, Norah Jones’ interpretation of The Association’s Never My Love, Stephen Stills and Eric Clapton covering Buffalo Springfield’s Questions, and a couple from Canyonite, Neil Young. 

Plenty of distinct geographies have been responsible for musical genres - from New York to Liverpool, Nashville to Manchester - but there was something about Laurel Canyon and the bungalows and hippyish spirit that fermented there which led to some of the most interesting fusion of folk, rock and pop the 1960s and 1970s produced. And Echo In The Canyon captures it all, in highly entertaining form.

London royalty: the Soho Dukes

© Simon Poulter 2019

Living in Greenwich, as I partially still do, I am constantly reminded of the emergence of the so-called New Wave in the late 1970s. All around this corner of south-east London there are venues that played host to legends of pub rock that were a vital part of the New Wave. Squeeze, in particular, loom large in this story, gigging in and around Greenwich and Deptford (Glenn Tillbrook still lives and works from a studio in Charlton), and there are tales from varying ends of the Old Kent Road of bands like Nine Below Zero, Dr Feelgood, Kilburn And The High Roads (and their successors, Ian Dury & The Blockheads) and even Dire Straits plying their trade in the pubs of the area. Dire Straits' debut single, Sultans Of Swing, was even inspired by a jazz band playing a near-deserted pub in Deptford.

Before the term ‘pub rock’ became coined, there was no shortage of back rooms in pubs hosting bands. The Rolling Stones got their break with a residency at the Crawdaddy Club, a back room at The Station Hotel in Richmond-upon-Thames which was a glorified pub itself. A couple of years later, The Yardbirds - featuring the teenage Eric Clapton - built a similar following in the same part of south-west London. Clapton himself had grown his reputation by busking in the pubs of nearby Kingston. It was perhaps fitting, then, that he signed his professional terms to join The Yardbirds in a pub down the road in New Malden. Today, the term 'pub rock' covers a multitude of exponents and it is, perhaps, a lazy term, but does still validly cover that strata of the music industry that can be found on any given night of the week knocking out a combination of standards and their own tunes to an audience of punters getting ever-so-slightly sozzled, and ever-so-slightly deaf. A case in point is the Cavern Freehouse in Raynes Park, a couple of miles up the road from the pub where Clapton turned pro, and typical of the kind of local haunts where, on any given night of the week, an erstwhile act will be pumping out some chugging boogie. Unashamedly named after its more famous Liverpool namesake, thanks to proprietor Noel being a proud Scouser and Beatles fan, the Raynes Park Cavern is typical of venues where you’ll find good quality, honest-to-goodness pub rock. Such as, on this particular Wednesday night, courtesy of the Soho Dukes.

Formed by rhythm guitarist Colin ‘The Duke’ Foster (a New Malden-raised lad himself), together with seasoned pub rockers Johnny Barracuda (vocals), Si Leach (lead guitar), Mark 'Bomber' Randon (bass) and Adrian Blackwell (drums), the Dukes are a lively brew, drawing quite happily on a number of Route 1 influences. Significantly, they write their own songs, rather than rely on an overworked canon of standards. “It’s all about the song for me,” says Foster, the band’s chief songwriter. “Always has been, always will be.” That is always the essence of any good pub rock band. As Bono once said, “All I want is a red guitar, three chords and the truth”. Well, we’re not far off here. No vibey keyboards, no elaborate backing tapes, just a couple of guitars, a bass, drums and a highly charismatic front man.

© Simon Poulter 2019

“The idea behind the Dukes was to take all the influences we love and create a very British band,” Foster says. “One that you could find trawling the streets of Soho, clutching a can of Party Seven in between falling in and out of pubs, bars and venues! It struck me that the musical history and heritage of Soho and its surrounding areas was that of hosting some of the greats in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. So, why not celebrate the area that gave us so much music - places like the Marquee, the St. Moritz Club, the Borderline, Astoria, and so on. Soho is a place where the Dukes had either individually or collectively spent so much time breathing in the sights and sounds. Hence the Soho Dukes: something regal but with dirt under the fingernails”.

And there certainly is plenty of that. This is pub boogie at its best, with songs like Angel Walk, Pablo’s Place, Murdertown and tracks off their recent Three Sheets To The Wind EP drawing on an even wider range of influences to Foster’s writing style. “My influences are many and varied,” he says, “but right at the top of the list are the Stones - Keith’s guitar playing and Mick’s vocal phrasing. But you can add to that Slade lighting up Top Of The Pops [in the 70s] with rabble-rousing anthems; Rod Stewart’s voice and the good-time vibe that The Faces would bring to the bar room table. From across The Pond you’ve got the likes of John Mellencamp and Tom Petty, while back in Blighty, Tyla from the Dogs D'Amour , who is a huge influence on my song writing. Tyla’s lyrics and melodies set to a backdrop of simple, three or four open chords.”

