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.

Hey-hey Mama: 50 years of proper Rock and Roll

I don’t know what your memory of 1971 is, but mine’s pretty hazy, mostly because I was 4. But, as David Hepworth’s terrific tome 1971: Never A Dull Moment argued, it was a pivotal year in music - even more so than my own birth year, 1967 (for music, you understand) due to its profound confluence of significant album releases. 

1971 was the year that saw the long playing record, in old money, find its place as one of the major artistic mediums, alongside books and cinema. There had been albums before, of course, and ground-breaking ones, too, like Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper, that had made ‘album artist’ a thing in its own right. But 1971 generated an  unprecedented slew of milestone releases, including David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, The Who’s Who’s Next, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Carole King’s Tapestry, Elton John’s Madman Across The Water and at least 20 more that played their part in defining not just the year but the decade itself (for a more comprehensive list and examination of Hepworth’s book, here’s my post from when it was published).

50 years on, one of those albums stands out, arguably more than any of the others: Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. Colloquially known as ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, the officially untitled record could - should, even - be described as a touchpoint for classic rock as a genre. A bold claim, I know, but within its eight distinct tracks, over a run time of 42 minutes and 34 seconds, it remains a remarkable piece of work by a band that, with it, truly hit their stride. Yes, it contains Stairway To Heaven, a song worthy of discussion all on its own, but within its octet of tracks lies a breadth of hard rock (Black Dog, Rock And Roll), ballsy stompers (Misty Mountain Hop) and those rooted in traditional blues (When The Levee Breaks), mystic, 12-string folk (The Battle Of Evermore, Going To California) and pastoral country references. It’s legacy extends well into its 50-year history, too, with John Bonham’s distinct drums - captured by virtue of the cold, damp stairwell of the Hampshire country house they recorded it in (latterly sampled and used by seemingly everyone, including the Beastie Boys and Beyoncé. 

“It’s like there was a magical current running through that place [Headley Grange] and that record,” guitarist Jimmy Page recently told Mojo’s Mark Blake. Like it was meant to be. Perhaps this comes somewhat from Page’s singular vision. The former teenage guitar prodigy from Epsom, the third of that remarkable trio of Surrey sons to join The Yardbirds (after Eric Clapton had handed the six string reins to Jeff Beck, who in turn handed them to his friend Page) had largely been the architect of Led Zeppelin, the band renamed from The New Yardbirds in 1968. 

Their first three albums had built their profile and credibility on both sides of the Atlantic, riding the post-Beatles wave for British bands with a harder rock tendency in parallel to the early progressive bands that were coming through at the turn of the decade. Notably, Zeppelin built their reputation through, largely, word of mouth and electrifying live performances at events like the Bath Festival Of Blues And Progressive Music and relentless touing in America, playing legendary venues like Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York and its counterpart Fillmore West in San Francisco. 

Notably, too, they had deliberately shied away from releasing singles, the primary promotional vehicle of the pop era. This defiance of convention would remain with Led Zeppelin to the band’s abrupt end in 1980, brought about by Bonham’s untimely death. But in Zeppelin’s fourth album, this belligerence found a particular outlet, led by Page’s own wariness of the way the music industry dictated things, leading to the record being as intentionally enigmatic as the band’s reputational rise had been unconventional. 

For a start, the album would go untitled, a notion obliquely referred to in This Is Spinal Tap by the band’s insistence on releasing Smell The Glove with an all-black sleeve and no lettering. While that was a gimmick, Page had another intention: “I didn’t want anyone, including Rolling Stone, making a judgement before they heard the music,” he told Mojo. “I wanted to prove our music wasn’t just selling because of our name.” 37 million album sales may have proven his instincts to be correct, but that wasn’t how Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary boss of Atlantic Records saw it, telling the band it would be “professional suicide” to not even have the band’s name on the cover. “We weren’t backing down,” Page recalls.

So, for a band that had been feted on both sides of the Atlantic as the Second Coming, Led Zeppelin IV arrived with anonymity, not just lacking cover text, but also photographs of the band anywhere in the album artwork. Instead, the front cover featured a 19th-century agricultural oil painting singer Robert Plant came across in a Reading antiques shop, while the rear featured a drab Birmingham tower block, an attempt to highlight themes of urban and rural living. In place of band pictures, Plant, Page, Bonham or bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones. Instead, Page came up with the idea of the quartet being represented by four rune-like symbols. “That whole cover was a Jimmy and Robert production,” Jones has said, somewhat sniffily. “I didn’t quite get it myself.”

Page’s own self-designed symbol, ‘ZoSo’, has itself been a source of much debate, with some pointing to the guitarist’s apparent interest in the work of occultist Aleister Crowley as being its inspiration. Collectively, however, the entire approach of IV’s graphic design is probably just one of those rock band gimmicks which, in 1971, meant that anything went and record company marketeers couldn’t say no. Conventions of album design weren’t broken as few had yet been established. “It’s not something to be questioned or dissected,” Page said of the artwork in his interview with Mojo. “Like the album, it was something that was just meant to be. You listened and made up the pictures in your own mind.”

