Loraine Burgon was Alvin Lee’s partner for about a decade from the early 1960s through the early 1970s, and while they didn’t marry, she was there for his rise from Nottingham cover bands to stardom with Ten Years After. Unlike many a rock partner/associate memoir, this is pretty detailed and well written, and—in a less common virtue—often attentive to the music, with plenty of accounts of concerts, recordings, and Lee’s evolution as a guitarist, songwriter, and singer. Although the pair separated in 1973, her love for Lee and his music is clear, though they weren’t ultimately suited for the long haul.

Considering how tight they were for a pretty long period, their relationship unraveled fairly quickly over the course of about a year when they moved to a large home (actually their second large home) outside of London. Both were caught up in extramarital affairs and Lee’s attention getting distracted by some drugs and interlopers. One of those interlopers was George Harrison, whose delights in earthly pleasures contrasted with his holier image as a devout follower of Indian religion. After leaving Lee, Burgon was involved with Traffic’s Jim Capaldi for a couple years, and then caught up in a zealous bust of Ronnie Wood’s home with Wood’s then-wife (both were found innocent after a couple trials). That’s where the story ends, and while those post-Lee adventures are covered in satisfactory depth, most of the book’s given to her journey with Lee, also documenting their pot and LSD use with unusual positivity for a rock memoir.

As Lee didn’t write a memoir, this might be as close as a book comes to an inside view of the guitarist and Ten Years After’s prime, particularly of their half-dozen or so years of peak popularity between 1967 and 1973. I spoke to Burgon about her book in March 2025, not long after its publication on Spenwood Books.

What was the main spark for writing a book about your years with Alvin?

Somebody had to do it. That was the conversation I would have with Alvin when we talked on the phone, or when we would email. We were still in contact. There was a constant conversation went on that said, what amazing times we lived through, and somebody should write that story. ‘Cause he was completely blown away with how it had been, and so was I. I would constantly say to Alvin, you go and write it. But he wouldn’t. So I thought right, I’m gonna do it.

As you and Alvin were in contact as you started writing the book, did he have much input into it?

We did have a lot of emails back and forth, and I got some picture of what he thought about it from some of those things. But I think you can’t try and write with too many angles going on in your head. You can’t try and think, well, I wonder what he would have thought and this is what I think. It says it’s a memoir, and that’s what it is. It’s not meant to be an Alvin Lee biography. Because if I’d written a biography, it would have been a quite different thing. 

And I didn’t think when I started writing it that Alvin was gonna die. That was the furthest thing from my mind. ‘Cause he was still quite young, 68 [when he passed away in 2013]. So it never occurred to me that that was gonna happen.

You first met Alvin in Nottingham when he was playing in the Jaybirds in 1963, under his birth name, Graham Barnes. You spent a lot of time with his family, and his parents were very unusual for the time in sharing their love of blues and jazz with him and his friends. Van Morrison’s parents were also big blues and jazz fans who played a lot of their records for him, but that sort of musical kinship with parents was pretty unusual for young rock musicians growing up in the British Isles at that time. 

It was always astonishing to me that [Alvin’s father] Sam Barnes was really into the blues, and work songs. Kind of chain songs, as we would call them, when people in the penitentiaries were out in the fields. I wish to god I’d asked him why. But I was young, I was a teenager. I just thought it was amazing, and I remember listening to so much of it at Alvin’s home.

That was his music, [for] Sam Barnes. And he could sing along. I wish we’d recorded him! He had the most amazing bass voice, and he would sing along with all of this. So he really kind of had a blues soul. I have no idea where it came from. I know there were tours of these musicians, and they would go to Nottingham. So he did go and hear a lot of them. And [Alvin’s mother] Doris too, the pair of them. They were really into the blues.

There was also a jazz influence from his parents. Was that more his mother?

It wasn’t necessarily more from Doris. Les Paul and Mary Ford, this is something that Doris would play. I remember that being Doris. Also, Alvin had this brother-in-law who played jazz clarinet, George. So the first instrument Alvin played was the clarinet. When we went around to their place at Christmas, his sister’s, with her husband George, she’d be playing the piano, and she sang. I think they even performed locally, and George would play the clarinet, and Alvin would play guitar. So there was always a lot of music around for him in the family. It was a musical family.

Sam and Doris were really unusual. And they really heartened me; after my parents, who were incredibly uptight, to be around Sam and Doris was absolutely bliss. All his friends, [Ten Years After bassist]  Leo [Lyons], all those people, they would come to his house to hear the music. Because what they were hearing was more interesting to them than what they would be hearing, say, on the radio.

Peter Green was a big influence on Alvin when he moved to London and the Jaybirds made the transition to Ten Years After. How was he inspired by Green?

It was just the fact that it was the blues. We hadn’t heard the blues being played live by anyone at gigs in London. It was the Marquee, and we’d only just got to London, and we’d only just gone to the Marquee. The Marquee was an incredible venue, especially at that time. He was playing with the John Mayall band. Mayall was extraordinary for having all these guitarists. He was like a training school for guitarists, wasn’t he?

He had a great intensity, Peter Green. I think it was his intensity and intention when he played that really probably struck Alvin. ‘Cause there was a lot of that when he played.

Green developed some amazing guitar sustain during his time with the Bluesbreakers, especially on the instrumental on the only LP he did with them, A Hard Road. Was Alvin influenced by his use of that technique?

I could imagine, but I can’t really say. I mean, [Alvin] experimented with the guitar so much. The thing that impressed me was it was only him plugged into the amp, and these speakers. He never had any effect pedals, or anything like that. He would sometimes play around with effects in the studio when they were recording things, some of those happened later on. But it was purely him to the amp through the speakers, and what he could get with that setup.

So he would be exploring all of those things. He really liked sustain, and he really liked feedback. That was very exciting to Alvin, yeah.

The whole group went through a big transition when they moved to London, changed their name from the Jaybirds to Ten Years After, and became more blues-grounded. What do you think the other members’ key contributions were as they became Ten Years After?

I do think that Leo and Alvin was really the heart of the band. I think it could have been other drummers. It could have even been other keyboard players. Or even without a keyboard player. But it couldn’t have been without Leo. There’s absolutely no way. That’s not to say I don’t think Ric [Lee, drummer; no relation to Alvin] and Chick [Churchill, keyboards] are excellent players. But just to say that, there’s something about the chemistry that Leo had with Alvin that was very powerful. 

They were the two that started playing together when they were in their early teens. They had played together since 1960. There was certainly a musical dialogue between them that they never had to think about, it was such a strong connection. Although in bands it’s more typical for the bass and drum to have the strong connection that makes the rhythmic foundation, therefore leaving the more melodic instruments—guitar, voice and keyboards—to interact.

With TYA the foundation was Leo and Alvin. Some of that was the length of time and the experiences they had together before Ric or Chick played with them. They’d already been the Jaybirds, and the Jaybirds didn’t have Ric as the drummer. I saw the Jaybirds as a trio with Dave Quickmire, they were amazing. Dave Quickmire was an incredible drummer. That was a very powerful trio.

Dave Quickmire didn’t want to leave Nottingham. I only discovered from Leo in recent years, it was actually because he had a girlfriend and was engaged, and wanted to stay in Nottingham with her. Dave Quickmire didn’t come down to London. When they came down and did the play [as the band in a West End production of] Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, he didn’t want to. So that was when Ric came down and joined the band. 

Then Chick had already been roadying for them. So it was a natural thing to bring Chick in and play keyboard. That was officially what he was doing to start off with. He was the only one who actually could read music. Not that that was ever useful with the band, ‘cause they never did play from music.

Leo was a really mobile bass player, bobbing up and down with nonstop frenetic energy. 

It wasn’t that you just watched Alvin. You did watch Leo as well.

He was like the opposite of John Entwistle, as far as his stage presence.

Oh, absolutely (laughs). Unbelievable. So when [Leo and Alvin] would meet head to head…especially in “[Good Morning Little] Schoolgirl,” which became in a way, you could say, a set piece. The solo was set, but going head to head at that point. It was so powerful to see how they would play into each other like that. I think Leo’s amazing.

I recently read online that he’s decided this year to write his own memoir, which I’m really pleased about. ‘Cause he can write about Alvin before I knew him.

You saw Alvin’s creative process up-close more than anyone. You wrote that “he would learn new songs to cover and practice singing them at home, and sometimes he’d give me the lyrics so I could correct him or prompt when he forgot.”

We were definitely a team. But I wouldn’t be credited, no no no. All the lyrics were absolutely his. The thing that Alvin, I would say, was proud of, was the fact that his material was original to him. ‘Cause I remember in later emails, sending him things where people online had said, “Oh, Led Zeppelin, they took this riff from this old blues song.” Led Zeppelin are quite known for having taken things from earlier music. I would send Alvin that to him to amuse him, to go, this is interesting, isn’t it?

He would never have done anything like that. There was no question that he wouldn’t have. Yes, there were the songs like “I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes” [adapted from a number by gospel-blues singer Blind Willie Johnson] which came off of that one compilation album [What’s Shakin’, a 1966 LP featuring tracks by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Al Kooper, and a studio-only group with Eric Clapton, Stevie Winwood, Jack Bruce, and Paul Jones; Ten Years After learned several of the album’s songs to use in their early repertoire].’That was credited to Al Kooper, which is very interesting, ‘cause Al Kooper didn’t actually write the original. Alvin told me once that he met Al Kooper, and Al Kooper thanked him for having bought him a house! (laughs) Which I thought was great.

But Alvin had a lot of integrity. His songs came out of him; he really wanted to do them well, and do them better and better. And sometimes it would be like, there was this song [originally recorded by others] that was very popular that they were performing. So he would want to try and write something that might replace that. But some of the more popular songs that they always did, they could never replace. Like “Help Me” [originally by Sonny Boy Williamson] and “From Crying,” “Schoolgirl” [Williamson’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”], they became so much standard to them that everything else had to fit around that.

You also contributed a lot to their fan club magazine, The Palantir, under the name Vicky Page.

It sounded more like a writer, I don’t know, Vicky Page. So I did that starting in Warwick Square [where she and Lee lived in London in the late 1960s]. I got contributions from the rest of the band. I would nag them to give me contributions. There’s some really funny stuff. Alvin had it put on his website. the whole thing. There were maybe six editions. You could have seen them all on there. Unfortunately, his widow took them down not long after he died.