The influences don’t end there: “I love both electric and acoustic compositions,” says Foster. “Take the Black Crowes: Rich Robinson’s guitar on Shake Your Moneymaker and Chris Robinson’s voice, but also the songs overall on that album. Then you’ve got The Quireboys, with their Mott The Hoople/Faces-influenced rock n roll and Spike’s voice; Phil Mogg from UFO’s vocals and lyrics; Blondie with their delicious pop songs and Clem Burke’s Keith Moon-style drums; early Police, Aerosmith, Hanoi Rocks, Zep, ELO and Jeff Lynne’s eloquent songwriting. Cheap Trick’s zany songs and delightful pop melodies. The list goes on…”

It could indeed go on, such is Foster’s unbridled enthusiasm for collating his influences and shoving them into the music blender. All are readily audible in the Dukes’ music, and fronted by the delightfully eccentric Barracuda, one of those lead singers who can transform themselves into something that can’t be ignored with just the addition of an undertaker’s hat and a pair of sunglasses. Married to Foster’s boogietastic compositions, Barracuda draws on Rod Stewart's phrasing, Ian Dury's comic timing and New Wave figures such as Wreckless Eric and Elvis Costello. He’ll even throw in some literary effect: “The wit of Raymond Chandler. The imagery of Ray Bradbury's prose,” he says. “It's all different flavours of genius. And I'd kill for just 1% of it.”

“Weekend Millionaire was the song that, for me, started to properly define the direction the band has taken,” Barracuda explains. “It's become a bit of an anthem for us and was a natural to record for the EP.” Another is Analogue Man: “It’s about an obstinate old boy standing firm against the march of technology, and and possibly more than a little autobiographical! Usually Col and I will develop a song together; guitars and vocal melodies evolving simultaneously. Songs definitely taste better when they're grown organically. ... And we'll generally start with a chorus and work our way outwards. But Analogue Man was an exception. A vocal melody suggested itself as I was writing the words. Col grabbed it, twisted it into shape and then the band took it to another level entirely. This one won't appear on the first album, in the final stages of completion, but it'll definitely feature on the second. I'm already looking forward to recording it.”

With a name evoking that most central area of central London, the Soho Dukes have a distinct Britishness about them. That doesn’t mean Barracuda adopting Steve Marriott’s Itchycoo Park vocal persona, but more of a lyrical geolocation bound with the American roots of their music. No more is this exemplified than Think Of England, which evokes “supposedly better times”, according to Barracuda. “An England gone forever. An England of fizzy bitter, Marc Bolan and Randall and Hopkirk. It's the Dukes' national anthem. 'Lie back, think of Eng-er-lannnnd!' One for the teenagers…,” he giggles. The song makes references to “back seats at the Odeon”, taking the “last bus home and change out of a shilling”. Resolutely old imagery, but imagery that takes a welcome baseball bat to the latent neanderthal tendency in Britain today that views a return to the 1970s of The Sweeney as being a healthy one. Don’t, however, see this as a Richard Digence-style reminiss about Spangles, Bazookas and Knock-down Ginger. Or see the Dukes as any kind of revivalists. In fact, there’s more going forward for them than going back.

The Soho Dukes will play the 'Camden Rocks' all-day event at Club Kolis (The Lounge 666), 1 Archway Road, London N19, on 29 February - Leap Day. Their three-track EP Three Sheets To The Wind can be downloaded from www.sohodukes.com.  

The end is nigh: Sheryl Crow's Threads

After my post last week about an abruptly different employment status, this latest headline might appear alarmingly nihilistic, but fear not. Following my conscious uncoupling last week I suddenly have time on my hands to catch up on numerous overdue domestic tasks. That includes listening to the small pile of records that has accumulated like traffic cones stacked up by the road, ominously, long before the road gets dug up. Top of the pile, through no particular selection process, is Sheryl Crow’s Threads which, the singer says, will be her last.

She has been touting the prospect of retirement from album making for a while, recently telling Rolling Stone that she’d fallen out of love with the process. “I’ve loved making albums, I’ve loved growing up with albums, [but] I don’t think people listen to albums as a full artistic statement anymore,” she explained. “They cherry pick and make their own playlists or you’ll only hear a song if comes up on a playlist. For me to make a full artistic statement, with a beginning and a middle and an end, and to put the emotion and the money and the time into it only to have it not be heard that way? It seems slightly futile.” Crow is not done yet with the idea of making new music, however, but says she’ll focus on writing and releasing individual songs. Which makes consideration of Threads interesting. “I feel really good about this being my last album,” Crow told Rolling Stone. “I feel like it’s really the summation of my creative life all the way until now. Threads is a beautiful final statement.” Whether it is or whether it is not I’ll come onto in a moment.

But, first, let me take you back a couple of weeks, when I had a job, and was sitting at Munich Airport after yet another corporate country visit. I suddenly realised that the music being piped into the departures area was Coldplay, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what Coldplay song it was (and couldn’t be arsed to fire up SoundHound to find out) because I stopped buying Coldplay albums as they (band and albums) had ceased to be of any interest whatsoever. They’d become over-earnest, the music wallpapery and Chris Martin had basically become a bit of a tit, what with all that latter day hippie-dippieness. The Coldplay song I heard in Munich was pleasant enough, don’t get me wrong, but ordinary. Pleasing, but nothing outlandish. A Ford Mondeo, if you will. William Shatner, even (you’ve seen his face all your life, and even though he’s now, remarkably, in his 80s, it doesn’t seem any different to when he was Captain Kirk in the 1960s). Familiar, like a neighbourhood that never changes.