Which brings me back to Stairway To Heaven, a song commanding a cultural mythology all of its own. As Bohemian Rhapsody is for Queen, Led Zeppelin were so much more than this one song, but Stairway will always be their opus, regarded for it’s sheer expanse and complete defiance of pop tradition. Stairway will also never be regarded as a pop song, but that’s what makes it’s lasting endurance even more extraordinary. It was also, famously, never released anywhere as a single, and yet it has received close to three million plays on American rock radio, according to official figures (it was the most requested song on FM radio stations in the US in the 1970s. By a more contemporary measure, it has been streamed more than 600 million times on Spotify. 

To some extent, too, Stairway is the quintessential early ’70s rock album track, and one that - whisper it - comes closer to prog rock than blues-rooted heavy rock. Broken into three sections over its eight minutes, Stairway commences  with the pastoral, arpeggiated A-minor chord so beloved of guitar shop wannabes everywhere (remember the “No Stairway To Heaven” sign from Wayne’s World?), rolling into a folkier groove before rocking out in the final third, Page committing an excoriating solo to it with his vintage Telecaster (a Yardbirds gift from Beck). While this structure clearly creates the attention, its lyrics - penned by Plant while, apparently in a bad mood - have been the subject of intense debate. “Depending on what day it is,” Plant once said, “I still interpret the song a different way - and I wrote the lyrics.” The general consensus is that the “lady who's sure all that glitters is gold” is about a woman who accumulates money, only to find out - badly - that life is meaningless and she wouldn’t get into heaven. Beyond that, Stairway is no more profound than the product of a band at the peak of their chutzpah indulging in the early ’70s penchant for album tracks that got a tad widdly-widdly. 

Jimmy Page has suggested that when Zeppelin started working on the song in October 1970 it was envisaged as being as long as 15 minutes (still quite brief compared with some examples of the prog genre, such as the 23-minute Supper’s Ready by Genesis), with a construct built on a mystical story that leads to a romping climax. Rumours about hidden satanic messages, contained in reverse-recorded passages, have led to some with too much time on their hands to suggest that Stairway was the Devil’s work. Page’s flirtations with the work of Crowley haven’t helped, either (he did, to be fair, buy Crowley’s house near Loch Ness, which only added to the association). Plant has wisely dismissed the suggestions in pragmatic terms. “There are a lot of people who are making money [out of these suggestions],” he has said. “If that's the way they need to do it, then do it without my lyrics. I cherish them far too much.”

While, though, there is some sense of Stairway being something of a millstone for the surviving members of the band, its place is rock music history hasn’t been lost on them, least of all Page: “I thought Stairway crystallised the essence of the band,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It had everything there and showed the band at its best - as a band, as a unit.” Page called it a milestone for the band, and remains proud that it was never released as a single, a point that only adds to its enigma and its lasting significance. That, though, hasn’t indemnified Stairway from critics (even Plant once said in an interview with Q magazine: “If you absolutely hated Stairway To Heaven, no one can blame you for that because it was so pompous” (he has also branded it a “wedding song”). 

Its appearance on Led Zeppelin IV drew no shortage of accusations of being pretentious and bloated. For a song so eulogised now, it wasn’t always so loved by the music press, but then again, they were never the most receptive audience to anything deemed progressive in the early ’70s (although, in my experience, even the most pro-punk/anti-prog journalists all had plenty of art rock in their record collections…).

With John Bonham’s death in 1980 Led Zeppelin came to an abrupt halt. Plant, Page and Jones were persuaded to play at Live Aid five years later, using both Chic drummer Tony Thompson and Plant’s friend Phil Collins on drums (Collins and Page have since traded barbs, with the latter saying the drummer was unrehearsed, and Collins suggesting the guitarist was somewhat out of it on the day. Stairway To Heaven closed the 30-minute set, which also included Rock And Roll and Whole Lotta Love. The song was performed again in 1988 at the Atlantic Records 40th anniversary concert, with Jason Bonham playing drums. The performance wasn’t great, with Plant even managing to forget some of his own lyrics. A better rendition appeared - for the last time - in 2007 when Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham Jr agreed to play at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute at London’s O2 Arena, the final time Led Zeppelin as a band performed on stage. Stairway was a part of Heart’s tribute set in 2012 at the Kennedy Center Honor show, attended by Barack Obama and intended to take a hat off to artists who’d made an important contribution to American culture (the only other British recipients have ever been Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Paul McCartney).

When it was released on Monday, 8 November, 1971 Led Zeppelin IV went to Number 1 in the UK, only narrowly missing out on the top spot in the US. It is still regarded as one of the greatest albums of the classic rock era, and you can take from it what you want in terms of its legacy. It wasn’t Zeppelin’s first and it wasn’t their last, and certainly wasn’t the only memorable entry in 1971’s lengthy parade of classics. But with so much of the music produced that year, it was the work of a group of young men for whom anything went, creatively (though as numerous biographies have revealed, the same could be said of Zeppelin’s touring antics). Unlike today’s somewhat over-curated, packaged pop, it comes from a time when bands had licence to do what they liked, and weren’t dictated to by popular taste or the need to appeal to radio airplay algorithms. Led Zeppelin IV can also be broken down into the individual DNA of the four proponents - the very people depicted by the inner sleeve’s runes - in so far as it draws, in different degrees, from all the different musical interests Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham had at the time - blues, rock, folk, heavy rock and more. “I think that was the beauty of the players, of all of us, that maybe the style went over here, and then over there, and we could cut it wherever,” Plant told Mojo. “But we were in a really fluid creative place.” 