It was interesting to hear your memories of some of your favorite records when you were living at Warwick Square, since some of them weren’t too similar to Ten Years After and weren’t too popular at the time. Especially the Velvet Underground’s first album, and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. How did you find out about the Velvet Underground’s first album (The Velvet Underground and Nico, aka “The Banana Album” in honor of the Andy Warhol-designed cover)? Not many people in the UK knew about it then.

How did we come to hear the Velvet Underground? I think to some extent, once Alvin went to America, he was exposed to Tower Records [the huge store on Sunset Strip]. As I write in the book, they’d let them run in Tower and pick up as many albums as they like. So they’d pick albums from what the sleeve looked like. So it might have been one like that. The other possibility is Simon Stable, wonderful Count Simon. He had his own record shop on Portobello Road [to this day one of the prime London shopping areas for offbeat merchandise]. He found all kinds of alternative music. He would bring Alvin stuff that was not mainstream music. So a lot of stuff came from him. There were various friends who bought music as well, who had their own little music interests, who would bring things in that way.

Would Alvin have been interested in that because it was so different from most other rock music of the time?

I think it was, because it was very unusual. I think it was because it was a very different kind of a record. It was the novelty of it. Well, not novelty, but the newness of it. He loved to hear music that would stretch his own musical imagination. And that’s what the Velvet Underground did. Things that weren’t predictable, Alvin wanted to listen to.

We never listened to kind of contemporary bands, really. We never listened to Led Zeppelin. Because if it was a guitarist especially, he just understood completely what they were doing, where they coming from, what their influences were, and everything.

Of course, that wasn’t the case with Hendrix. Hendrix was the only guitarist he ever listened to, really. Early on he listened to Eric Clapton a bit, and Peter Green, when we’d gone to see him live, that was such an influence on him. Jeff Beck a little bit, because we knew Ronnie Wood, so we listened to Beck-Ola a bit, that was quite a good album that we liked. He had pretty eclectic taste, in a way. The Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, that was a good album, we enjoyed that. 

This Spanish guitarist called Juan Serrano, we loved listening to him. The photo on the cover of the album looks like he’s got six hands. We used to joke that he’d got six hands, because that was kind of how the music sounded. And then—I wrote about it in the book—we had that amazing experience. We were in San Francisco walking down the street, and we see a bar. And the guy’s performing live there! We went and saw him perform. It was so fantastic! There was nobody much in there. Twenty people. He used to, for some reason, do a fortnight there every year.

There were a lot of blues-rock bands in Britain when Ten Years After started out—John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, and Savoy Brown were just a few of the more well known. I think something that set aside Ten Years After from most of them was they had more of a jazz influence, especially in their earliest albums.

He listened to a lot of jazz when we were first in London. He listened to George Benson a lot before George Benson was singing. Those albums of Benson when he wasn’t singing, he listened to a lot. He used to like to listen to jazz guitarists. But he could also see that if you got too jazzy, if you got too just jazz, that wouldn’t be a good direction to go in either.

I know he never felt like a frustrated jazz guitarist. What he absolutely loved was rock and roll. He did love to be doing that full-on rock and roll, and I don’t think there was a better rock and roll guitarist. When he would do Chuck Berry numbers, or Bo Diddley numbers, I’ve never heard anybody else except them do it any better. ‘Cause he just had such a feel for rock and roll. He never would have wanted to limit himself to jazz.

I liked the story in the book of how they played Woody Herman’s “Woodchopper’s Ball” to help get them a residency at the Marquee, because Marquee manager John Gee was a jazz fan. Playing the Marquee regularly was a big help in developing their following in London.

When he started to extemporize “I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes,” it started off ten minutes or something, ended up being twenty-odd minutes. But where he gets into this tuning down the bass string, the E string, and then bringing it back up again, that just happened at the Marquee. He started to do that one night and that’s not the sort of thing you sit at home and practice on an acoustic. It has to be on an electric guitar. And the Marquee was like his rehearsal room where he would do those things, ‘cause he was so comfortable there, and they were playing there every two weeks. 

When you listen to one of the good live recordings of “I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes,” some of the really long ones—there’s a great one on an album from the Isle of Wight that’s incredible—I absolutely think that is constructed almost like a piece of classical music. I don’t think there’s another piece of rock music from that era that has anything like the structure and dynamics of that one track of theirs. The dynamic of it is to bring it right down, taking you to nowhere, bringing it back up, taking it higher, higher, higher. It’s structured like classical music.

It’s very long, so you never hear it on the radio. But I think it’s phenomenal. I think he just kind of tuned in to some place that isn’t on this planet to bring that through, that whole formation of that. It was extraordinary to watch him, and watch how it developed over that time.

I think Alvin was ahead of everybody. I think he actually was producing some music that still hasn’t been fully understood. I don’t think people have really got it, and really see what it is. ‘Cause you have to sit, like you would in a concert hall for a piece of classical music, and hear it all the way through, and take it in like that, like a concerto. 

That thing of lowering it and lowering it, he was doing that in Nottingham with the Jaybirds when they were doing covers. He and Leo were already doing that. They were doing it with the Ray Charles numbers.

Like “What’d I Say”?

Yeah. He would take that down and then bring it up louder again. It was definitely a couple of Ray Charles numbers where they used that dynamic. That was the first thing I saw of them doing that dynamic, before they ever went to London and were Ten Years After.

Something the book clears up is the origin of the name Ten Years After. In the U.S. at least, the usual story is that it referred to the group starting ten years after Elvis Presley became big. The actual idea came from something completely different.

There’s a lot of mythology about it was ten years after Elvis, or ten years after this. No, it was just a headline, Ten Years After Suez. It was the Radio Times, which is the paper that tells you what’s gonna be on the TV. They were hunting around for names, and writing up a list of various names. Leo came up with Ten Years After and Alvin loved it, ‘cause he said, it’s abstract. It’s going to be something that people scratch their heads about. But it’s not going to tie them down to one genre of music. That’s what he didn’t want. He didn’t want to put blues in the name of the band. He didn’t want to make it anything that would be specific to a type of music. And Ten Years After isn’t. Ten Years After what?

That was one of the albums, Watt [sic; their sixth LP, from 1970]. I didn’t even know this, but donkeys’ years later on email, he told me, I never intended it to be Watt. It was supposed to be What, but in a way I’m glad it was, because that would have been too obvious.

When Ten Years After did their first album in 1967, it had covers and a few songs Alvin wrote that, as far as you know, were his first compositions. Did Alvin feel like he had to write quickly to fill material on the first LP (self-titled Ten Years After), or under pressure?

They had been in covers bands in Nottingham. He hadn’t been writing in Nottingham. But it was definitely the case that once he was given the opportunity, yeah, I’ll have a go, I’ll see what I can do. I remember him starting to write at Warwick Square, just with his acoustic guitar there. He would just sit down and think about words and write them down, and then he would play and find chords. Actually, they were quite short songs.

When they came to release that ridiculous single, “Portable People” (from 1968, which had an uncharacteristic psychedelic pop feel), there was no reason that they couldn’t have taken the shorter tracks off of the Ten Years After album. Some of those would have made singles. But then, Alvin never wanted singles. He really didn’t. He was definitely not interested in hit singles. Of course, the rest of the band would have gone along and had hit singles. And his management would, and the record company would. So that was a quite a big chain of energy coming towards him about it. But he resisted it pretty well, really.

There’s footage of them performing “Portable People” on French TV in 1968, and they don’t seem as engaged in the material as usual.

It was a joke. Everything about it, it’s very obvious it’s a joke. 

The first Ten Years After albums were done amazingly quickly, at a speed that’s unimaginable today. There were just five days spent on their first LP.

I think it was the way they were used to doing records at that time. Most bands, initially, they all expected to. They would rehearse before they ever got there

I think it’s very interesting, this word studio. ‘Cause artists, visual artists studios, is somewhere where you go and experiment. Well, music studios didn’t tend to be in those days somewhere you went to experiment. It was somewhere where you pretty much know what you were gonna do when you got there. Because the expense of those studios, which all came out of the artist’s royalties of course, was very big. It was a very high hourly rate. So yeah, they wanted to get on with it and come out. So I don’t think they minded initially.

At first they were produced by Mike Vernon, who produced a lot of notable records in the British ‘60s blues-rock scene. He was most famous for producing the Bluesbreakers albums with Eric Clapton and Peter Green, but he also produced Fleetwood Mac’s early work, and David Bowie’s first LP, though that wasn’t blues-rock. You were at some of those early sessions. What’s your impression of Vernon’s role?

I think Ten Years After were really finding their way. Alvin was finding his way in the studio and how it all worked. I would say it was sympathetic, but it was more business-like. It was more, let’s get on with it, and do the job. Until a band had proved itself, until it had got a product out, and they were having good sales; then you got more leeway. Then the people who were producing were more willing to let them get high in the studio and just take their time, and not be too concerned about it all. Once they got away from Mike Vernon, and got away from using Decca’s studio, then there was more time taken. Because obviously there was money being generated by then, so it was possible to do that.

The great thing was that once they got away from Mike Vernon and Decca, it was a great sense of freedom that they got from being able to be in a studio and experiment with what was going on and have somebody who was more experimental with them. Gus Dudgeon [Decca engineer most famous for producing Elton John’s hit singles and albums in the first half of the 1970s], he was a really nice man. Andy Johns was really a major part of their recording as well. He was working with Gus, and then he also engineered for them.

Gus also co-wrote a song with Alvin for the first album, “Losing the Dogs.” 

The thing about him was that he didn’t try to interfere with the process of what they were doing. He just wanted to support what they were doing. That’s the ideal producer, isn’t it? 

Once they got to Olympic — well, Olympic was like the golden studio in London. It was how it was seen. It was an amazing environment.

There’s a lot in the book about their manager Chris Wright, who did a lot to help establish the band in both the UK and US. But also he did some business deals that might not have favored the band as equitably as they could have. Do you think the good outweighed the band in what he did for Ten Years After?

I think the good outweighed the bad. I know that Alvin, right up to his death, felt good about Chris. He never felt bad about him. Some of the others in the band, we all kind of knew they’d reached the point where, well, there was money issues that really ought to be looked into and all of that. And Alvin was like, well, you go and do what you want. But I’m not interested in that. He always had a good feeling towards Chris.