So what’s that got to do with Sheryl Crow? Well, there have been emerging parallels. 27 years ago, when her debut album Tuesday Night Music Club burst through via the gloriously infectious All I Wanna Do, Crow commenced a run of albums that strolled between LA cool and Stonesesque rock and roll, blues and country, soul, edgier stuff and alt-country folkiness. It was always polished - though thankfully not gloss-polish. It was mature without sounding old, familiar without being derivative. It rightfully propelled her into rock’s executive lounge, recording and touring with the Stones, Eric Clapton (whom she dated, later writing My Favourite Mistake about the experience), and headlining a package tour with John Mayer (I was lucky enough to see their San Diego gig). Such is Crow’s standing that she’s never been short of stellar associations, from the late B.B. King to Bob Dylan. Which brings me to Threads, her eleventh studio record and a 17-track collection of collaborations with a galaxy of luminaries, from Stevie Nicks and Willie Nelson to Clapton and Sting, and from Chuck D to Vince Gill and even Johnny Cash, whom, if memory serves me, died in 2003.

Duet albums are often this way, an excuse to do something with musical mates but which add very little actual value to the principal act’s value proposition. Threads, though, might be different but, perhaps, only in the context of being Crow’s last album. For there has been a creeping sense of diminishing returns with her most recent. That’s not to say that 2013’s Feels Like Home and 2017’s Be Myself weren’t good, they just lacked the vibrancy that made earlier efforts like TNMC, Sheryl Crow and The Globe Sessions zippy and fresh, even with patent, denim-clad classic rock vibes. Things had begun to feel over-familiar, lacking groove. The Coldplay Syndrome.

Picture: Instagram/Sheryl Crow

If Feels Like Home was a reflection of Crow’s relocation with her two adopted sons to Nashville, leaving behind the Californian free spirit that was core to her early work, Threads opens with Prove You Wrong, featuring Nicks and young country star Maren Morris, and as much of a country marker as she could possibly make. Strangely, for an opening song - traditionally a blunderbuss of a track to wake up the listening programme to come - it’s probably the weakest of the 17. Thankfully, the following 16 tracks liven up in varying ways. Tell Me When It’s Over, co-written with and featuring country rocker Chris Stapleton, is one of her best in years, while Lonely Alone with Willie Nelson is a beautiful, gentle confessional. So Live Wire takes a deliciously bluesy route with Bonnie Raitt (who was “instrumental” in Crow picking up a guitar at the age of 17) and Mavis Staples adding a gospel-infused sensibility. The cover of George Harrison’s Beware Of Darkness, featuring Sting and Brandi Carlisle, runs a risk of mawkishness, but is actually quite good (with, thankfully, Sting’s appearance being understated). Others, such as Story of Everything (with Gary Clark Jr. and Chuck D), Still The Good Old Days (with Joe Walsh) and Dylan’s Everything Is Broken (with Jason Isbell) work less well. As an exercise in the application of professional friendships, Threads can’t be faulted. It is as its best when Crow’s natural ability for writing songs with rock-blues roots comes to the fore and you don’t, actually, care all that much who she’s working with on the track.

There are a couple of songs worth highlighting: a cover of the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge track The Worst - a surprising choice at that - is a intriguing duet with Keith Richards. Keef, we all know, is not a natural singer, and yet his rasp provides a wonderful counter to the sweetness of Crow’s own voice. And then there’s Redemption Day, a track Crow included on her eponymous second album in 1996. Originally written after she’d toured US troops in Bosnia, Cash re-recorded the song in 2002, with the intention of making it being the “cornerstone” of his next album, but he died before it could be released. “Cut to now,” Crow explained recently, “and with everything that’s going on in America and in the world that song kept coming to mind so I asked his family if it would be OK if I used his demo vocal.” Cynics might be troubled by such raiding of a dead icon’s past, but the song - already good to begin with - is hauntingly good. We can sometimes sit discomfortably with retreads, reissues and re-recordings, be they of songs, films or television series, but here Crow’s cover of her own song is perfect. “I can’t think of many better compliments as a songwriter [than Cash recording one of your songs],” she said recently. “It was a very humbling experience, to hear him now with this crazy person in office – it was definitely sobering.”

Crow is only 57 - just five years my senior - so it would be horrendous to think of her retiring. She says she’s not, but given that she’s been drawn to, and has drawn to her, some of rock’s grandest statespeople, both on Threads but historically, all because of her traditions of songcraft, it would be a shame to think that the well has run dry. Her argument that the album, as a curated sequence of songs, is a spent force has some validation in this age of streaming services. But at risk of being an old head - face facts, I am - there is still a place for records with a beginning, middle and an end, that tell rich stories through lyrical heft and high quality musicianship. And that should stand out as being recognisable when piped through an airport.

Johnny Boy would have loved it - Sarah Jane Morris' sweet little mysteries

There is an inherent danger to covering the work of a unique artist: there’s good reason, too, why few successfully (or even at all) carry off imprints of music by, say, Bowie or Queen without sounding like a bad Wednesday night in a suburban karaoke club. For fans (and purist fans in particular) of the original performer, the notion of any form of emulation is fraught: too close a copy and you dismiss it as "so what?"; too outré and you creep close to sacrilege.

Riskier still is if the covers are of a deceased legend like John Martyn. Even his own myriad reinterpretations of his greatest songs didn’t always land well, although that was part of his unpredictable appeal - regularly reworking material to suit his mood, be it acoustic, electric, funked-up, reggae-infused, jazz-influenced, or whatever.