That manifests itself in the album’s eight tracks: in Black Dog’s riff; Rock And Roll’s nod to the musical revolution of the 1950s that set everything in train; The Battle Of Evermore hippy-dippyness (enhanced by Sandy Denny’s co-vocals); Stairway To Heaven’s sheer audacity; the bonkers groove of Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks’ rhythmic veracity; the wistful beauty of Going To California; and those signature, pounding drums of When The Levee Breaks, which consciously made the genetic link between original Delta Blues and hard rock. 50 years on, what it lacks in the innovations of more revered albums like Sgt. Pepper before it, or The Dark Side Of The Moon which followed two years later, over 42 minutes it remains an utterly compelling album. 

These days albums seem designed to be dipped in and out of, with tracks extracted for streaming playlists rather than complete, start-to-finish playback. Led Zeppelin IV, over its eight tracks, defies that. It’s also, by the way, much, much more than that one song that closes Side 1.

It's the vinyl countdown - Record Store Day is with us again

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

To some of us, buying records - and I mean the round, mainly black objects with a hole in the middle - is more than the fetish those who remain indifferent to physical music ownership might think it is. Each to their own. For everyone who maintains that Spain can't be beaten for a holiday (remember them?) another will insist on Greece. For Nike see Adidas. You get my point.

Music's digitisation, first with the CD and, latterly, streaming services, has undoubtedly set free consumption, and facilitated it into our busy, mobile, portable lives. However, it also abandoned the pleasures of opening a brand new record, removing it from the sleeve while still studying the artwork and liner notes, and then sitting down to listen. Well, at least, that's my justification. It's also why I'm one of those happy to be ensnared by Record Store Day, the normally annual vinyl-buying splurge designed to help out independent music dealers as they compete with the few remaining record chains, the Amazons of this world, the supermarket checkout impulse-buy points-of-sale, and streaming.

COVID-19 has forced RSD to this year postpone the regular April fixture into three smaller 'drops' - the first in August, a second today and the third next month. August's drop met with no shortage of custom, with record shops reporting brisk in-store business and the now-familiar queues forming at sunrise by punters keen to bag special releases and the odd rarity. It is, at the end of the day, a purely indulgent, self-serving frenzy, but the punters get something unique and the shops do a decent bit of business. Those that get it right, of course.

One emporium local to me, which didn't open physically on the day (unlike plenty who did), decided to do its RSD trading entirely online, with a clunky system by which you registered interest in a release in advance and then waited on the day for an e-mail at 6pm to say you could then go online and buy it. When this didn't work at the time when everything was supposed to be up and running everyone went to the shop's website and promptly crashed it, rendering Record Store Day a frustrating Saturday evening hitting 'refresh' a lot. For  RSD read RSI. Now, I appreciate that the shop in question may have stayed shut out of consideration for its staff, but it's the kind of experience that doesn't do well for customer loyalty. And makes me wish I'd been queuing up at the crack of dawn to spend my money somewhere that managed to get it right.

Perseverance, however, paid off in the end. Stupid or not, we got what we wanted from retailers who had got their e-commerce acts together: releases as disparate as The The's latest RSD-only single (a regular occurrence, but you wish Matt Johnson would do a new album, rather than these one-offs...) and a compilation of Memphis soul obscurities, the obligatory release from The Dame (BowieNowChanges) and a vinyl reissue of Peter Bruntnell's sublime Normal For Bridgwater. Happy days. Today's drop will be a little more modest (just 89 releases as opposed to August’s 345), but that may not be the point: whether you’re interested in a Two-Tone 40th anniversary compilation, Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, The Yardbirds classic Roger The Engineer or even Britney Spears’ Oops! …I Did It Again, it's sometimes worth taking a punt on RSD, buying something you've either never heard before, or haven't owned since you had it as a crudely taped copy back in the day. That’s half the fun of record curation in middle age.

“The real thing, the real joy, is in the tactile relationship, between you and the artist,” says Simon Tyler, who runs the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham, Kent. He points to the physical object itself: “This square piece of cardboard with a 12-inch round record slipped inside," he says, “It's a magical object.” Not surprisingly, Simon says that the magic begins with the record shop itself, a point I wholeheartedly agree with. The imposition of lockdown on in-store retailing severely curtailed the pleasure of browsing and discovering something you didn't even know you wanted. Or in the case of shops like Simon’s, a natter with a friendly and knowledgeable proprietor. 