He and Chris got along. Chemistry is just something you can’t define how it comes about. Some people connect very well, and he connected very well with Chris. He just was the right fit for the band at that time. They’re all the same age; Chris Wright isn’t older than the rest of the band, although he always looked like he was about twenty years older. So they felt on a level with one another. It wasn’t like a Peter Grant. That would have been a manager and a half, literally and figuratively. 

The fact of the matter was that they were all starting out together. So they had the same manager going in the same direction. Chris had grown up in the next county to Nottingham, so there was a lot of understanding of how their upbringings were similar. He’d gone on to university. Alvin, Leo, none of them went to university. Alvin wouldn’t have done it for all the tea in China, he couldn’t wait to get out of school, he was like me.

They had so many similarities, and he’d started his career in the north of England. When Ten Years After was first starting to get attention, they didn’t even have a presence in London. He realized that they had to have an agency in London because he had a hot property now. So they came down and started [with Terry Ellis] the Ellis-Wright agency before it was Chrysalis [which became one of the world’s most successful record labels of the 1970s and 1980s]. He just absolutely was the right person.

And yes, there may well have been things, like [shortly afterward with their US manager] Dee Anthony, that were a problem. Alvin was never that concerned about if he’d been overtly ripped off. It wasn’t a big thing for him, the money of it all. It was never the big thing for him. He never felt like that was his motivation. He always felt much more that the music was his motivation, and we wanted the managers to manage, and he wanted to hand all that over. He handed over all the household bills to me, do you know what I mean? He really didn’t want to be bothered with any of that. Right up until the end of his life, I’m sure that was the same. 

It was interesting to read there was unreleased material from a live in the studio session in March 1968. You wrote about it positively in the fan magazine, but negatively in the book.

It must exist somewhere. I think it would have been horrendous. I don’t think there’s anything about it that’s worth retrieving. It was obvious, after a time, that how they played live with an audience created an atmosphere that, if you could capture that in the studio, might be really good. So they had their session there and invited friends into the studio to…but no. It was never going to be…I don’t remember it standing out.

I was surprised. I’d written about it in The Palantir saying how good it was and all of that. But I think that was just because people knew it was gonna happen, or knew that it had happened, and wanted to have some feedback on it. But I don’t remember it as outstanding. I don’t think there’s anything on there that would have been material for an album. I think that was very obvious.

There are some BBC radio sessions from the late 1960s that are kind of live in the studio, that circulate unofficially. They’re good to hear, there’s something a little looser about them on those recordings.

They were also looser live than they were…It’s difficult to get that loose in the studios. I think that’s why I love their live albums best of all. It amazed me the Fillmore East album [recorded in February 1970] didn’t come out until the 2000s. That was the one that Eddie Kramer [engineer/producer most famous for his work with Jimi Hendrix] recorded. It amazed me that they hadn’t released it at the time, and I can’t really work out why when I listen to it. But there was some reason why they decided not to release it at the time.

You note in the book that Undead, their live album recorded at the Klooks Kleek club in London in May 1968, was initially supposed to be a US-only release. That seems to indicate that the record label and management might have felt that the US market should be specially targeted, although their albums would chart higher in the UK than the US until the early ‘70s.

There was this kind of hardcore underground of blues fans in England. But it very much was kind of on an underground level. In a way the American market seemed much more like…first of all, it’s vast. But also, places like the Fillmore, that was really lifting them to a whole other level. They did universities around America too, that was their kind of early setting. ‘Cause they’d done universities around England. 

Alvin was just thrilled that there was this audience out there that really listened to the music, that was the initial thing. The Fillmores were mindblowing to play at. Because (laughs), you know, people were high. It was a bit like I was saying, the idea would be a concert hall; people would just sit and listen. The Fillmores were the closest that that ever happened. The Fillmore East especially, ‘cause it was a completely seated auditorium. That was a brilliant auditorium.

Some of the best concerts I ever saw them do, they did at Fillmore East. Because the audience would have got high. I’m only talking about having a smoke. But the audiences would have had a smoke, so they were really focused. And Alvin would have had a smoke. So there was a real simpatico between them all. They would have really connected with one another. That’s pretty magical, to have venues that are like that.

Once they started to be more popular in England, then the venues were kind of assembly halls and concert halls. But they weren’t conducive to anything like that at all. The Marquee was a place where the ceiling was low, it was very atmospheric. But they couldn’t get more than a thousand people or something in, if it would be even that. Once you got to the Albert Hall, c’mon. It was built as a concert hall. It was never built for rock and roll. 

It was amazing that they played both the Fillmores on the very first tour they went out on. Everything became different from that point of view. 

So did their label (Deram in the UK, London in the US) and management want to concentrate on the US, where the sales potential was bigger and there was much more airplay for bands like Ten Years After on FM radio than they could get on British radio? 

It might have been the case for the record company, and for Chris. It wasn’t the case for Alvin. For him, it was that the audiences were so exciting, and the venues. There were some venues with light shows in England, but not really anything on that scale. There was the Roundhouse and places like that, but once you got outside of London, no.

When he went to America they realized, this is gonna work. They really did come back from going to America, and being involved with the Fillmores and all of that, knowing that yes, there’s an audience for them out there. 

I really think that at that point, [Alvin] was so pleased to come back to England, where he could go down the street and nobody really knew who he was. He didn’t want to lose that.

Things were a lot different touring and managing overseas back then. You write that Chris Wright was actually writing letters to his business partner Terry Ellis during the first US tour, because they thought it was too expensive to make Transatlantic phone calls.

They were writing letters to one another! I’m talking to you 6000 miles away, and I can see you. There was nothing like that. When Alvin went off for that first tour and they were gone for three months, I think I got like two or three postcards from him. That was it. It was very difficult for me, and it was difficult for them too. Yes, they had fun. But it was far from ideal. Alvin didn’t really like touring on his own.

When Ten Years After took off in the US, Dee Anthony handled their management in this country. He was involved in the management of a lot of top acts, like Peter Frampton and Joe Cocker. He’s a controversial figure, as some have felt he didn’t handle their careers and finances as fairly as he could have. For Ten Years After, do you think the good outweighed the band?

Oh, way way, way outweighed the bad. Alvin still really liked Dee, right up to the end of his life. He took people for who they were as people. What they were doing with his money…well, he was very lucky with that whole house deal [when a home he bought in the early 1970s sold for a lot of money]. That was a very lucky thing. ‘Cause he had so much money come into his life, like winning the football pools, as it was in those days. That gave him all kinds of options about what he could do, which he wouldn’t have had otherwise. Also, it just meant that he never had to concern himself about money at all, from when the band first started to take off right to the end of his life. It was never an issue for him.

That wasn’t true for the other guys in the band, which is why I think they would have got more upset about the money that went missing. But it wasn’t the case for Alvin.

So Dee and Chris were people that he liked. Dee was very smart. Dee got high with Alvin. Alvin kind of trusted anybody who got high with him. He started to learn that they weren’t all good guys. But he loved to be together and get silly with one another, and have a good laugh. When he wasn’t on the stage he wanted things to be light. That was who he was. He was a joker, he was a lighthearted person.

One of the things that I find disturbing about him, his legacy, now how he’s seen…He’s in all these endless pictures of him on stage with his guitar, the thrusting guitarist. He seems to become so two-dimensional to me. That was one of the other things that I wanted the book to show, was that there was a whole person here. There was a lot more to him than just that. Of course that’s the bit that people were excited by, and enjoyed, and I completely appreciate that. But it wasn’t who he was in total. When he was offstage, he wanted to be off.

You wrote that after their early work, “Alvin was now the one steering their musical direction while the others were not that clued up about what Ten Years After were actually about.” 

That’s definitely true, but I don’t think Alvin actually had a plan. He didn’t see where it was gonna go. He was just following where his musicianship and his instincts and his talent were leading him, and [the others] were not suggesting another direction. They were not bringing anything else to the table. They didn’t bring other music to the table. So by default, he was the one in charge.

Were the others more content to keep on doing what had made them successful?

Yes, I think that’s true. I think there was a lot more kind of an approach of, well, we know what we’re doing now, so let’s just keep doing it. Alvin was definitely…he was getting…we’re becoming a musical jukebox, was the phrase he used to use a lot. We’re like a musical jukebox. He understood that was what Ten Years After fans wanted. But he didn’t want to carry on doing that for the rest of his life. But he wasn’t clear enough in his head to be able to say, well, this is the different direction that I want to go into. 

Somebody like Sting with the Police—he absolutely knew that he wanted to be more of a jazz player, from when he was young. So when they got to the craziness of their heights, he said right, I’m out of here. I want to go and play jazz. Well, Alvin didn’t have anything like that going on, anything that defined. But he just knew that he didn’t want to carry on going on these tours, making albums, endlessly…it was like being on a treadmill, really, to some extent. He definitely wanted to be able to and explore other things. I don’t know if he could have shifted the others. I think they’d just traveled their journey.

Although there was more money coming in, I don’t know that it would have really enabled him to be able to not carry on with Ten Years After. That big house [Hook End] was a massive shift of everything, it was crazy. We’d bought Robin Hood Barn [their first country home] for £24,5000; there was not the room in the attic big enough to build a studio. We sold it two years later for £210,00, nearly a tenfold increase, tax free. We bought Hook End Manor for £250,000. It had many outbuildings, including a barn. In that barn Alvin, Harold (my brother), Sam Barnes, and Andy Jaworski built a recording studio. On the Road to Freedom [Lee’s album with Myron LeFevre] was recorded whilst I was still there with Alvin, in 1973.

If we hadn’t sold that house, first of all, he couldn’t have built a recording studio. Coincidentally, more money had also started to come into Alvin from royalties in late 1973 /1974. So he didn’t need to tour with Ten Years After.

It could have been more lucrative for Alvin and Ten Years After, since as you write, there seemed like a conflict of interest when Chrysalis wanted to control his management, recordings, and publishing. Looking back, do you think it might have been good for you or someone outside of the band to point out these conflicts and help structure their affairs differently?

I do write briefly in the book about that one episode where we were in Chris’s office and him with a new contract to sign, and me saying can we take it to a lawyer. And Chris telling me, well, I’m not asking you to sign anything. He said to Alvin, “Don’t you trust me? Don’t you trust me, Alvin?” It was like, “Of course I do. Where do you want me to sign?” I was dealing with enough in looking after Alvin, in being there for him all the while. For me to try to do anything else wouldn’t have worked at all. And there was really nobody else.