His gargantuan, 17-CD posthumous Island Years box set served testament to this, with its plethora of alternate studio takes and live versions which showcased Martyn's restless reinvention - many the result of what touring approach he was taking at the time (i.e. on his own, with mucker Danny Thompson, or with jazz and rock band backing). So step forward bravely, Sarah Jane Morris and her album project Sweet Little Mystery, which brings her incredible contralto voice together with regular guitar collaborator Tony Rémy, along with Tim Cansfield (acoustic guitar), Henry Thomas (bass) and Martyn Barker (drums), to reinvent some of Martyn's songs in a respectful but rarely (if at all) emulatory way. She is not the first to do this, of course: such is Martyn's appeal that plenty have done so before, most famously Eric Clapton's version of May You Never on 1977's Slowhand album that probably - and sadly - did more for Martyn's bank balance than many of his own albums. In 2011, two years after his death, the lovingly-curated compilation Johnny Boy Would Love This produced an eclectic array of tributes from committed fans like Beth Orton, David Gray, The Cure's Robert Smith, Beck, Lisa Hannigan, Paolo Nutini, Snow Patrol, Bombay Bicycle Club, Morcheeba, fellow folkie Judie Tzuke and Martyn's oft-collaborator and pal Phil Collins.

So what does Morris bring to the table? A huge amount, actually. Martyn was labelled many things during his career, largely because he dabbled in many things, but jazz seems to be one of the roots to his canon. Indeed, having started out in the folk clubs of Glasgow, before migrating to London and clubs like 'Les Cousins' (which artists like Martyn, Ralph McTell and others mistakenly thought was named after a bloke called Les Cousins...) he discovered saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders' album Karma, turning him onto modern jazz. From here on in Martyn worked on textures, especially with his voice. "There's a space between words and music and my voice lives right there," he once explained. The album Solid Air, now revered as the godfather of chillout music, and its follow-up One World, could easily have been regarded as jazz, even through the weed-wooze that they conjured. Which is where, kind of, Morris comes in, with a voice that, in her 60th year, is richly reminscent of Nina Simone or Sarah Vaughan. Married to Rémy, Cansfield and Thomas's guitar and bass work, and Barker's understated drumming, it produces corking versions of my Martyn favourites, like Couldn't Love You More, Sweet Little Mystery and I Don't Want To Know.

Picture: Juliet Matthews

In a live performance at London's Purcell Room to launch the album, Morris and band even put in a rollicking version of Solid Air. Given that this song, a paean to Nick Drake, is, in its original form, as stoner-friendly a piece of music as you will find, the brisk and lively application here is refreshingly inventive. Johnny Boy would certainly have loved it. Closer - but not too close - to the original was One World, easily my personal Martyn pick, with its poignant "To take our place in one world, to make our peace in one world" stepping closer to the original, while Fairytale Lullaby (which recently turned up in a particularly bucolic edition of Countryfile) ambled closer still to its foundation, with its now somewhat outdated proto-folk, Arran sweater-wearing, finger-in-ear lyrics about goblins, elves, pixies and "the magic dancing wood". Taken out of that era and the folk club context, Morris delivers it with a playful earnestness.

The entire Sweet Little Mystery project is clearly a work of heartfelt love for Martyn's music by Morris, and in a stage show directed by the comedian and activist Mark Thomas, there are video inserts featuring interviews with Eddi Reader (with whom Martyn collaborated on a TV performance of the southern blues classic He's Got All The Whisky), fellow Glaswegian and cohort Jim McKnight, and Martyn's sister, Julie Ann. Indeed, these three interviews underscored my fascination with the big man himself: Martyn was born on September 11, 1948 in Beechcroft Avenue in New Malden - a 30-minute walk from the house where I was born. As a young boy (then Iain David McGeachy), his light opera-singing parents divorced, with his father taking the five-year-old John to Glasgow, while his mother remained in the Kingston-upon-Thames area. Now, considering that no one famous ever seemed to hail from my neck of the woods, the discovery that my musical hero John Martyn was born a mile or so from where I came into being 19 years later was a revelation. In interviews - few and far between, it must be said - Martyn would skip between broad Glaswegian (increasingly slurred as life's excesses took their later toll) and a more southern English accent. There are videos of him on YouTube performing in the 1970s with what could be considered a Mockney voice. So to see his two worlds collide in these interviews - the obviously Scottish McKnight and Reader, and Martyn's Kingston-raised "little sister" - provides a delightful set of interludes that also reveal the "grace and danger" that not only titled one of his most acclaimed albums (and a band his nephews play in today), but was his trademark.

Few Martyn tributes have ever abstained from referencing his occasionally appalling, substance-driven behaviour. Indeed, the consensus has always been that his 'danger' and self-destructive nature lead inevitably to his untimely demise at the age of 60, ten years ago this year. But I've always chosen to dwell on his grace, the sometimes impossibly, hauntingly beautiful songs like Go Down Easy and Head And Heart that led his first wife, Beverley Kutner, to remark that he put so much emotion into his music that there was rarely anything left for anyone else. Sarah Jane Morris's Sweet Little Mystery captures much of that emotion but, rather than focusing on the sometimes mawkish nature of his music's beauty, brings it to animated life. If only the same could be done for Martyn himself.

Grace and Danger: John Martyn - ten years gone

If ever there was a combination of contrasting words which perfectly encapsulated someone it's "Grace And Danger", the title of John Martyn’s 1980 ‘divorce album’. For, as it transpired as his career unfolded up until his death at the age of 60, ten years ago today, he was grace and danger epitomised: writer of songs of an almost ethereal beauty and yet capable of the most preposterous damage to himself and those around him.