“Firstly,” he says, “you hear the shop as you walk along the street. The strain of music drifting out of the double doors turns your head. ‘What’s that? Is it? Oh God, yes! I haven’t heard THAT for years!’.” Once inside, the tactile experience draws you in further. “You see row upon row of albums calling to you like a siren,” Simon says, describing his own shop’s experience, in a calming corner of Kent's oldest and quaintest market town. “You walk across the threshold and let your fingers browse across the top of the records. You see familiar pictures and faces, and new images that offer a strange fascination. They tease you; they reveal and yet conceal the secrets within.”

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Simon’s view is obviously biased, owing to running a generously stocked shop full of vinyl records, but he’s spot on. Some people can enter a fashion boutique and feel tempted to buy the place up; record shops, for me, hold the same appeal, such is my interest in buying something new or something worth hearing anew.

There is, as Simon says, a magical experience to opening up a freshly-bought record, but to me it is more about the listening experience. That, I recognise, sounds like I've swallowed the music industry's Kool-Aid and gone back for seconds. Records are, though, magical objects, which may go to explain figures from the BPI, the UK's recording industry body, earlier this year which revealed that many people who buy LPs never actually get round to playing them (and not just those like me who acquire too many and then struggle to find time to listening to them). 

Moreover, the BPI found that as many as a fifth doesn't even have anything to play their vinyl on. This reflects strangely in light of vinyl enjoying sales growth for 12 consecutive years in the UK, now accounting for one in every eight albums bought as a physical format. 

Over 4.3 million vinyl LPs were sold in the UK last year, a 4% increase on 2018. In the United States, vinyl sales have just surpassed sales of CDs for the first time since the 1980s, accounting for $232 million of music sales in the first six months of this year, as opposed to just under $130 million for CDs, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. That, the RIAA has revealed, is a 4% increase for LPs and a 48% decrease for the shiny silver discs. This might also reflect the times we’re in, but despite my love of vinyl I’ve still continued to buy CDs that I might want to play in the car. However, seeing as lockdown and all of that has meant I’ve hardly used my car since March, my listening has been largely done at home over the last six months. 

However, while all this love for vinyl is admirable, it can’t be ignored that physical sales continue to drop, and the pandemic isn’t helping. Industry figures have shown that overall physical music sales continue to drop exponentially as streaming has grown, both for ‘free’, ad-supported services as well as premium subscriptions. That, at the end of the day, is not good news for the artists themselves, who get a lesser cut of the action than they do with physical sales. For the so-called ‘heritage acts’, like Fleetwood Mac, who’ve re-released back catalogue material on vinyl to relatively healthy receipts, physical sales might offset lower income from streaming. For those in middling industry positions, now also denied the opportunity to play live - which, these days, is what makes them money, the virus has hit them hard.

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Record Store Day, at least, will provide a momentary fillip for the artists who take part - even if their releases aren’t even taken out of the shrink wrap, a phenomenon identified by the BPI in its All About The Music yearbook. “A proportion of people are buying vinyl because they’re a superfan,” said Rob Crutchley, the book’s author, when it came out in April. “Even if they don’t actually have a turntable they’re still keen to support the artist and have the artefact itself."

"There is still a strong core of fans who also value the opportunity to acquire, own or gift recorded music on physical format,” Cruchley added, pointing to the custom of artists using Record Store Day to give fans something unique. “Sometimes it can be because they’re catalogue titles that are being re-pressed in a new edition - maybe a run on a different coloured vinyl - other times it might be a new title that has a limited press on a certain format.” 

This, then, points to the irrationality of consumerism overall. I’ll be the first to ’fess up - mainly to my partner - at buying albums that already exist in my collection. In some cases, it’s for new sonic experiences - remastered, refreshed editions on 180g vinyl that have improved upon recordings made many years ago and now benefit from modern studio and reproduction techniques. Or they’re albums bought on CD early in the day, often when the new digital discs were effectively crude transfers from analogue recordings. In some cases, they’re albums I’ve only ever heard on cassette tape, furtively 'borrowed' from my brother and recorded while my dad was out at work. 

“The joy of records is in the experience,” says Simon Tyler. “That joy is deeply personal, and long may it continue.”  Record buying is, then, one of the cycles of life. There is little real justification for buying an album again “because it sounds better”, but the same applies to replacing that VHS copy of The Godfather, with the DVD, then the Blu-ray Disc and ultimately the 4K Blu-ray version to play on your super-duper new flatscreen TV. And I know you wouldn’t buy a new copy of a classic book because it’s been given a new cover, but there’s a difference. There really is.

Universal exports - David Hepworth's Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There

In early December 1992, 25 years of age and recently furnished with a decent redundancy package, I touched down at Los Angeles International Airport with mouth agape. The America I’d grown up with, vicariously, through the myriad TV shows recorded in Southern California, was finally right in front of me. And it didn’t feel in any way unusual. 

Normally, when you travel abroad, you are immediately assaulted by new sights, sounds and smells. You visit a local supermarket and, by a rite of passage, groceries with amusingly rude brand names bring out the inner sniggering schoolboy in you. But not in LA. There, the sky was as blue as I’d seen it on The Rockford Files and the Six Million Dollar Man, my childhood television staples. The freeways were just as they were on CHiPs, the mountains just as they were used to substitute for Korea in M*A*S*H. And, yes, Santa Monica Beach was just as it appeared on Baywatch. Even the Hollywood sign didn’t seem that startling: “Oh yeah, that,” as I made the first of many ridiculous attempts to find the perfect vantage point in Beachwood Canyon to photograph it.