One of the reasons that I was concerned about…well, it just seemed all the eggs were going in one basket. And all of their percentages were going out in one direction as well. It just did seem like a very obvious conflict of interest to me at the time. But of course, the rest of the band didn’t really know that all of that was taking place. It was when Chris took me and Alvin out to dinner—he didn’t take the others—and said to him, this is what Terry and I want to do. And offered what Alvin thought was a ridiculously stupid small percentage [0.5%, of Chrysalis] (laughs), which of course it wasn’t at all. It would have been fantastic to have had that percentage. But Alvin was disgusted by it.

So that was how much he knew about finances, or was concerned about them. Despite all of that, Chris he was still fond of toward the end of his days, and Dee as well. He just had great memories of them both.

You write about how badly Led Zeppelin, or at least some of them, behaved when they shared a bill with Ten Years After in the US in July 1969, throwing juice cartons at them while they were on stage. Why would they have acted like that? They were well on their way to being a huge act, and it seemed like there was no reason to feel threatened by or harass Ten Years After.

I think Jimmy Page really was impressed with Alvin, and that pissed the others off. I don’t know why. I have no idea. They didn’t need to be pissed off. They’d got a big career ahead of them. I don’t think there was any reason at all for them to feel like that.

This whole story about Alvin and the orange juice, I think is hilarious. You can just look at the reviews from that show to see that that didn’t happen. He didn’t get orange juice all over the neck of the guitar. That was kind of a strange myth. And various people have said, I did that, oh I did that, no I did that. It’s like, really? How many of you did actually do that?

I think Led Zeppelin came along and there was already Keith Moon in the Who, and there was already this idea that you behaved appallingly. You could do what the hell you liked, get to America and behave like the worst kid on the block. There was something about that that was going on for them. I think Keith Moon was a big influence on all of the bands to think that, oh, it’s carte blanche! We can behave like the naughtiest school boys we’ve ever imagined being. Alvin wasn’t like that, and Ten Years After were not like that. But yes, those other bands would behave in those outrageous ways. 

If you listen to what Robert Plant said in later years, he always feels like it was the others, that he was just kind of pulled along with it on some level. He was a much more sensitive person. Jimmy Page, I don’t know. I know that he did really admire Alvin’s playing.

They were extremely competitive with one another in England. Not consciously. I don’t think it was a conscious thing, but Ten Years After did have this wanting to blow other bands off the stage attitude. That was definitely one of their go-to ways, especially to start off with. When they played somewhere like the Windsor Jazz Festival in the afternoon, they really wanted to leave an impression that would make it hard for the rest of them to follow. Once you’re a headliner, you don’t have that kind of…’cause you’re the headliner. Then you’re looking at other people who come before you. But they definitely wanted to, when they were still playing to other people being headliners, at these early festivals.

As you wrote, Jimmy Page did apologize to you for his behavior a few years later.

He was alright, Jimmy Page. I liked him. But yes, it was John Bonham, and [Led Zeppelin road manager] Richard Cole. Have you read his book? It’s the only book I’ve ever got through like a quarter of it or a third of it and thought, I don’t want to read any more. 

Alcohol was never the best drug in the world, as far as I was concerned. It definitely didn’t improve anybody’s behavior. Alvin was not a drinker. Later on he was for a while, but he wasn’t when he was with me, because I was never a drinker. I was never a successful drinker, because I’m allergic to alcohol. Those that got drunk definitely were the bands that caused the biggest problems.

As a side note, there’s a funny line in the book about seeing Soft Machine supporting Jimi Hendrix at the Albert Hall in 1969, that “they seemed like good musicians who were determined not to play anything together.” I like their very early work, but I would more or less agree with that as they became more of a jazz fusion band.

That’s exactly what they sounded like at the time, it’s quite hilarious. They were playing amazingly, but not playing together (laughs). Yeah, that’s a line I was pleased with.

There’s an amazing statistic in the book, that Ten Years After toured the US 28 times in four years.

That’s what I’ve read.

An interesting point you make is that, contrary to the stereotype of women on tour causing problems, you and Ric Lee’s wife Ruthann actually stabilized the group’s behavior.

Well, it is true. It’s obvious, really. If you’ve got a woman there, it’s like coeducational schools. If you’ve got schools that are all boys, or schools that are all girls, it’s a very different energy than if you go to a school where they’re mates. The girls tended to be the more moderating force, controlling the behavior without doing it intentionally. But just because that’s kind of the way it would work.

Most guys, after the initial run of having a tour where they just jumped on every female that wanted them to, how long do you want to do that for, really? It’s not conducive to how you want to live as a human being. I wouldn’t have thought it would be. That’s what I got from Alvin. He lost his enjoyment for that very early on.

One interesting passage from the book is your account of their concert in St. Louis, right before Woodstock, where they played for a mostly African-American audience. It took a bit, but you remember Ten Years After won them over.

I just think that there isn’t any color in musicians. At that time, musicians were not aware of color. At Woodstock – you’re seeing Sly Stone, you’re seeing Santana – there was never any question that people would have found, oh this is too mixed, or anything like that. It wasn’t like that. The audiences were relatively mixed, or were more mixed. They weren’t so segregated. Just overall, it was, musicians are musicians.

I was briefly with Jim Capaldi, with Traffic. Rebop Kwaku Baah, who was their conga player, was amazing. He was African, he was incredible. And the bass guitarist, Rosko Gee, fantastic musician. They were a mixed group. I didn’t think at the time, oh, this is good, here’s a band with…it didn’t matter. It was the musicianship that was what was important.

The controversy about these things has perhaps come later. At the time, I don’t think there was any controversy about them playing the blues. I think a lot of the blues musicians were very grateful when there were covers of their music, because the royalties did go to them. It brought them fame. I think everybody lifted everybody up.

Especially after the Woodstock film, where Alvin was spotlighted in their performance of “I’m Going Home,” it seemed like he overshadowed the rest of the band, though that wasn’t his intention. Considering he was the focus not only as the lead guitarist and singer, but also because of his visual flamboyance, do you think that could have been avoided?

I don’t think there was any way that could have been avoided. It was inevitable. Alvin didn’t want it. It was the way it happened. He was very, very charismatic. He was an effortless singer. His guitar playing was the focus of what most people saw, but he sang effortlessly. He didn’t do vocal exercises or anything like that, or have any singing lessons. He just sang very expressively. He sang from his heart, in the same way that he played his guitar from his heart.

You and Alvin are briefly interviewed in the 1970 movie Groupies, which included footage of some British acts and women who were following them around. It probably wasn’t the impression the filmmakers were aiming for, but those women’s lives come off as pretty sad. You write that you thought the film was going to be called Rock 70 and about English bands on tour in the US, though it ended up being quite different.

As I said in the book, I used to tell people I was a groupie, I’d only met him the night before, when they asked me questions. But that was a joke, obviously. I just thought, how would you talk about groupies, what would you say about them? They were very pushy when I was first out there. Then they got used to seeing me out there with Alvin, the ones who were around all the time. So that was no problem. 

Probably they were looking for someone who’d stay with them, but not able to understand how to do that. But that film was very weird. Because nobody knew that that’s what they were filming about. I think Groupies was an exploitation film. [It does include concert footage of Ten Years performing “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.”]

When you and Alvin moved in 1973 to Hook End, your second home in the English countryside, a number of people were regular visitors, one of them George Harrison. As some regard George as a sort of holy figure for his humanitarian and musical accomplishments, it might take some fans aback to read you describe how “the gap between his spiritual beliefs and his fondness for sex, drugs and rock’n’roll was confusing to say the least.”

I think people were surprised by what I wrote. But he’s not two-dimensional. He wasn’t a saint, and this was more about him and who he actually was. I thought it was admirable that despite the fact that he obviously was a very sexual being, he still had this fantastic relationship with his spirituality. I think that improves on him, myself. The fact that he was actually a full human being, a full man…he really was a person of all of his sensations. He wasn’t someone who was only going in one direction. I think that’s admirable.

I mean, he grew up in Liverpool. They were northerners. That was kind of par for the course, to be…[his first wife] Pattie wrote about it anyway in her book. She writes quite a lot about all the different things that he was doing with different women. That’s exactly what was taking place.

For some reason, that year, there was a lot of turbulence going on around relationships, and around the people that we knew. And that pans out into other people. It’s kind of a rippling effect that took place. But I would say that’s definitely the case. I think their marriage was already in trouble. Well, I’m sure it was already in trouble. ‘Cause he would come and stay for days, and he was only living ten, eleven miles away. So there’s no reason for him to be staying overnight, there’s no need for that. That was his choice.

Considering how close you’d been for about ten years, both romantically and in other ways, your relationship with Alvin unraveled pretty quickly in 1973, over the period of about half a year. It seems like it was a combination of how disruptive it was to unexpectedly need to move into a different home; enforced celibacy when Alvin was diagnosed with catching an STD on tour, although there’s suspicion the doctor treating him was letting that diagnosis linger; more and more musicians coming into the home, sometimes to use the studio or stay over, like the US musician Lee collaborated with for a while, Mylon LeFevre; and Alvin starting to use cocaine, though you were unaware of this at the time. Is that an accurate assessment?

Yeah. It was like a perfect storm of everything being not very good, for me personally. I felt like I was quite crazy at that point. I think that was kind of where I’d reached. Alvin, I couldn’t connect with him. We’d lost our connection. I think the cocaine was a lot to do with why we lost our connection, because cocaine is a very cold drug. I didn’t know that. I only knew that it wasn’t gonna be a good drug for Alvin, for sure. Because he was speedy enough. The last thing he needed was to have some substance enter his life that was gonna wind him up.

But I don’t think there was any avoiding the cocaine, because it was just so prevalent in the music culture at that time. Which is a real shame. There was some record producer, and I’ve never been able to find the quote again, otherwise it would have been in the book, who said that he felt when cocaine arrived with the musicians in the studio, that the music went out the door. He really thought it was not good for music, and I don’t think it was good for music. It certainly was never any good for singers. It didn’t improve singers at all.

So that was the big aspect to it. Then you can flip out, and do something as dumb as I did, at that point, when you’re under a lot of pressure. Then you do it in such a way that there’s no way back. That’s just how it is. It was a perfect storm of all those things. It was very sad, because it wasn’t long after that Mylon went home, and they didn’t really continue with what they doing, although I think what they were doing had some value in it.