Much is made of Martyn’s self-destructive predilections, principally drink and other substances, and to look back pictorially over his musical career - a journey that progresses from beautiful, tousle-haired, slightly buck-toothed 20-year-old to grizzled, great bear of a man, performing from a wheelchair, the result of having his lower right leg amputated as the result of a burst cyst - is to watch an at-times agonising evolution. Pity, however, is the last thing Martyn would want or have expected.

He was, at times, as blasé about his condition as those things that led to it. This might sound reckless but to say it was belies the complexities that Martyn surrounded himself in, indulged and even encouraged. And that’s if you’d even heard of him. My frustration with Martyn has always been his lack of fame: despite being feted by the likes of Eric Clapton (whose cover of May You Never, Martyn’s lullaby to his son, was a useful royalties earner) and his great friend Phil Collins, amongst other A-listers, Martyn sometimes seemed to welcome obscurity, an aspect that confounds as much as it frustrates those who’d wish, now, posthumously, he were more than just “acclaimed singer-songwriter, John Martyn”.

It’s too easy to dwell on Martyn’s weaponised dysfunction as a means of labelling him, but he truly encapsulated grace and danger. Perhaps turning a blind eye to the danger, I choose to focus on the grace, and for this he remains, resolutely, my musical hero. I can’t think of an artist who, over 44 years and 22 studio albums and over 30 live and compilations, produced such a prodigious, exquisite canon of work that could both pick you up and bring you down when you are sad, as well as envelope you in a warmth much like his own lyric to Go Down Easy, “You curl around me, like a fern in the Spring”. He was also a master of reinvention and experimentation: coming out of, first, the Scottish folk scene and then, by way of the legendary London folkie hangout Les Cousins (referred to by many, phonetically, as “Lez Cuzzans”, as if run by a bloke called Leslie, as opposed to the more exotic French name it actually bore…), Martyn emerged from his first, somewhat Arran-sweater-and-fingers-in-ear folk albums, to explore the realms of jazz, reggae, rock, funk and even trip-hop. And just when you thought you knew one of his albums, along would come another live release or compilation with completely new arrangements of familiar songs, each as invigorating as the original, and often dependent on whether they were recorded as a full electric band, or a solo acoustic set, or one of many tours with his longtime sparring partner - sometimes literally - Danny Thompson.

In my first encounter with John Martyn’s music I had no idea how much it would become a predominating soundtrack in my life, more than any other artist (including Bowie). Nor would that first encounter reveal the small personal connection I had with Martyn. The encounter came one Wednesday evening in the early 1980s when Gary Crowley had Phil Collins on as a guest on his Capital Radio show. Collins requested Sweet Little Mystery, a song from the Grace And Danger album, on which they had both worked. There is something of a bittersweet irony about this fact: their collaboration came at a time when both were going through painful divorces. With his first marriage irretrievable, Collins started working at home in Shalford, Surrey, on the demos that would eventually launch him as a solo superstar. Martyn, going through a very painful divorce to Beverley Martyn (with whom he is co-credited on the 1970 albums Stormbringer! and The Road To Ruin), came down to stay and work on songs with for what became Grace And Danger. “I’d turned my master bedroom into a studio,” recalls Collins, “and there was a phone on the floor. We both took it in turns to call our relative partners. There’d be all kind of shouting matches going on. It was very creative, because Face Value came out of that.” “We were both going through the same emotional trauma,” Martyn told Q magazine. “There was vast amounts of going down the potting shed together and weeping. I’d phone Beverley and it would be ‘aaargh’, then it would be Phil’s turn. We were both making ourselves terribly miserable, and then playing and singing about it.”

Such was the raw nature of many of the tracks on Grace And Danger that Island Records supremo Chris Blackwell was reluctant to release it. In fact, it would be almost a year late when it eventually appeared ("I freaked,” said Martyn in 1981. “Please get it out! I don't give a damn how sad it makes you feel. It's what I'm about: direct communication of emotion.”). Many will say that Grace And Danger was Martyn’s last great album. It was certainly his last for Island. What followed in the 1980s were a procession of records that took Martyn further away from his folk origins. His next album, Glorious Fool, saw Collins take on production work, and there was a notable shift towards a more mainstream pop-rock sound (for which Collins has frequently been blamed, wrongly). Clapton was drafted in to guest on one track, a reciprocation for his May You Never cover. Perhaps the next run of albums - Well Kept Secret (1982), Sapphire (1984), Piece by Piece (1986), The Apprentice (1990) and Cooltide (1991) didn’t do Martyn as much justice as his more feted releases, Solid Air (1973), One World (1977) and Grace And Danger. And while there was a tendency towards 80s over-production - more synthesisers and less of the acoustic-guitar-and-Echoplex-wooziness of his 70s releases - the essence of John Martyn’s music remained throughout. Sometimes it’s better to listen to some of the many live recordings from this era to hear his soul, not to mention his gift for rearrangements that could transform any element in his body of work, to the extent that you might now own myriad versions of the same song, and yet consider them different pieces altogether.

