Colin H on John McLaughlin
Back in February Christopher Hjort very kindly got in touch with me, as a John McLaughlin biographer, to share a photo of something remarkable that he had stumbled upon while doing research on unrelated matters at the British Library.
There, in the Wandsworth Advertiser edition of 22 March 1963, writer uncredited, was what is almost certainly the world’s first interview with John McLaughlin – along with what are (outside of a few in Georgie Fame’s own collection, uncirculated) the only known photos of John during his time with the Blues Flames. The full text of that piece appears below, but first some scene-setting…
Photos of McLaughlin in the 50s/60s are incredibly rare. There is one publicity shot with Big Pete Deuchar’s Professors of Ragtime (circa 1958/59), reproduced in Walter Kolosky’s ‘Power, Passion and Beauty: The Story of the Legendary Mahavishnu Orchestra’ (http://www.walterkolosky.com/); there is a stunning set of live shots with the Graham Bond Quartet from his April-September 1963 tenure with them, taken by future psychedelic scenester John Hopkins (but sadly priced out of the market for license at the time I wrote ‘Bathed In Lightning: John McLaughlin, the 60s and the Emerald Beyond’, published 2014); and there is one snap with Herbie Goins & the Night-Timers; and there are a couple of shots at a jazz cellar in Germany with Gunter Hampel in 1968. That’s more or less it until his first solo LP ‘Extrapolation’ and subsequent membership of Tony Williams’ Lifetime in 1969. There is only one known shot (onstage) with Miles Davis during his various live and studio associations with the man during 1969-70.
Prior to this Wandsworth Advertiser discovery, the earliest quotes from McLaughlin I was able to find for my book were from a Richard Williams phone interview with him in a Melody Maker piece on Lifetime in late 1969.
For a man who played with (and often recorded with) numerous great and/or interesting combos from one end of the decade to the other (Pete Deuchar, Georgie Fame, Graham Bond, the Tony Meehan Combo, the Rick Laird Trio, Brian Auger Quintet, an unrecorded quartet with Ian Carr and John Stevens, Duffy Power/Duffy’s Nucleus, Ronnie Jones & the Night-Timers, Herbie Goins & the Night-Timers, the Gordon Beck Quartet, Sandy Brown…), he left barely a trace in terms of imagery and contemporaneous commentary.
I’ve reproduced the full text of the uncredited Wandsworth Advertiser piece below. There are many fascinating aspects about it, from an historical perspective. R&B (“R and B”) was still a very new phenomenon in Britain, it needed explaining. When the writer refers to “rock” he means ‘rock’n’roll’, of the kind peddled in Britain by the Larry Parnes stable, including Billy Fury. Tenorist Mick Eve is given as “Mike”. John is still using “Johnnie” (we don’t know if that’s how he spelt it himself, though: he spells it ‘Johnny McLaughlin’ on his 1950s calling card, reproduced on the cover of the 1978 LP ‘Electric Guitarist’). This is the only interview I’m aware of in which he mentions British saxophonist Tubby Hayes (a prominent musician on British TV at that time, with his own series) as an influence. He would mention Cannonball Adderley in future interviews. All his future-named inspirational players would be Americans.
Georgie’s reference to slipping in jazz with the crowd-pleasing pop is intriguing: Tony Meehan would try the same in concert during the brief tenure of his eponymous Combo with John and others (one tour in late 1963, a few subsequent dates and a minor hit single). Graham Bond, with John on board in his Quartet with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, in the period between (April to September 1963), moved very consciously FROM jazz to R&B, trail-blazing that form of music and trail-blazing what became the British club-based touring circuit, partly to try and become popular – switching in that period from alto sax to organ/vocals, and from a jazz-based repertoire to a blues-based one. Brian Auger, with whom John worked for a few months in early 1964, would make a similar conscious shift in musical direction (and also a career-defining shift from piano to organ).
The final paragraph reference to dancing and genders is also telling. It was often said at this time in the British papers that ‘folk music is for listening, pop is for dancing’. Outside of a few specialist jazz/R&B clubs, jazz-based music still fell into the functional/social music pot – for dancing, with listening coming second. Practitioners played it at US Air Force/Army bases in the Home Counties and at pubs like this one, the King’s Arms in Peckham (not even a well-known music pub of the era – just one that we are fortunate to be able to glimpse here because there was clearly a writer on the local paper who cared). Georgie’s Blue Flames made their name at the Flamingo in central London, but played anywhere within reach of London they could – sometimes managing 10 gigs a week.