The big thing that we’d forgotten with Hook End was the very thing that had taken us out of London. Which was, we wanted to be somewhere in the country, which was a contrast to everything else that was going on. Well, once you build a recording studio that people come to, and you have a house attached that’s big enough for musicians to stay in, you’ve actually brought the city back out. Because those musicians don’t want to drive back into London every night. There’s no way that was gonna happen. So you’ve recreated what you ran away from. 

In one of the book’s final sections, you write about how you and Ronnie Wood’s wife of the time, your good friend Krissie, had to suffer through two court trials after police made a drug raid of Ronnie’s home in 1975. You write that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wanted you to plead guilty to get it over with, which you didn’t; you were both found innocent after a lengthy ordeal through the legal system. Jagger and Richards, one would think, would know the consequences of pleading guilty, having been harassed themselves on various frivolous drug-related charges that could have prevented them from touring the US.

I thought it was pretty appalling. It didn’t improve my view of them at all. It did me a lot of good ‘cause it woke me up. It wasn’t nearly so good for Krissie. I don’t know that she ever really recovered from it.

You also observe how Ronnie Wood seldom got songwriting credits with the Rolling Stones, though his contributions might have merited more.

Absolutely. I think he deserved it, because I think he had a lot of talent. Those two solo albums that he did, before he joined the Stones were really good albums. You can hear on those albums the basis of what he contributed to the Stones. It’s already there on his albums. He wasn’t so interested in the money. He was a bit like Alvin in that sense.

Unlike many couples, not just in the music business, you and Alvin did stay in contact and maintain friendship after you separated.

We just always had that connection. The connection didn’t separate with that. It did for a year or so after I’d left, although we still had phone calls. There still were times when we spoke to one another during that time. I went back to the house once during that time, or a couple of times, ‘cause my brother was still working for him.

It wasn’t only the death of our own relationship. It was also the times that we’d lived through. Because when you’re young like that and you live through extraordinary times like the ‘60s were, well, you’re never gonna be able to have anything like that experience with anyone else. It’ll never happen that you’ll have those level of experiences with another human being. So the bond you have formed at that time is so strong, it’s so powerful.

There had been a lot of connections between us. I’d gone and seen him in Spain when he was with [his partner] Evi three or four times in the early 2000s, and met up with him a few times. When I rang the doorbell, and he opened the door, he just held me and held me and held me. Because that was how it always was when we would see one another again. The love between us was always there. You know, love doesn’t die. It can change, and you’re no longer the people that you were. Well no, you are the people that you were. That’s the point of really, isn’t it. That in your core, you’re still the same people.

I always think, how can you say you really love that person, and then say, I hate that person? And cut all that off. You can’t cut it off. The love is still real, ‘cause love is always real. That’s how it is.

Something that sets your memoir aside from many memoirs by partners and associates of star musicians is that there’s a lot of description of the music. There are deep details about the gigs, the songwriting, the recording sessions, the equipment, and more. In many such memoirs, there’s the impression the author didn’t pay much attention to the subject’s music, or sometimes was even indifferent to it.

I love the music. I just loved it. I felt really blessed that I was on the road with Alvin and able to hear them every night. It was never boring to me. I was always at the side of the stage. I never went off to the bar. I didn’t drink! I didn’t want to watch the first number, and then go and talk to somebody else and come back. It didn’t occur to me. I was there for the music, I loved his guitar playing and his singing. It was completely that I loved his music. I know that not everybody who was involved with the band loved the music. But I did 100%, so I didn’t want to miss a note. I didn’t want to miss any of it at all.

I suppose that’s one of the reasons we were so close, because I did love the music so much. I mean, I was astonished in Pattie’s book that when they did the concert for Bangladesh, she only went in the evening. She didn’t go in the afternoon, when they played the afternoon concert. I was incredulous. I’m like, what?! Why would you want to do anything else when [George Harrison] was doing that? ‘Cause it wasn’t like he was playing endless gigs. I just didn’t understand her, why that would be the case. So no, for me the music was so important.

When they were the Jaybirds in Nottingham when I met him, I loved to go and see the band play then. I loved to travel in the van and go and be at their gigs. I loved being at gigs. That’s why it was so difficult for me at those early gigs when we couldn’t afford for the “old ladies to go out,” that I wasn’t able to go. It was really very difficult for me, ‘cause I really wanted to see those gigs. I wanted to see all of it.

I shouldn’t say it, because it makes it sound like the only thing that made music any good. But because I’d had a smoke, I was focused. Because I loved to dance, that’s what I was doing. I would dance all the way through a gig. I would get as hot and sweaty as Alvin did. But I would be somewhere at the side of the stage, hidden away from the audience. Except for Fillmore East. Fillmore East, they’d have seats up in the balcony I would go and sit in. That was good. But mostly, I was at the side of the stage hidden away from the audience. I didn’t want to be seen dancing, it wasn’t like I wanted to get on stage and dance. But I wanted to be able to dance. I was dancing before I met Alvin.

Do you have any thoughts on Alvin Lee and Ten Years After’s legacy, and how your book might help preserve it?

That was one of the things I hoped, that it would bring Alvin back into people’s consciousness and Ten Years After back into their consciousness. That was really one of my side wishes. But my impetus for writing was really more that I knew this story had to be written. I think they’re not as well known as they should be. On the other hand, their music is…well, if you have tracks that are twenty minutes long, fifteen minutes long, twelve minutes long, it’s very difficult. The radio’s not gonna play ‘em. So it’s kind of limited how they can be heard, which is really a shame.

I do believe there are universities in America that play a lot of their stuff. I have heard that. But not in England. It’s very rare to hear Ten Years After on the English radio. I know “I’d Love to Change the World” has been re-recorded by quite a number of people. In recent times, some other people have recorded it. It’s in coffee shops now in San Francisco, I hear it. But that’s ‘cause it’s been in a couple of movies.

A song that “I’d Love to Change the World” is much different than the bluesier sound Ten Years After started with. Do you have any thoughts on how things might have been different had he been able to pursue more of those different directions?

He went on, and he recorded a lot of other albums afterwards. But I saw him the middle of the ‘80s, and when he came offstage, he said, god, I’ve just realized, I’m still playing all the same old numbers. I said yeah, but they’re great old numbers. Of course you should still be playing them. Part of that was, we talked about this—he went to see Jerry Lee Lewis when he was in his country and western phase, and was playing country and western music. And Alvin wanted to see him play rock and roll when he saw him in London. He came out from that concert thinking, I should keep playing my music. ‘Cause that’s what people want to come and see, and I can add other things to it. But I should play the core of what Ten Years After played when I perform.

So that was always something that stuck with him, right up to the end of his life. He would still play “I’m Going Home” at the end and all of that. Because he felt, well, people come and see Alvin Lee to see those things, like he’d gone to see Jerry Lee Lewis. Which is a very considerate way to look at it. He did always bring in new songs. If he was recording something new, he brought it in. 

Some of that live music of Ten Years After, if you’re gonna be a listener, you should treat it like it’s a classical concert, and just give it your full attention. This isn’t music to put on in the background. This isn’t music to have as a backing track while you’ve got friends there and having dinner and a drink or two. Because that’s what we did in the ‘60s, so much more. We would get together with friends, have a smoke, listen to an album from beginning to end. That’s what we did with the Beatles’ White Album. It was fantastic. That’s how you treated music. You wanted to listen to the whole thing. Astral Weeks, that was a whole album you wanted to listen to. You didn’t want to just have it going on in the background, and wander around and carry on doing what you’re doing.

Richard Morton Jack’s new book Pressing News: British Music As It Happened 1962-1972, as detailed in my previous post, is built around reproductions of more than a hundred press releases for British rock artists between the early 1960s and early 1970s. Usually the releases are tied to specific records, from the most famous (Sgt. Pepper) to some by very obscure acts (Fresh Maggots, Jerusalem, and the Pete Best Four, to name just a few examples). These are accompanied by quite a few reprints of reviews, and sometimes full stories, that appeared about these records and acts at the time, not years later, when critical views about the performers and their importance often shifted. There are also reproductions of some ads from the period, and each entry has a substantial paragraph from the author explaining the context of the material and the performers’ career at the time.

I described a few of the entries in my previous post. This month I took the opportunity to ask the author about how the book was assembled, and what the press releases can tell us about British rock of the period. The book can be ordered through https://lansdownebooks.com.

I think they’re interesting and worthwhile and deserve to be proliferated. Having collected a large number, it seemed obvious to me to share them in book form. Not all of them contain revelations, but a lot of hard information about often obscure artists or much-loved classics can be gleaned from them, and – if you read between the lines – they contain fascinating insights into the way music was marketed in that period. They’re period pieces, for sure, and often use language that is quaint or even absurd to modern sensibilities, but I think that makes them of sociological as well as musical interest.

Music press releases aren’t the easiest things to collect, since I would guess almost all of them are quickly discarded after they’re received. A few journalists and the like saved some, and some collectors have been lucky enough to find them in the original LPs. But how did you go about accumulating such a large collection of them, and what were the biggest challenges in doing so?

You’re right – by definition, press releases are scarcer than the records they relate to, and most were instantly tossed. In fact, I’m unaware of any record company that maintained an archive of them. I discussed this with Chris Blackwell, and he expressed regret at Island’s cavalier (in hindsight) attitude towards its marketing materials, which were frequently gathered and thrown away. I acquired mine piecemeal, often on eBay, but also through generous-spirited fellow collectors who know I value them. I also had the good fortune to acquire a large number from the estate of the music journalist historian Fred Dellar. The biggest challenge in collecting press releases, and all promo materials, is the fact that no one knows what existed in the first place until it happens to pop up. There are no catalogues or lists, or specialist dealers in such things. It makes it a fun but frustrating area.

What were the biggest surprises you found in the press releases, both in terms of their general approach during this decade, and specific examples of things you didn’t know or that you found surprising were being promoted?

It’s constantly striking that in many cases the people writing them had no idea how the record in question was going to fare – there’s a freshness to reading about artists that are now regarded as ‘legendary’ when they were just embarking on their careers. I mean, when Decca released Tintern Abbey’s sole 45 in November 1967, they didn’t have a clue whether it would be another “Whiter Shade Of Pale,” which had shot to number one from nowhere that May. The major labels followed the same formula in many of their press releases, with a short descriptive page followed by a questionnaire. Some of the questions and answers are ludicrous in one sense – who needs to know that Ringo Starr disliked Donald Duck? –  yet it’s important to remember that these press releases were serving a wide range of publications, many of which catered for children, so they had to cover different bases. It’s also intriguing to see how many major stars were already hard at work well before they found success: Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and so on. In their cases clearly it was just a matter of time.