But to return to that midweek appearance on Capital Radio by Phil Collins, his choice of Sweet Little Mystery led to my ‘discovery’ of Martyn himself, and that tiny personal connection I had. Not being old enough to have heard Martyn’s seminal 70s work, I started buying his albums in, perhaps, the agreed order - Solid Air, then One World, then Grace And Danger. And then, in 1992, a curious compilation came out, Couldn’t Love You More, featuring reworked versions of some of his best songs, like One World, Head And Heart, Could've Been Me and Man In The Station. In hindsight, the album has been slated for revisions that rendered some songs a bit too AoR. But with contributions from, again, Collins and Clapton, plus David Gilmour, it’s a lovely piece of work. It was around the time of Couldn’t Love You More’s release that I made a startling discovery: Martyn had been born, Ian David McGheachy, on 11 September 1948 in my home town, the London/Surrey suburb of New Malden. Growing up, nothing famous happened to or in New Malden, with the exception of Jimmy Tarbuck living in the posh bit, Crackerjack's Jan Francis being spotted now and again in Boots, and a backdrop of one of the town's twin 60s office blocks appearing as a backdrop to Bless This House. And yet, briefly, someone who was fast becoming a musical hero of mine was actually born there! Nothing would knock this from the top of my pile of things I’m most proud of, not even discovering that Bowie launched the Ziggy Stardust tour at The Toby Jug pub in nearby Tolworth, or that Clapton himself went to school in neighbouring Surbiton and signed his contract to join The Yardbirds in a New Malden boozer.

When Martyn’s parents - light opera singers - separated, the-then five-year-old Iain moved to Glasgow with his father. To all intents and purposes, he became Scottish, but once McGeachy became Martyn, he would flit for the rest of his life between Glaswegian and somewhat Mockney accents with impressive ease. In Glasgow the teenage Martyn developed a love of folk music, acquiring an insane talent for the acoustic guitar, and eventually falling under the influence of local folk musician Hamish Imlach. Iain gradually became John, as the prodigious youngster evolved his craft. “John Martyn” was adopted as a stage name, an adaptation of the Martin guitar company (whose acoustic instruments would become intertwined with Martyn’s signature sound in the mid-70s). “Iain David McGeachy” had been deemed too Scottish, so something more neutral was needed: “In those days there was no traditional scene as such,” Martyn told biographer John Neil Munro for his terrific book Some People Are Crazy: The John Martyn Story. “You had to be American-sounding. I was more influenced by American music than Scottish music, so the name Martyn was [friend and later agent, Sandy Glennon’s] idea - it had to have the ‘y’ in it , to sound posh.”

That, then, was the start of a career that would baffle as many as it would enlighten. Martyn’s back catalogue from the early days is worth listening to, if only to hear the folkiness gradually disappear. By the time Solid Air came along, with its title track, a paean to troubled friend Nick Drake, defining Martyn’s ethereal, weed-influenced sound, as well as uniting him with lifelong mucker and bass player Danny Thompson, Martyn was already moving into a more progressive sound. Over the years I’ve devoured Martyn’s work with every studio album he released, and every compilation and box set, some like the epic Island Years box set requiring help to bring home, such was the copious amount of material it contained. I make no exaggeration when I say that if the house burned, this - and my own Martin D35 guitar - would be the only two possessions I’d leap from the bedroom window clutching. Listening to the Island box - remember, he was only on the label for a decade or so - is like repainting the Forth Road Bridge: when you eventually reach the end you’ve got to start at the beginning again. It is that lavish, and that stuffed with live recordings and alternative takes that are the very essence of record collection curation.

There is so, so much more I could write about John Martyn in this post - good and bad - but I and you would be here all week. In some respects, I simply implore anyone who is either unfamiliar or unaware of him to go and spend an evening on Spotify. Or, better still, go and actually buy his records. His death, on January 29, 2009 was sad but, perhaps, not unexpected, even though he’d only turned 60 the previous September. Unlike the ’27 Club’ - Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse, et al - Martin had survived into late middle age against the odds. He’d imbibed forbidden substances copiously, worked his way into drunken brawls and escaped worse, and been appalling to the women in his life. He’d changed from angelic-voiced youth to a wheelchair-bound amputee. The cyst that had burst was, possibly, caused by Martyn having stood heavily on that particular leg on stage over the years. In that there is a bitter irony: an artist sometimes criminally overlooked and under-appreciated, whose final album - which was finished by others after his death - was Willing To Work, the ethic that ran through the 44 years of his recording and performing career, one which never saw him soar to the wealth of so many of his musical acolytes and collaborators.

Somewhere on the Internet you can hear a recording of an extraordinary piece of radio from the day John Martyn died. Danny Baker, then doing a daytime show on BBC Radio London, had just come in to the station when he was told the news. “I almost turned around and went back home,” he said when he went on air, breathless and decidedly downbeat. “This news has knocked me for a loop,” he intoned before commencing a couple of hours of playing only Martyn’s music, while reflecting on the huge influence he’d had on him. It’s extraordinary because Baker was being delightfully self-indulgent. But probably only he could get away with an improvised two-hour show featuring music from just one artist, one who could hardly be thought of as mass market, either. And yet the reverence of the broadcast matched that you’d reserve for the Queen’s passing, or a national treasure of unblemished significance.