There are few if any contemporaneous written accounts of the Blue Flames at the Flamingo during the McLaughlin era (mid 1962 – March 1963), but trumpeter (and future Nucleus leader/Miles Davis biographer) Ian Carr, who had moved to London from Newcastle in 1962, recalled the scene vividly in Alyn Shipton’s excellent Carr biography ‘Out Of The Long Dark’:
“[It] was full of American servicemen in big coats and Homburg hats. There were black and white, pimps and prostitutes, dope pushers, all of human life in those audiences. The music at the Flamingo went from midnight to five in the morning, and there were some tremendous bands that played there. The one I most remember was Georgie Fame… John McLaughlin was in the band on guitar, they had a great drummer called Red Reece, and… Mick Eve who was a fine saxophonist. Georgie was really under the influence of Mose Allison at that time, and he was a lovely singer with great time. But for me the star was McLaughlin. He was at the top of his form, and playing fantastically. He was steeped in the blues, but he had also absorbed all sorts of other kinds of jazz. He was truly phenomenal, and I used to go down there sometimes, just to hear him. As he played, there’d be all these Homburg hats, silhouetted by the lights, jiving away.”
Perhaps most remarkable about this Wandsworth Advertiser piece from March 1963 – catching John probably only a week or two before he left for the Graham Bond Quartet – is the opening paragraph. Take away the first sentence and the writer could be describing the same musician at a 10,000-seater American arena 10 years later. Whoever that writer was, he was good.
WANDSWORTH ADVERTISTER, 22 MARCH 1963
‘South London’s With-It Page’
‘Friday night in an upstairs room at the King’s Arms, Peckham Rye. A guitarist lifts high his instrument and a hand greedily slides over the strings. His eyes close, hands and strings fuse together and for one musician on a cold wet night comes ecstasy.
‘The pianist hits the keys and snarls into the mike… his eyes are closed too. The drummer drums and the bass guitarist emphasises the off-beat. The tenor man takes a break and listens.
‘Georgie Fame and his Blues Flames, a rhythm and blues group, have taken up the end of the week residency at the pub.
‘They play ‘R and B’ but like the other groups that play the same music they can’t define it. Sometimes it’s merely polished ‘rock’, sometimes the music takes up a modern phrasing and then it’s far more than just a noise to twist to. Rhythm and blues music with soul punched in it. Soul is rhythm and blues… it’s synonymous.
‘Georgie Fame, leader, singer, pianist, and organist and his drummer, Red Reece, once played with Billy Fury. “While we were under Larry Parnes we played with most of the pop stars,” said Georgie, “but we quit and formed this group. The others joined us, Mike Eve on tenor, “Boots” Slade bass guitar, and Johnnie McLaughlin guitar.”
‘Come the interval and Johnnie McLaughlin told me of his career. First, although he had to decide what name to use. He plays with many groups and changes it constantly. For this occasion it stayed as Johnnie.
“I don’t listen to other guitarists. I don’t want to sound like them. Cannonball Adderley and Tubby Hayes have influenced my playing the most.”
‘He smiled ruefully when I asked him if he liked pop music. “We play it,” he confessed, “you have to eat.”
‘Georgie continued on the same theme. “We play jazz but mix it with pop numbers. You can’t churn out jazz all the time, audiences won’t take it.”
‘The audience were down one end of the room. There’s a bar down there. There are plenty of girls, unattached girls, but the boys seem too self-conscious to jive. Only the brave ones dance.’
There are, alas, no recordings of John with the Blue Flames, but here is one of his earliest recordings, from less than two months after the local newspaper piece above, in May 1963 – a spontaneous blues recorded at Abbey Road during an at the time unreleased Graham Bond Quartet session.
Lovely stuff Colin.
OK fact fans. The guitar McLaughlin is playing in the newspaper picture is a Gretsch 6125 Single Anniversary in Smoke Green. Introduced in 1958/59 it had only one pick-up (hence no control knobs on the lower bout) There was also a twin pick-up version dubbed the Gretsch 6118 Double Anniversary.
Here’s one I made earlier
http://i.imgur.com/qV2SBAQ.jpg
Ooh, I like that!