Of course, I loved it, and that visit to California became the first of many, including two years living there and living the dream for real. Four months after my maiden trip to the US of A, I went to New York (also, the first of many visits since). This proved to be a cultural reawakening of similar stature to my Californian experience, walking the steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan, doing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tours, splurging on cheaper CDs at Tower Records, eating in diners and enjoying the exchange rate benefit by cleaning out Macy’s of clothing at more than two dollars to the pound. You can repeat these patterns in any one of a number of pleasure and work trips in the 28 years since that first visit.

All of this is brought to mind by Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There, the latest instalment of David Hepworth's impressive run of brilliantly researched book-essays on pop music culture. It starts with the premise of the so-called ‘British Invasion’, the wave of British pop bands which commenced with The Beatles travelling to America in 1964, closely followed by the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and many others. Collectively, they effectively imported the very rock and roll that had been exported via somewhat nebulous supply lines, be they Elvis Presley’s music heard fertively via offshore radio stations, Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock in cinemas, or the blues records entering Britain via its seaports, which so famously found, in that fateful meeting at Dartford railway station, kindred spirits in Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Britain, it shouldn’t be forgotten, wasn’t long out of the economic and social austerity of World War Two when John, Paul, George and Ringo landed at Kennedy Airport to make the first of three appearances in February 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, the top-rated Sunday evening institution on the CBS network. They had, actually, appeared before on American television the previous November when a news report covered Beatlemania in Britain. Such was the interest it generated that 4,000 fans turned out to meet the band at JFK when they landed on 7 February. While my first visit to the US wasn’t met with anywhere near the same fervour - in fact no fervour at all - Hepworth examines what it must have been like for The Beatles, four twentysomethings from lower middle class Liverpool backgrounds, to suddenly experience an America they probably had significantly less cultural experience of than I had. At least I’d seen Charlie’s Angels on a weekly basis.

David Hepworth

What must still be admired today about the Fabs’ arrival in America - their first live appearance on the Sullivan show garnered an audience of 73 million - is that it established a new relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Just twenty years before, more than a million GIs had been been based on British shores in anticipation of D-Day, grabbing the girls and splashing their not insignificant disposable income around in country pubs to the annoyance of impoverished, ration book-imposed, horny local adolescents. “We saved your ass,” was probably the inbound refrain. But here, in Hepworth’s book, a reverse tide made gods from state-to-state out of young British men, playing mail order-purchased, American-made Fender guitars, as the rock and roll and blues America had inadvertently sent our way, was brought back in spades by these Limey upstarts. 

The Rolling Stones, Hepworth cites, were prime examples of this. Starting out as exclusively a covers band, their evolution into “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” - a description they continue to earn, 56 years later - was founded in America. Hepworth notes that their first signature hit, Satisfaction, came to Keith Richards as a riff while staying at a Florida motel. Lyrically it’s a song about American life, not a lad from a bombsite suburb in Kent who’d never set foot abroad until a couple of years before. Whether Satisfaction was autobiographical or simply a song that worked, it, Hepworth demonstrates, undoubtedly channeled the America that Richards had been infusing via his Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters imports.

While some of these fresh-off-the-boat young men (and they were, exclusively, young men) inevitably found themselves guppy-mouthed at king-sized beds and en-suite hotel bathrooms, as opposed to the provincial B&Bs they’d had to endure in Britain, Hepworth moves on from the initial landings and teen-screamfests to examine how these bands evolved in an America that, itself, was undergoing social movement with the emerging war in Vietnam in the background. 

One of the most interesting sections of the book examines what made Led Zeppelin, ultimately, the most successful British band in the US during their tenure. The contrast, Hepworth notes, is that while the early British invaders - even the Rolling Stones - had a certain cuteness about them, which somewhat appealed to American heartlanders, Zeppelin built their case with sex appeal, musicianship, amplification and sheer momentum (so the legend goes, the band were totally different animals while touring the US, or during their notorious stays at the ‘Riot House’ Hyatt hotel on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, than they were when back home in their bucolic English country piles). While U2’s proclivities aren’t as documented - or even existed at all - Hepworth also examines their ambition to conquer America. Arguably, it took The Joshua Tree and all its Mojave desert imagery to do so - but, like Led Zeppelin, they found the US to be a receptive market, and set to master it, “give it what it considers it wants and needs,” Hepworth quotes a modest Bono saying in 1981.

By the time that U2 started to break America, along with bands like Culture Club (with Boy George causing quite the sensation - remember his appearance in an episode of The A-Team?), British bands had blazed a trail. American charts in the 1970s had been dominated by the likes of Elton John, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and even Fleetwood Mac, if you can consider their ‘classic’ line-up three-fifths British. It is, perhaps, no surprise, that American comedy scion Rob Reiner chose, with co-writers and American actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, to spoof a British touring rock band in This Is Spinal Tap. Led Zeppelin’s notorious tours, in which manager Peter Grant literally took suitcases of cash away from gigs, provided a model for British acts to be as gargantuan, stadia-fillingly successful in America.

Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of Hepworth tomes that brilliantly and richly get under the skin of popular music. Like it’s most recent predecessor, Nothing Is Real, and the earlier Uncommon People, A Fabulous Creation and 1971 - Never A Dull Moment it is another collection of artfully considered, not to mention highly entertaining thoughts about the music business. Each has been a superbly researched gathering of thoughts around a single theme - be it the rise of rock stars, the LP as a limited concept, or 1971 as the year everything happened (and forget anyone who says otherwise about ’66, ’67 or ’70…). 

The level of detail in Hepworth’s books is always impressive - if you like the history books of an Anthony Beevor or John Julius Norwich you will appreciate the same degree of narrative and insight - but not without the wit that Hepworth has applied in his music journalism career, in particular as editor of Smash Hits and founder editor of The Word, but also his period as co-presenter of Whistle Test with old mucker Mark Ellen. Indeed, I’ve had the pleasure of spending many highly entertaining evenings in both their company for recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcasts, pre-lockdown, in which they gently interrogate authors of similar books about music on their specialist subjects. Hepworth’s own books are also quite substantial, too, which means that, at his current rate of output, another - like the DFS Sale and the Oscars - will be coming around shortly. Which means I’d better get a move on in finishing the new one.

I guess that's why they call it the blues

Regular visitors to this blog will know my fascination with the south-west suburbs of London that I grew up in and their profound connection with the music Britain exported to the world in the 1960s and 70s. At its root was the Blues and the songs of an impoverished American South, implausibly transported into Surrey bedrooms​ to provide identity to angst-ridden teenagers living in relative affluence on the outskirts of the capital.

Of these adolescents, the individual who, perhaps, channeled the Delta Blues most effectively, both in terms of his playing and his own, personal tragedies, is Eric Clapton, the subject of Lili Fini Zanuck's engaging new documentary, Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars. The Clapton-endorsed film doesn't seek to tell anything new about the guitarist - nor does it. Instead, via a lengthy sequence of home movie clips, archive interviews and personal photographs, overlaid with dialogue from characters who've been pivotal - one way or another - in Clapton's 72 years, Zanuck focuses on several periods in his life which have defined him, and via the footage used, adds an extra dimension to much of what Clapton himself wrote about in his 2007 autobiography.

Indeed, Zanuck's film somehow continues the catharsis Clapton has been seeking, it would appear, most of his life and, arguably, for those things most people know about him already: his childhood, growing up believing his grandmother was his mother, and his mother was his sister; his rapid rise from teenage guitar prodigy in 1963 to feited "god" as one third of Cream in 1967 (having passed through The Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in the process); his descent into drug and alcohol abuse at the turn of the 70s and the addled decade that followed; the tragic death of his first child, son Conor, when he fell from the 53rd floor of a New York apartment building in 1991.

It's always tricky, presenting a multi-millionaire rock star with the Italian-style Surrey mansion, a collection of Ferraris, vintage Rolexes and a penchant for Armani suits, as a tragic figure. But, if A Life In 12 Bars panders selectively towards the melancholy, rather than periods of happiness, contentment and celebration in Clapton's 55 years as a professional performer (not to mention the teenage years busking in the riverside pubs of Kingston-upon-Thames), it is consciously to draw out the sadness as the fuel behind his career. In this respect, Zanuck's film neither calls for pity or scorn.

It does, though, paint a somewhat despondent picture of an artist, not so much tortured as unlucky. Growing up in the peaceful Surrey hamlet of Ripley, he cut a strange and lonely figure: after getting his first guitar (bought from a now defunct shop in Tolworth), he discovered the blues of Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters and BB King, also finding that, with some endeavour, he could emulate their licks on his little acoustic guitar. Learning from his grandmother the truth about his origins (his absentee father was a Canadian serviceman who'd had a wartime one-night stand with his mother), Eric Clapton would spend the rest of his life seeking escape from this conflict, while adding more, all to the soundtrack of music conjured many thousands of miles away.

Later events, such as the death in 1970 of his friend Jimi Hendrix, would build on this trajectory by putting him on a path of self-destruction, confessing - in one of the film's more disturbing scenes - his "deathwish".

As with Asif Kapadia's documentaries about Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse, Zanuck's absence of on-camera interviews and use of footage and stills adds the film's tone. Disembodied, we hear Rose Clapp - Clapton's grandmother, his Auntie Sylvia, his onetime girlfriend Charlotte Martin, his wife/muse Patti Boyd, and his late friend and mentor, Ben Palmer, provide the colour. There isn't pity - Rose says Clapton had a mostly idyllic childhood - but there is plenty of undercurrent that doesn't disappear until long after the death of his son.

72 years is a lot to cram into a documentary of any length, so while it seems that large chunks of Clapton's life have been left out, they are probably the chunks that have little to add to the primary story. Indeed, the film ends with a brief montage of private film clips of the elder Clapton and his 'new' family today - wife Melia, daughters Julie, Ella and Sophie. There's no mention of his continued musical output and touring (or his reported health challenges - encroaching deafness, difficulties playing guitar), which have been Clapton's raison d'etre for the better part of six decades. But, weirdly, that's not the point.