Although press releases are the core of the book, a lot of space is also given to reprints of articles about the acts spotlighted in them, as well as vintage advertisements and reviews. You’ve used excerpts of many reviews in your huge and comprehensive reference guides to UK and North American records of the 1960s and early 1970s, but these reprint the reviews in their entirety. What’s the value of reading these vintage reviews?

Record reviews were typically written by people who had – I assume – only just glanced over the relevant press releases, so marrying up the two seemed logical. I wanted to demonstrate how the press releases might have influenced what was written – or not. It’s important to remember that record reviews were almost always written at great speed, without serious engagement with what the artist was trying to convey. One prominent music journalist of that period told me that, on the publication he worked for, LPs with voluminous notes on the back cover were the most sought-after for review, because you didn’t have to listen to the music in order to bash out some copy. So, in short, I wouldn’t say that all old reviews necessarily contain worthwhile insights, but if interpreted in the right spirit they offer another fascinating window into the way pop was marketed and promoted. As the book’s subtitle indicates, I wanted to put the reader in the moment as far as possible. Towards the end of the decade, of course, reviewing albums became a more serious affair, and certain critics, such as Mark Williams of International Times, wrote with considerable intelligence and insight.

Records now esteemed as classics were sometimes dismissed or ignored when they came out, and some very popular ones are now disdained or seldom discussed. What are some of the most striking examples of how differently a record/act is perceived now than then?

I agree, many of the most popular groups of the 1960s are barely listened to today. I wonder how many people can identify more than a handful of songs by Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, the Love Affair and so on, yet the music press was jammed with coverage of them in those days. Conversely, artists that barely made a ripple in those days are now widely admired, even if their audience remains small: COB, Fuchsia, Nick Drake and so on. Time Of The Last Persecution by Bill Fay, a deeply personal and heartfelt record set to adventurous rock arrangements, was scorned by critics upon release, yet resonates powerfully with many people down the decades. Conversely, an awful (to my ears) album called Ark II by Flaming Youth was garlanded with praise upon release and has no critical standing today, and the well-known journalist Charles Shaar Murray championed a dreadful (to my ears) group called Gnidrolog. Inevitably, tastes change over time and cream can be slow to rise.

Sometimes received wisdom about an act – not just their musical quality, but basic facts about their career – are called into question or disproved by artifacts like press releases and reviews. As Nick Drake’s biographer, you found this when you uncovered numerous complimentary reviews demonstrating he wasn’t ignored or dismissed in his lifetime, as some other historians have conveniently claimed. The same holds true for the Velvet Underground, and there are other instances. Is this something you often discover, and are there a few particularly interesting examples you’d like to cite, whether Drake or others?

I am constantly uncovering intriguing information from vintage sources that disprove received wisdom. We’re talking about an era in which there were numerous weekly newspapers devoted to current popular music, as well as various monthly magazines, yet depressingly few writers and researchers use them. It always surprises me how many famous albums’ release dates are constantly cited inaccurately. Only yesterday I was ridiculed online by [a writer] for pointing out that he had the release date of Neil Young’s debut album wrong by three months. Upon request, the sources he cited were its Wikipedia and Allmusic pages. So I hope the book will help to correct a few dating errors, at least.

Some artists who are typically portrayed as unfathomably overlooked did, in fact, receive a good deal of coverage. Vashti Bunyan springs to mind – her album was widely and warmly reviewed at its time of release, and she received feature coverage in both the music and the national press (not that it influenced the record-buying public!). As anyone who has ever worked in the record business will tell you, trying to break a record by an artist with no live / public visibility is a fool’s errand, and that often explains why such acts failed to connect, rather than their going unmentioned in the press.

On a related note, very few albums received absolutely no coverage at all. One example – as far as I am aware – is Beginnings by Ambrose Slade, which came out on Philips’s Fontana imprint in May 1969. Of course, what’s especially interesting about that is that they went on to [as Slade] become one of the biggest British groups of the 1970s.

As one of the leading collectors of the UK music press at the time, you know how important it is to preserve and research issues of the weeklies and monthlies that had vital information. Even some of the weeklies with big circulations, like Record Mirror and Disc, often aren’t easy to find, even in libraries with big collections of vintage papers. The value of their reviews/interviews/stories is obvious, but of the four most popular ones (NME, Melody Maker, Record Mirror, and Disc), do you find notable differences in their quality and approach, having read more of them than virtually anyone?

In the period covered by Pressing News, the simple answer is that Melody Maker wasn’t predominantly chart-focused. The others, whilst covering of a wide variety of artists, were fundamentally geared towards those who were having hits. (This shifted in the 1970s, to some extent.) As such, Melody Maker tends to contain the most detailed, thorough and wide-ranging coverage, but all of them are valid and contain interesting and thoughtful journalism – as do Combo, Music Echo, Top Pops, Music Now, Record Retailer, Music Business Weekly and so on.  

A significant attribute of Pressing News’s sections for reviews and stories is that you also reprint material from much more obscure music publications that are very hard to find vintage issues of now. There’s Beat Instrumental, which paid more serious attention to musicianship than other publications, and ZigZag, which was the first widely distributed underground-oriented UK music magazine of note. But there are also ones that are yet far more obscure, like Music Now and Top Pops, as well as some business-oriented publications that few have paid attention to. What are the biggest challenges in finding those back issues, and what are some particular values some of the more obscure papers provide?

The biggest challenge in collecting the more obscure music publications is obvious: far fewer copies were printed and sold, so far fewer survive. It is virtually impossible to assemble complete runs of some of them, and the British Library’s collection is far from complete. There are gaps in my collection that I may never fill, and in one or two cases I wonder if the missing issues even exist anywhere. Certainly no person or institution I’m aware of has them. In terms of their content, as a rule of thumb, the more obscure a paper is, the less likelihood it had of bagging interviews with major stars, so papers such as Music Now often feature acts that received scant attention elsewhere. The same applies to photographs and adverts.

Pressing News also spotlights music coverage from general interest papers, rather than music or even entertainment ones. There are stories from the newspapers of cities around the UK, some of them sizable cities, some of them quite modest in circulation. For instance, there’s even a review of the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” in the Newtown & Earlestown Guardian. You’ve unearthed many such items, which is a source of great satisfaction to researchers unaware of such material. Yet there must also be frustration knowing there must be many more such items in publications that are difficult to find in any form, and extremely time consuming to peruse for the rock-oriented coverage that happened to pop up. What are the biggest rewards and challenges of trying to find such material? 

The joy of looking through such papers is not knowing what may lurk over the page. It’s time-consuming, but always a thrill to discover an unfamiliar review or article relating to an artist I consider worthwhile. In recent weeks I have found pieces that include a photograph of Syd Barrett performing a solo show in 1970, and of Jimmy Page performing with a group under a pseudonym in late 1963, neither of which have ever been circulated, to the best of my knowledge. In writing my Nick Drake book, I attempted to pin down every piece of press that he received during his lifetime, but I am aware that there must be more. Received wisdom had it that he only ever gave one interview, but I came across another, and am wide open to the possibility that others might exist. 

Records were sent out widely for review, and I have been told that local newspapers often wielded more influence over young record buyers than the music press, hence their pop writers were carefully cultivated by record companies. However, their writing was often lazy. I was delighted to find a long piece about Egg from the summer of 1969, then realized it was a word-for-word reprint of Decca’s press release for their debut 45. They’re not the only act I had to omit for a lack of supporting material in the music or general press. Bulldog Breed come to mind, too, and there are a few others.

It’s odd that a Move album was reported to be on the way in late 1966, yet didn’t appear until early 1968. Odder to me is a report on April 24, 1967 that their manager announced tapes had been stolen from their agent’s car in Denmark Street, a factor in delaying an album release for quite some time. Do you think this might have been planted? 

In short, the answer is yes – their manager, Tony Secunda, was a great believer in publicity at any cost (and the cost ended up being pretty high when the Prime Minister sued them), so he fed a steady diet of bullshit to anyone willing to consume it. I’m sure they’d have been successful without his gimmicks, but either way, the saga of the Move’s first album / early recording career is long and vexed, and it’s a shame they didn’t have an album out in late 1966.

For the Who’s My Generation album, there are a couple press reprints of great value, from papers that aren’t easy to access. In the July 1965 Beat Instrumental, there’s an advance report of sorts on what was initially supposed to be the Who’s first LP, describing eight tracks (although the story refers to an acetate with nine, only eight are detailed). All but one of the songs were covers, and they, quite unusually considering there must have been pressure to get an album out quickly to capitalize on their first two hit singles, decided to pretty much start the album over, only keeping four of the eight tracks for the final My Generation LP. Then in the December 4, 1965 Record Mirror, Pete Townshend gave a detailed track-by-track rundown of the album, and a very forthright one, heavily criticizing some songs and insinuating some criticism of Roger Daltrey and producer Shel Talmy. I’m devoting a full future blogpost to these items, but would you agree it was both very unusual to have such an advance report of an album in the making in 1965, and very unusual to have such a track-by-track rundown from the main songwriter/leader, though such rundowns would become more common in future years?

Yes, I would agree. From the start Townshend was unusually outspoken and forthright, both to the press and as regards what he wanted the group’s recordings to consist of. It’s intriguing that the scrapped first version of My Generation got so far as to be reported in detail. Asking artists to comment on each track on an album wasn’t unheard of, though – off the top of my head, I can recall the Beatles, Scott Walker, Roy Wood and others doing so too. But to insult your own work in such plain terms is clearly peculiar, and typical of Townsend’s self-critical candour.

Getting back to press releases, one of the relative surprises of Pressing News is that many obscure acts who sold very few records were granted substantial press releases: Vashti Bunyan, Jackson C. Frank, the Virgin Sleep, Blossom Toes, Cressida, the Human Beast, Fresh Maggots, and Mellow Candle, among many others. Was it just considered pro forma by labels and publicists to churn out press releases regardless of commercial prospects, or sometimes indicative that they were considered to have had greater prospects than many realized? Or kind of a combination of those approaches?