I’d hate John Martyn to be remembered for being niche, but that’s just my own frustration that a man whose music has embellished my life like no one else’s wasn’t better known, or more successful. Yes, he was, perhaps, a muso’s musician, someone that former NME journalists like Baker can wax endlessly on, while others with their heads firmly in the clouds of broad popular music wouldn’t know him from a hole in the ground. Martyn’s music touches me today, and the happy coincidence of him being the New Malden brother I never had is nothing more than that, a happy coincidence.

But I’ll leave you with this one thought, of many more that I could commit to the keyboard: shortly before his death, Martyn received an OBE in the 2009 New Year’s Honours list. It would have bemused as much as anything. But 12 months before, the BBC gave Martyn a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, with the gong handed to him by his great friend Phil Collins. “Folk” just doesn’t do his musical canon justice, but in its award citation, the BBC described his “heartfelt performances have either suggested or fully demonstrated an idiosyncratic genius.” I’d say that nailed John Martyn perfectly. RIP.

Haters gonna hate

There are people I know who will never abide Phil Collins. Like, really hate the man. I've never been entirely sure what he’s done to deserve it, personally or otherwise. After all, he’s a perfectly affable bloke (though three wives - including the last, with whom he’s back again - might disagree...). But, the fact that Phil Collins is one of only three artists to have had sold more than 100 million albums as both band member and solo artist (the other two being Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson) would suggest, by definition, some degree of popularity. However, there are those who'll just never get along with him. Haters clearly are gonna hate. And this post just ain’t for them.

Collins himself readily accepts that he’s not to everyone's liking. Always a king of self-depreciation, he acknowledges in his highly entertaining - and characteristically frank - 2016 autobiography, Not Dead Yet that his ubiquity in the 1980s and '90s clearly led to familiarity breeding contempt. And he was everywhere: his own solo career taking off in 1981; fronting Genesis as it became a MTV-friendly, Van Halen-rivalling pop-rock monster in sharp contrast to their prog rock origins; singing, drumming and producing collaborations with the post-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant, ABBA's Frida, Paul McCartney, Adam Ant (yes, really), his great friend John Martyn, Earth Wind & Fire's Philip Bailey and many, many more. He even managed to play Live Aid twice, including a drumming set with Zeppelin that, in hindsight, appeared to have not been a great idea.

By the early 1990s Collins was as much a symbol of the age as bankers in red braces had been in the decade before. No coincidence, perhaps, that Patrick Bateman, the psychopath protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho is a fan, pontificating at length on Collins' career in the 1980s ("I thought it was quite funny," Collins has said of the book's film adaptation, "although I don’t know if it was meant to be. I don’t think [Bateman] being a psychopath and liking my music is linked – my music was just omnipresent in that era."). In some respects, Collins was the 1980s, or at least the musical embodiment of the decade. It began in January 1981 with a hissing drum machine and a simple, three-chord hum from a Prophet 5 keyboard. In The Air Tonight was and remains a remarkable song, on a par as an era keynote with Ultravox's Vienna, which was released on the same day. Both songs have mood and gloom (as well as a shared use of the Roland CR-78 drum machine), with one capturing the irreparable collapse of a marriage, the other, a fleeting affair. Only one, however, has that epic drum fill. It appears almost three-quarters of the way in (Collins' US record company had insisted that 'live' drums were added from the outset of the American single release) and, with its legendary 'gated reverb', set the tone for drums on pop records for the decade. Even today, In The Air Tonight is referenced to and even sampled by hip-hop artists. And how much more 1980s can you get than the song appearing in the first ever episode of Miami Vice (in a key scene in which Sonny Crockett's black Ferrari cruises down, appropriately, Miami's Collins Avenue)? The singer himself even landed a starring role in a later episode, playing the crooked game show host 'Phil The Shill'. The '80s, then, belonged to Phil Collins, but it wasn't just his music that became omnipresent, he did too, hobnobbing with Hollywood, picking up Emmy after Grammy after Oscar, and seemingly serving as Eric Clapton’s wingman, all slicked back hair and Versace shirts.

Success can be a strange mistress. Collins' fanbase, up until In The Air Tonight and the Face Value album it was recorded for, had hitherto been constructed exclusively of followers of Genesis who, until they'd had a hit with Follow You, Follow Me in 1978, had largely been long-haired men in army surplus greatcoats listening intensely. A hit attracted women to their concerts, as well as a wider American audience they'd previously only skimmed. With the album Duke and its short, punchy singles Turn It On Again and the Collins-written Misunderstanding (itself a nod to Toto's Hold The Line), the band's trajectory elevated. This ascent had not been without its cost - Collins' first marriage collapsed in the wake of relentless touring, although this led to the catharsis of bedroom-recorded demos that would later become the album Face Value, launching the solo career, launching Brand Collins.

The arc of this career is charted by Plays Well With Others, a four-disc box set which runs from his earliest recording, as a member of Flaming Youth, a constructed boy band that produced the one concept album Ark II in 1969, through side projects like the brilliant jazz-fusion band Brand X, work with Rod Argent and being loaned out by Genesis to work on Brian Eno's Another Green World (reciprocity for Eno contributing noises to the band's The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway album), and then the period when you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing something Collins had been involved in. One common thread throughout the last 40 years has been Collins' friendship with the late John Martyn, a relationship forged in the dissolving of their respective first marriages, writing together at Collins' cottage on the Surrey/Sussex borders, occasionally breaking off for bitter phone calls with estranged partners, before returning to work...or drink. For me, the various collaborations with Martyn are amongst the most enduring on Plays Well With Others: from Sweet Little Mystery from Martyn's Grace And Danger album to Could've Been Me and Suzanne from the trip-hop influenced And, and the posthumous Can't Turn Back The Years from the big man's final recording, Willing To Work. There was a genuine warmth to their relationship that comes across like no other in this collection.