A Life In 12 Bars - a title with so much meaning (all things - wink-wink - considered), may not be the perfect editorial study; indeed, Zanuck - who first met Clapton when she was directing the harrowing drug cop film Rush, to which he provided the musical score - doesn't open up anything more than a third, pictorial dimension to the star's life. But it does provide a rich scrapbook to remind ourselves just what the fuss was all about - why a 17-year-old Surbiton schoolboy was invited to join The Roosters in 1963, why he then became a part of British blues history in The Yardbirds, in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, in Cream, in Blind Faith, with Delaney And Bonnie, and as the frontman of Derek & The Dominoes, and as the rock star's rock star ever since. Because down on that Ripley village green in the mid-1950s, with his blues records and his Hoyer acoustic guitar, was the lonely, troubled misfit, rejected by his birth mother, who embarked on a journey to counter that rejection and apply what can only be described as a God-given talent for making a guitar sing.

Still dazed, but not confused: Led Zeppelin - The Complete BBC Sessions

There are many things to love about the BBC. I do, willingly, admit a bias on this, since dear old Auntie put a roof over my head from birth (my dad was a BBC studio cameraman at the time and remained with the Beeb until his retirement). I therefore have a close affinity with the organisation, as distinguished and grand a public institution as the National Health Service, and probably equally as flawed.

But despite all the things about the BBC you could probably fill an entire edition of the Daily Mail with (which they do), one of its finest traditions has been the curation of music, from pop to the Proms and all stops in between, recorded in its own studios and theatres, and during in-show sessions for programmes like John Peel's suspiciously titled Top Gear (nothing to do with motoring, folks...), Radio 1’s landmark In Concert broadcasts, and other specials over the last half century or more.

This incredible wealth of music history lying in the BBC's vaults writes the history of pop and rock, and many of the recordings have found themselves released by the bands themselves, often providing fascinating snapshots of bands in development. The two Beatles' Live At The BBC compilations, recorded in the early 60s for the BBC Light Programme (Radio 1's forerunner) are wonderfully reverent captures of a band in the initial throes of superstardom, while Bowie At The Beeb covers The Dame's emergence in the late 1960s, as he trod a line between progressive rock and the vaudeville of his Anthony Newley/Jacques Brel phase (it also includes brief but fascinating exchanges between Bowie and Peel, for example, introducing his "new" guitarist "Michael Ronson"). The recently released Yardbirds Live At The BBC double CD captures the raw energy of the band as it launched the British R&B boom, along with the careers of three Surrey guitarists - Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Amusingly, it includes interviews between the BBC's plummy-voiced Brian Matthew - whose corny questions and use of phrases like "hit parade" became ironically parodied years later by Smash Hits magazine - and Page, sporting a slightly Epsom-posh, high-pitched voice.

By the time he played at the BBC with The Yardbirds in 1967, Page was already a seasoned 23-year-old session guitarist, having recorded with The Who (augmenting Pete Townshend on their first single, I Can't Explain) and The Kinks, played on Van Morrison/Them's Baby Please Don't Go and Here Comes the Night, and on Petula Clark's Downtown. In 1968, The Yardbirds' Keith Relf and Jim McCarty left, leaving Page to recruit replacements for a tour of Scandinavia. The musicians he brought in were vocalist Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and another prolific session musician. John Paul Jones. And thus was born "the New Yardbirds", until a Keith Moon quip about a "lead Zeppelin" brought about another change of name: Led Zeppelin.

Ten years after Zeppelin formally broke up in the wake of Bonham's death, Page took on the role of band curator, overseeing a series of CD remasters of the original studio recordings. However, despite being one of the greatest stage acts in rock history, there had been a paucity of official Led Zeppelin live recordings to work on, despite the 1970s vogue for live albums. The one exception had been the soundtrack for The Song Remains The Same, the critically flawed concert film recorded over three nights at Madison Square Garden, and added to with bizarre fantasy sequences, such as Plant in soft focus rescuing a castle-bound maiden while in search of the Holy Grail. No, me neither.

For the rest, however, Zeppelin fans had to make do with myriad bootlegs, many of which had been poorly recorded on dictaphones smuggled into venues. This has long irked Jimmy Page, believing that fans have been denied access to the full power of the band live. So, on November 11, 1997 (coincidentally, my 30th birthday folks...), Led Zeppelin released BBC Sessions, a CD package containing BBC recordings from 1969 for the likes of Peel and Alexis Korner's Rhythm And Blues show, as well as exclusive BBC gigs between 1969 and 1971 during which early versions of Dazed And Confused (which Page had first performed with The Yardbirds), Communication Breakdown and the Whole Lotta Love medley, a staple of their later tours, were premiered.