Review copies of virtually every new record were accompanied by some form of publicity material, not least because record companies had precious little idea what would or would not connect and had to cover each base. Black Sabbath were treated with near contempt by Philips in the run-up to their first album’s release. (Almost unbelievably, none of the members had heard the finished LP or seen the cover before it was in the shops. Luckily, they were delighted with both.) Review copies of that album simply came with the usual bland Vertigo single typed sheet, yet it became a huge success right away. So I don’t think any record’s success can be attributed to whatever the publicity department said or did, though in some cases they made journalists’ lives easier by including obvious material to parrot. The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” press release even included a readymade review by Tony Barrow for reprinting! As time went on, more elaborate promotional materials started to be generated, often indicating a level of excitement about an act. For example, the first Yes album was promoted with a bespoke promo folder containing info on headed paper, photos and a poster. That said, such things were often funded by management or other interested parties, rather than the record company.

As many press releases as there are in Pressing News, obviously many more exist that could have been considered, particularly for big acts like the Beatles and Rolling Stones (for whom not every album is represented), but also for more obscure acts who aren’t represented at all. Were there criteria you applied in how you had to be selective, and any you regretted omitting?

One criterion was my own taste, hence the absence of disposable pop, mainstream ballad singers, novelty acts and so on. Another limitation was my memory: I recently found the press release for Reality by Second Hand inside the cover of my copy when I played it. I would have included it in the book if I’d remembered I had it. The same goes for But That Is Meby Mandy More. Another is the fact that I simply don’t have certain press releases – for example, I have the ones for Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left and Pink Moon, but have never seen one for Bryter Layter. It seems unlikely that Island didn’t generate one, so I’ll just have to wait until a copy surfaces. The same goes for The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and various others. Finally, I didn’t want to include too many by one artist, so I had to be selective about what to include relating to, say, the Beatles, the Stones and David Bowie.

Would you consider publishing another volume or volumes?

Yes, albeit with a certain hesitancy, because it was a fiendish book to lay out. Pressing News only covers Britain, and I have many American press releases that I would like to put into book form one day. Off the top my head, it would include rare and unseen material relating to Love, Captain Beefheart, Silver Apples, Big Star, the Monks, Fifty Foot Hose, Karen Dalton, Jefferson Airplane, Leonard Cohen, the Stooges and many others. To a lesser extent, I have press releases relating to artists from non-English speaking countries (Can, Culpeper’s Orchard, Pan, Oriental Sunshine etc), but those would obviously be more problematic to make into a book with any semblance of commercial viability!

Do you find notable differences between how US and UK acts were promoted, in press releases specifically, but also in how they gained press coverage?

American press releases weren’t much different to British ones – a mixture of hyperbole, quaint idioms and information of varying degrees of usefulness. The big difference between the territories is that, despite being a much larger market, America had a bafflingly limited music press compared to Britain (trade magazines aside). There were a few great publications – Hit Parader springs to mind – but no weekly music press until Go started publication in April 1966 (but that was a flimsy publication distributed via radio stations). Most pop coverage was in magazines aimed at youngsters, such as Flip and Sixteen, which – whilst occasionally pretty cool – tended to be flippant and superficial. A few regional papers appeared circa 1966, like New England Teen Scene and Mojo Navigator, and magazines like TeenSet, Hullabalooand Crawdaddy! took up some slack, but it wasn’t really until the end of the 60s that America had a really solid national music press, with Rolling Stone, Fusion, Circus, Changes, Rock and others appearing regularly. There were useful articles about interesting musicians in the national press, but these were often syndicated and consisted of rehashed press releases rather than original material. So, in general, serious American pop fans weren’t as well served by the press as British ones. As a sidenote, of course the American record industry was so enormous that no weekly consumer publication could have compassed it all.

Pressing News hasn’t been out for long, but has it resulted in any readers contacting you with copies of press releases you haven’t seen, and if so, have any been of special interest?

Alas, not! But press releases are very rare, and I didn’t publish the book in the expectation that it would result in a flurry of them resurfacing. But there are many wonderful records whose press releases I have yet to see, and I would be delighted if anyone were to share items of interest… For me, locating such things is all about sharing, not hoarding.

Pressing News can be ordered through https://lansdownebooks.com.

Richard Morton Jack’s new book Pressing News: British Music As It Happened 1962-1972 is the kind of book whose interest is pretty limited to intense historians/collectors/fanatics, and that you use for reference rather than reading all at once, or even in its entirety. That doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable, of course, built around reproductions of more than a hundred press releases for British rock artists between the early 1960s and early 1970s. Usually the releases are tied to specific records, from the most famous (Sgt. Pepper) to some by very obscure acts (Fresh Maggots, Jerusalem, and the Pete Best Four, to name just a few examples). These are accompanied by quite a few reprints of reviews, and sometimes full stories, that appeared about these records and acts at the time, not years later, when critical views about the performers and their importance often shifted. There are also reproductions of some ads from the period, and each entry has a substantial paragraph from the author explaining the context of the material and the performers’ career at the time.

A little disappointingly—and this has nothing to do with the talent of the author and the usual fine design he brings to his specialized books—the releases themselves (and the reviews) are often bland and basic, if reflective of how the industry promoted rock at the time. There aren’t a ton of genuine surprises, though it’s a great service to have reviews from UK music papers reprinted, as (except for Melody Maker, and to extent NME) accessing the ones from British weeklies is difficult, even for the major Disc and Record Mirror publications.

Morton Jack also dug up quite a few items from general interest/regional newspapers and magazines that have seldom been seen since their publications, going back to a few (such as a review in the Newtown & Earlestown Guardian) for the book’s first entry, on the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” single. Almost all of the reviews and stories, incidentally, are sourced from UK publications, though a very few from the US are present. While it’s unlikely every reader wants to go through the clippings and releases for all of the selections depending on their taste (especially the more esoteric ones from the late 1960s and early 1970s), there’s something for every fan of British rock of the period here, from the superstars to worthy cult acts like Blossom Toes.

There are some surprising nuggets here and there for British rock obsessives. I’m detailing some of the ones of most interest to me in particular in this post. I interviewed the author in my next post:

** The Yardbirds are justly hailed for pioneering blues-rock and psychedelic guitar work, often with volume, especially with the guitar, that was loud for the time. Yet in a press release for their first single (“A Certain Girl”/ “I Wish You Would,” May 1964), lead singer Keith Relf revealed, “Actually, up until last year I was a real purist, wouldn’t have anything to do with electricity.”

** The Zombies were most highly esteemed for their wealth of fine original material, usually written by either keyboardist Rod Argent or bassist Chris White, though singer Colin Blunstone wrote a bit. They are not highly regarded for their occasional R&B/soul covers, though they did a few good ones, some of which (like “The Look of Love”) were only done for the BBC rather than for their official releases. 

So it’s a little surprising, in a press release for their first LP (UK version), to see road manager Terry Arnold cite a cover as the most interesting song. “Probably the most interesting track is ‘Sticks and Stones’—it’s a slowed-down version of the oldie that Ray Charles made famous,” he states. “The boys give it a really earthy feel.”

** Vashti isn’t a name known to the average rock fan, but she’s pretty well known to the kind of people who read these blogs, if mostly for her cult 1970 folk album. Five years earlier, she had a brief career as a more Marianne Faithfull-like folk-pop singer, including the single “Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind,” written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and produced by Rolling Stones producer/manager Andrew Oldham. According to a press release for that 1970 LP (which misspells the title as “Somethings Just Stick in Your Mind”), “Although the disc sold as many as were pressed, for some unknown reason, Decca stopped production.”

It seems it would be highly unusual for a record label to stop pressing a single that had sold out. Could this not have been accurate—misstatements and outright untruths, as shocking as it sounds, not being unknown in press releases then and until the present? This is supported by Vashti Bunyan’s memoir Wayward, in which she writes, “the single went nowhere,” and doesn’t refer to it selling as many as were pressed and production getting stopped. Maybe, say, only fifty were pressed and they all sold, but that seems highly unlikely.

** Welsh singer-songwriter Mike Stevens is another name not known to the average rock fan. Like Vashti, however, he’s pretty well known to the kind of people who read these blogs, but under a different name: Meic Stevens. But he was billed as Mike Stevens when his first single came out in 1965. All very footnotish, but in the “Lifelines” section of a press release for that June 1965 single, Robert Johnson is listed as one of his favorite singers. Johnson is today extremely famous, but in 1965 he was known only to a pretty small cult of folk/blues enthusiasts. It wouldn’t surprise me if Stevens was the first to list him on a “Lifelines” or similar list.

It also might seem unusual Stevens even found any Johnson records in the UK, though the first Johnson LP compilation had come out in 1961. But was it as unusual as we might think? Eric Clapton made his debut as a lead singer on a cover of Johnson’s “Ramblin’ On My Mind” on the famous 1966 Blues Breakers: John Mayall with Eric Clapton album. I’m guessing that’s the first Johnson cover by a rock act (though the Bluesbreakers might have preferred to think of themselves as a blues band), predating Cream’s cover of “Four Until Late” on their first album in late 1966.

So Clapton found something by Robert Johnson in the UK, but was it as rare for young British musicians to find obscure (or at least then-obscure) American blues as we might think? Some such LPs were available at specialty shops like Dobell’s on Charing Cross Road in London. It’s been reported that Syd Barrett named Pink Floyd after coming across the names of Pink Anderson and Floyd Council in the liner notes to Blind Boy Fuller’s Country Blues 1935-1940 LP. It’s unclear how much he and the other members actually heard Anderson and Council, if they heard anything by them at all, or if or how much they heard Fuller for that matter. 

** It’s well known, among serious Who fans at any rate, that they finished or almost finished a debut LP dominated by R&B/soul covers before abandoning it and making a better one dominated by Pete Townshend originals. It’s not so well known, though this was likely the source for historical writing on the issue, that Beat Instrumental had a comprehensive July 1965 story on the first version, which they reported “has been completed.” Producer Shel Talmy played reporter John Emery an acetate with nine tracks, and Emery—with unusually acute observation by the standards of the mid-‘60s pop press—was hit “slap in the face just looking at the titles [by] the lack of originality in choice of material.” Eight of the nine tracks were cover versions, and although some were used on the My Generation LP and all the others named in the piece have come out on archival releases, this would indeed have made for an underachieving core of a debut Who longplayer.

To list the precise tracks cited: James Brown’s “I Don’t Mind” and “Please Please Please” (both of which did make the My Generation LP), Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” (which also made the LP, although only the UK version), Martha & the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave” (re-recorded for the Who’s second LP, although only the UK version), “Motoring” (the flipside of Martha & the Vandellas’ hit “Nowhere to Run”), “Leaving Here” (first done on Motown by Eddie Holland), “Lubie” (the most obscure item, first done by Paul Revere & the Raiders), and  “You’re Going to Know Me,” the sole Pete Townshend original. The description (“is opened with guitar strumming and bursts into an uptempo raver. There is some feedback used here”), makes it obvious this was an early title for “Out in the Street,” which did lead off the My Generation LP.