Elsewhere, there are inclusions that might come as a surprise if you'd missed them first time around, such as Adam Ant's Puss 'N' Boots, Howard Jones' No One Is To Blame and Tears For Fears' Woman In Chains, on which all Collins provides his precise, melodic drumming, a signature feature to Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas?, also included. There is also the inclusion of Peter Gabriel's Intruder, a dark song about home invasion made darker by its thumping, cymbal-less drumming (Gabriel had instructed Collins to play without the punctuation of cymbals) in which that gated reverb made its debut, thanks to some experimentation by Collins and engineer Hugh Padgham. Consider this the source of the Nile.

Change can sit uncomfortably with music fans. Just look at how people reacted to Dylan when he went electric. Those who'd followed Genesis from the Gabriel-fronted era of epic, complicated songs like The Return Of The Giant Hogweed and the 23-minute Supper's Ready, struggled with both Collins' commercial success as a solo artist, as well as the nature of his solo music. When Genesis included Earth Wind & Fire's Phenix Horns brass section on the Abacab album, die hards were up in arms, and continued to blame Collins as the band increasingly went down the pop route (despite Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks being equally compliant in the direction). Collins' own argument has always been that people change: "You don't read the same books or wear the same clothes you did years ago," he would say, "so why should I expected to do the same music as I did back then [in his early Genesis era]. Here, though, is where my loyalty began to be tested. His solo albums, up until 1990's But Seriously were mostly brilliant, if - as in the case of No Jacket Required - of their time. But beyond that, not so much for me. Too much repetition, even the impression of a lack of effort (an unfair comment, but perceptions and all that). Collins' soundtrack to Disney's Tarzan, was a high point, if you like that sort of thing (and, again, you don't have to) which, like Elton John's The Lion King work, was perfect for the Disney genre. But, by this point, a duality emerged, two Phil Collins: the gifted, inventive drummer, and the Hollywood star.

For the former, Plays Well With Others offers plenty of examples of the gift, even on the all-star live charity performances, such as backing George Harrison, Clapton et al on the live version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, singing and Ringo-drumming on Golden Slumbers, and the ultimate Beatle collaboration, drumming on Paul McCartney's Angry. However, the selection of charity gig supergroup work also includes The Bee Gees' You Win Again and, at The Party At The Palace, Annie Lennox's Why, Bryan Adams' Everything You Do and Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends, all of which seem little more than namedropping, even if they're simply examples of Collins fulfilling his teenage ambition to become just a jobbing drummer. More curious is There'll Be Some Changes Made with Tony Bennett, and Stormy Weather with Quincy Jones, examples of Collins' switch to big band jazz in the late 1990s, which included an acclaimed set at the Montreux Jazz Festival. There, just a few kilometres down the shore of Lake Geneva from his then-home, Collins did at least appear to drumming for fun, and the inclusion on Plays Well With Others of the staple Pick Up The Pieces and the Brand X track And So To F demonstrates what he did best before various physical ailments robbed him of his considerable ability on the skins.

Thus it's somewhat difficult to conclude who Plays Well With Others is aimed at or what it is trying to achieve, beyond providing a chronology of a near-50 year recording and performing career. There are curiosities that fans of one persuasion might find intriguing, such as Savannah Woman by the late Tommy Bolin or Al Di Meola's fusion-lite Island Dreamer; and there are somewhat stubborn attempts at proving Collins' unrecognised hipness, such as Lil' Kim's In The Air Tonight cover and a disappointing version of If Leaving Me Is Easy by The Isley Brothers.

As this post will hopefully convey, I've been an unashamed Collins fan for the last 40 years, when I bought the Genesis album ...And Then There Were Three, which opened up their back catalogue as well as his associations as a drummer and singer. Through him I became a huge fan of John Martyn - probably my favourite solo artist of all time (not hindered by the fact he was born in the same town as me), and cultivated curiosity in other artists and, even, genres. There's no doubting that Collins became a force majeure in the '80s and '90s and while his output was mostly impressive, Plays Well With Others highlights where quality control could have been applied on both the who and the what. To say Plays Well With Others is a mixed bag is an understatement but, going back to the Not Dead Yet book, it's very clear that the selection of tracks - good and bad - is a very personal statement. Perhaps he's demanding credibility, perhaps he's highlighting authenticity (which he has no need to do, to be honest). Perhaps he's reminding us that, before he 'went Hollywood', he was just a Chiswick schoolboy, child actor and fan of soul, R'n'B and beat music.

Ultimately, perhaps, this 59-track compilation serves as a settlement to the arguments some put forward about Phil Collins: clearly a good bloke, often under-appreciated as a truly talented drummer (up there with Moon and Bonham, both of whom he came close to posthumously replacing), and undoubtedly heartfelt as a songwriter and a singer, but whose work ethic led to overexposure, which in turn bred the kind of vitriol flung at him even now. You can't turn back the years, as he sung with John Martyn, but there are times when even I as a fan would have preferred Collins to have said no, rather than yes. At least, then, Plays Well With Others provides the argumentation for that dialogue. Perhaps that was its intent.