The BBC Sessions package - which included a limited edition version containing band interviews - was a masterpiece. Coming more than 20 years after The Song Remains The Same, it gave fans a chance to hear Zeppelin in their raw state, capturing in sessions often recorded in small radio studios the energy that would later expand into the arenas that became their domain in the 1970s. Of note, however, was the quality of the recordings: in 1997 the CD was still in its infancy, along with digital media in general, but fans were amazed by the detail in the recordings, such as the squeak of Bonham's hi-hat levers going up and down on one of the Dazed And Confused performances.

"The BBC really had very well trained engineers who would have done orchestral sessions, jazz sessions, folk, rock - even skiffle at one point," Page told Johnny Walker last week during a Facebook Live interview to promote the reissue of the BBC recordings - The Complete BBC Sessions, which was released on Friday. "These engineers did a terrific job, considering [most sessions] were recorded for just one broadcast. But to go in with something this avant garde for them to listen to...we were absolutely fearless!".

BBC engineers were products of highly respected training centres, such as the BBC technical college at Wood Norton, near Evesham in Worcestershire. For Page - who, on top of his experience as a session musician, was already a skilled hand in the studio - the BBC's staff responded to the challenge of Led Zeppelin's loud, raucous blues. "[The BBC] didn't know what they were going to be confronted with. For instance, with the Dazed And Confused recording we went in with that and the shorter Communication Breakdown to give two sides of the coin of what we were doing. But there were also usually three, maybe four, songs on the session, but we also used to make up songs on the go, like Sunshine Woman, The Girl I Love and Travelling Riverside Blues. We were creating music so freely and these songs were just in the moment."

Some of those 'made-up' songs didn't appear on the original BBC Sessions CD package, something Zeppelin fans have been known to growl about, feeling that they'd missed out on unheard songs from the canon. "20 years ago a lot got left off because of the amount of space you get on a CD," Page explained to Walker. To this end, the 'new' BBC set contains all 20 tracks from the 1997 release along with nine previously unheard performances from a 'lost' session. These include two more versions of Communication Breakdown and What It Is And What Should Never Be, another version of Dazed And Confused, the semi-improvised Sunshine Woman, and the instrumental White Summer (which appeared as a track extra on the 1990 CD reissue of Coda).

For those who missed the 1997 release, The Complete BBC Sessions is a terrific and thoroughly worthy indulgence - available in three options: an eight-disc (five vinyl and three CD) package containing a 48-page book, an individually-numbered, limited edition luxury print and access to high-definition digital downloads. A five-disc 180g vinyl package is also available, along with a CD-only version containing all 33 tracks on three discs. And, as if that wasn't enough, all versions come with comprehensive sleeve notes by Dave Lewis, editor of the long-running Led Zeppelin magazine and the fan site Tight But Loose, as well as author of several highly informative books about the band.

That The Complete BBC Sesssions just covers the period between 1969 and 1971 shouldn't mean that fans should clamour for more. The 1971 recordings were their last for the BBC, perhaps marking the moment that, with their fourth album, they were propelled into the superstar period of their career, spending the next nine years as their original line-up marauding across the world - and especially North America. Some will say, with some justification, that Led Zeppelin became the perfect example of bloated stadium rock (I will always disagree), but the thing that makes The Complete BBC Sessions so engaging is where the band were, musically, at the outset of their journey.

This was the dawning of the rock era and Led Zeppelin were, arguably, the vanguard, bridging that period between pop's maturing and British rock's transatlantic dominance. By 1969, Page had, in just a few years, gone from suburban Epsom to playing on Petula Clark and Tom Jones as a teenager, and then on to founding one of the most notable - and notorious - bands. At the BBC, though, you can hear Led Zeppelin, as a collective, playing with, toying with the blues and finding the voice that would eventually be branded "heavy rock". Most amusingly, however, is the idea that BBC engineers - whom, it seemed from my visits to Television Centre with my dad, were mostly called Brian and wore cardigans - were studiously, scientifically even, recording Robert Plant's overtly sexual singing, Bonzo's simply enormous drumming, Jonesy's measured, cultured bass and keyboards, and Page's incredible guitar work for posterity.

On this new collection there are also lighter moments - the Isleys' It's Your Thing as a bolt-on to Communication Breakdown, for example, plus a far greater array of experimentation than Zeppelin usually gets credit for. There is little wastage, either. "John Paul Jones and I had both been session musicians ourselves so we were used to working under very controlled conditions, where every second is literally costing money," explained Page in the Facebook Live session. "We were always very efficient - ruthlessly efficient."

Without getting into the marketing economics of the Led Zeppelin reissues - with middle aged, credit card-burning fans like me clearly the target demographic - they are clearly a labour of love for Page, and his earnestness at curating the Zeppelin legacy shines through. "With the renaissance of vinyl it was crying out to do this, and to put it in context of the reissues of the studio albums," Page explained to Walker. "This is a historical document. There wasn't anywhere else in the world that was like the BBC. It's a great time capsule. You can hear the band progressing from 1969 to 1971 - only two years!"

The process has also been rewarding, but highly time-consuming for Page: "The BBC Sessions are 'complete' as the name of the package says! I've been doing this a long time - you have to listen to everything in real-time. There are no short cuts," to which he added "Now it's time to dust down the guitar!", pointing to his eagerness to get on with a new project - with, or probably, without Plant.