If you’ve noticed the math doesn’t add up, you’re right. That’s seven cover versions and one original, though the acetate had nine tracks. The identity of the ninth one is unknown. Whatever the case, the Who were certainly right to redo the album for the most part. The Who did some good R&B/rock covers in 1965 (especially the B-sides “Daddy Rolling Stone” and “Shout and Shimmy”), but that wasn’t their forte, and the outtake covers aren’t that hot. They’re rather dull, actually, which isn’t something you’d say about anything on the final My Generation LP.

** Speaking of My Generation, Marc Bolan—then barely known, and barely recorded—had this strange comment on the album in the February 19, 1966 issue of London Life: “The song ‘My Generation’ really swings but for me this is a bad LP. Nevertheless, for the track ‘My Generation’—the LP is very much worth buying.” It would have been quite an investment for the average young British rock’n’roll fan to buy an album for just one track—one that would still have been easily available as a much cheaper hit 45.

** In a Record Mirror interview published on August 13, 1966, just after Cream formed, Eric Clapton was asked what he thought of the Yardbirds’ new self-titled album (since often called Roger the Engineer). He was most uncharitable about the band he’d left in early 1965, to be replaced by Jeff Beck. “I just don’t want to know, he said after what the paper reported as “a short snort.” “One of those numbers I gave to them two years ago and arranged it and everything.” It would be interesting to know which one that was—maybe “Lost Woman,” basically a rewrite of Snooky Pryor’s “Someone to Love Me,” which the Yardbirds did play with Clapton, as it’s on an archival release of a July 1964 concert.

Sadly, Clapton wasn’t done dumping on his old band and others. In the same feature, he went on to carp about the Yardbirds, “They do this thing about Keith Relf collapsing five minutes before they go on stage, then they pull the whole band out. Everyone’s waiting for the big split”—which wouldn’t happen for a couple years, but after a couple major lineup changes. Asked to rate fellow guitarists, he had good if brief words for Jeff Beck and Peter Green, but added, “If I was sure that everything George Harrison played was his own ideas, I’d say he was good, but I’ve got this feeling it’s Paul McCartney telling him what to do.” That was considered colorful enough to be rephrased for the article’s headline, though if George read the piece, he apparently didn’t hold grudges, he and Clapton famously becoming close friends within a couple of years.

Finally, Clapton stated “there are only about four groups in the country who are developing their own directions—the Beatles and the Kinks, and the Small Faces and the Who I suppose.” The Yardbirds were conspicuous by their absence.

** John’s Children are a group known more for their overhype than their music, though actually some of their records were pretty good. They never did make it over to the US, though there was more than one report of them coming over to capitalize on the success of their “Smashed Blocked” single in some Californian markets. One such report is in a February 1967 press release, which claims “there’s the chance of an American tour in March.” An easy claim to back out of when the chance didn’t come through, but it goes on to read, “and a Monkees-style TV programme for them while they’re over there.” Who knows if there was anything to that or just a flight of fancy to gain them attention, but there’s barely even any surviving film footage of the group, let alone a full TV program.

** As the Move had their first UK hit single in January 1967 and three big ones in the country that year (though they’d never make it in the US), it’s odd their first LP didn’t appear until more than a year later. This is how Morton Jack summarizes it in his text: “The Move’s debut LP was promised for November 1966, with publicity-hungry manager Tony Secunda bragging: ‘Our aim is to outdo Revolver with new musical innovations.’ The date came and went, but in the spring of 1967 Rave magazine reported ‘The Move’s first album, called Move Mass and due out soon, contains some really weird tracks…There’ll be one called ‘Kilroy Was Here’ and another provisionally titled ‘Roy Wood’s Toytown Band,’ which features the group playing toy instruments.’ On April 24, however, Secunda announced that the tapes had been stolen from their agent’s car in Denmark Street. Work on it stalled thereafter, as they gigged relentlessly, moved from Decca to EMI, lost a libel action brought by the Prime Minister and weathered bassist Ace Kefford’s mental difficulties. Late December was promised, but the LP didn’t appear until March 1968.”

That’s a really long period of gestation, and I have to wonder if the story about the tapes getting stolen—not something that often happened to an act with hits and a high profile—was planted to stall for more time if progress on the LP was laborious. (And what was the agent doing with the tapes anyway, and why would it have been the only copy?) “Kilroy Was Here” was indeed a song, and a good one, that was featured on their debut album, though it’s unclear whether it was re-recorded if tapes were actually stolen. No track titled “Roy Wood’s Toytown Band” appeared on a Move release, and going from the description, that might be a blessing. Incidentally, the album title reported back in spring 1967, Move Mass, wasn’t used, the debut LP bearing the most unimaginative title The Move.

** Speaking of overhype, the Idle Race were a good-but-not great group most known for including Jeff Lynne before he joined the Move, let alone co-founded Electric Light Orchestra. A Liberty Records ad from October 1968 is headlined, “First album from the group second only to the Beatles!” At least John’s Children’s overhype was making some outrageous and dubious claims as to their burgeoning success, and not anything along the lines of “second only to the Who,” though they did support the Who on a rambunctious German tour. The Idle Race did have some elements of the Beatles at their lightest, though they were considerably closer in sound—though again, in a notably lighter fashion—to fellow Birmingham group the Move. And they never did get a hit, let alone challenge the Beatles in sales or innovation, though they have their cult following.

** In the November 23, 1968 issue of Melody Maker, Long John Baldry—a much bigger name in the UK than in the US, where he made virtually no impression in the 1960s—commented on Fleetwood Mac’s new “Albatross” single, and not very positively. “It’s a bit Roy Rogers and Trigger riding into the sunset,” he surmised, before really digging the knife in: “I don’t see the point of this record by any standards—pop, blues or jazz. I don’t see what it’s got to do with anything.” He also predicted “it won’t get into the pop market because it doesn’t mean anything”—most inaccurately, at least for the UK, where it got to #1.

** In the June 7, 1969 issue of the now-forgotten UK magazine Top Pops, a sidebar to a feature on the emerging group King Crimson—who had yet to issue a record—listed four favorite pieces of music by each member. The original King Crimson, and the one album they recorded, are rightfully thought of as cutting-edge hip. Their lists, however, remind us that not everything cited as cool and influential at the time by cool and influential musicians is what we’d expect, or what has been with codified as unhip and uninfluential. Folky material figured surprisingly strongly, Robert Fripp listing Judy Collins’s “First Boy I Loved” (her version, not the original one by the Incredible String Band); Greg Lake listing Collins’s “Michael from Mountains” (her version, not the one by the writer of the song, Joni Mitchell); Michael Giles listing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Old Friends”; and Greg Lake listing Donovan’s “Deed I Do” (Donovan’s “Get Thy Bearings” was covered by King Crimson in concert in 1969, as heard on archival releases).

As far as unhip, Ian MacDonald lists Vanilla Fudge’s “Break Song.” Lake lists the Moody Blues’ “Never Comes the Day,” and although the Moodies aren’t rated as high as King Crimson by many rock historians, there were more similarities between the bands than many are willing to acknowledge. Of course they both used Mellotron heavily at the time, but also Moody Blues producer Tony Clarke worked on King Crimson’s first album before the band took the production reins themselves.

** Syd Barrett’s solo work might not be as highly regarded as the godhead stuff he did as Pink Floyd’s leader on their first album and handful of singles, but it’s generally felt to be at least interesting, and by some to be charmingly whimsical. Not so the Newcastle Sunday Sun, which gave his first album a pretty harsh rundown on January 25, 1970. “Judging by the sleeve of…The Madcap Laughs, Syd sings to a naked lady these days,” it reads. “Either the stool she is perching on is a trifle chilly or she finds Syd’s serenading troublesome.

“Syd’s all right doing his own thing as long as everyone concerned helps him along. They seem to impress on each other how good and groovy it all is really. In the end, they seem to persuade themselves, and reach a point at which they cannot distinguish between junk and genius.”

** Scott Walker briefly reverted to his birth name, Scott Engel, when he went in his most serious singer-songwriting direction on his fourth LP. Although that was his best and most artistic record, it wasn’t a commercial success, and he subsequently become Scott Walker again, never again reaching the heights of his simply titled 4 album. While he was still Scott Engel, however, he gave an interview to the now-forgotten paper Music Now for its December 5, 1970 issue. Here he disclosed a surprising and interesting ambition: “I am interested in Russian music. I have got great sympathy for the people over there. I would like to do a ‘political’ album, for want of a better word. It would be about life there and the lives of the people.” Elsewhere in the story he claimed, “I think I probably have the largest collection of Russian classical music in London.”

That record never did come out, and perhaps would not have been welcome in a Western world unsympathetic to Russia, as it often has been to the present day. Although Walker was noted for crediting non-rock influences like Frank Sinatra, Jacques Brel, and Russian classical music, and incorporating them into his work, in this story he does compliment a couple rock stars, Neil Young and the Band. More surprisingly, he adds that “Johnny Winter is another person I respect. I have played with a lot of good guitarists and I’ve seen a lot too, but he beats so many of them. He plays real shit-kicking music”—though most would fail to hear even an echo of Winter in Walker.

** Trader Horne, the duo of ex-Fairport Convention singer Judy Dyble and ex-Them keyboardist Jackie McAuley, lasted for just one 1970 album. Apparently more ambitious plans were afoot, as Dyble said in a June 1970 story in Beat Instrumental they were going to the US in August. They never made it over, as Dyble left in May, around the time the Beat Instrumental story would have appeared.

** The transition of the Move into Electric Light Orchestra remains a puzzling and odd period, as it seems these acts were envisioned as having overlapping careers, although in fact the Move ended only very shortly after Electric Light Orchestra began (and ELO only included the Move’s Roy Wood for a short time). A press release from December 1971 seems to indicate plans were different, Wood “clarifying,” “We can still expect to hear new records from the Move for another three years or so, but live appearances will be rare.” Actually the last Move release, the single “Do Ya,” would come out only half a year later, in June 1972.

Information about Pressing News and how to order a copy is at https://lansdownebooks.com/products/pressing-news.