Oh, my!
Often referred to as a ‘Green Goddess’. I saw my first one at a family function when I was 13. The band’s guitarist was playing one, and I sat and watched him all night.
“A guitarist lifts high his instrument and a hand greedily slides over the strings” talk about purple prose! I wonder if the unknown writer of that newspaper article moonlighted for Mills and Boon?
It’s certainly not either the staid ‘serious’ prose of fluffy teen pap one might have expected from a British newspaperman/woman in the essentially pre Beatles era…
Come to that, I can’t imagine Georgie Fame ever ‘snarling’.
I must say, Georgie’s looking very dapper in that picture, with his neat side parting.
Johnnie Mac meanwhile has always fastidiously maintained that nondescript fashion-defying haircut, right the way through MO and up to recent years when he went for the handsome George Martin look.
Fascinating stuff Colin. Many thanks for posting. This was an intriguing period, when musicians were finding their way and their individual voices bursting through after shedding their early overwhelming American influences.
To the list of early photos of John McLaughlin I would add a fairly hazy shot of John during the recording session for Gordon Beck’s ‘Experiment With Pops’ recorded for Major Minor Records in August 1967.
http://www.lsdreamsrecords.com/jazz/gordon-beck-quartet-experiments-with-pops.html
Yes, I have the album, Jazzer. There’s a similar small pic on the back of Jack Bruce’s ‘Things We Like’, presumable taken at the 1968 recording (though the LP wasn’t issued till 1971 or thereabouts).
In fact, the same picture was used in the inner gatefold of Solid Bond, where a bit more of McL is visible but they sort of tuck him in behind Jon Hisemam, amusingly playing the role of that sofa (or whatever) in the foreground of the photo on the Beck album. Which also confirms Colin’s point about there being hardly any photos of McL. QED.
Tasty looking line-up there too, doing the hits of the day. Oxley is now 78. In his time, he was a superb improvising drummer with an extremely individual kit. Played loads of times here in the 80s with people like Mengelberg, Kondo, Minton, Bang, Bailey, Parker. Clyne (d. 2009) probably needs introducing, otherwise you’d all realise his late-70s band, Turning Point, produced two extraordinary albums.
https://youtu.be/Eh4M6KzrWcM
https://youtu.be/JPT7rth4lQ0
Oh, and what a fine thread. And guitar porn to boot.
Reading the posts above, I realised that I have attended various gigs over the past 45 years involving quite a few of those named. In November ’71, my big brother, sadly no longer with us, continued my musical education by taking me to Hamilton Town Hall to see Jack Bruce. Also in the band, John Marshall, Graham Bond and Chris Spedding. On 18/06/73, it was the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the Glasgow Kelvin Hall arena. We actually met ‘Johnnie’ wandering around the back of the stalls ‘ checking out the vibe’. Great gig with a leaking roof and all. 06/10/01, it was Jack Bruce & the Cuicoland Express in the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow with the then squeeze whom I converted to JB that night. Last of all, 25/01/12, Jack Bruce & Lau – a strange brew which worked very well.
One residency that slipped past you, Colin, was when McL took over from an ailing Peeky Slowhurst during the Ravin’ Ravers stint at Brize Norton in the winter of ’64. Slowhurst’s piles were “playing up something rotten” so Johnnie borrowed Peek’s iconic Framus and tore the house down! Unfortunately the costs of rebuilding the house exceeded the band’s fee.
Following on from the newspaper piece above, here’s a piece I wrote for the ‘Bathed In Lightning’ website, containing material on John’s association with Georgie Fame that wasn’t in the book. While John didn’t play on any recordings with the Blue Flames during his original tenure in the band, he did slip into the studio with Georgie a few times later in the decade, and guested onstage. This essay is an attempt to pin down what those recordings were…
One of the best-known artists with whom John McLaughlin worked in the 1960s was Georgie Fame. There would be an ongoing association between 1962 and 1968: firstly as a full band member during a non-recording phase, then as an uncredited session player on various singles, then as a kind of special guest in a live residency at a London theatre and finally as a credited session/guest player on an album.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the popularity and profile of Georgie Fame at the time and since, there is still an air of vagueness and uncertainty about aspects of John’s involvement in Fame’s ‘60s career. When exactly did he leave the Blue Flames? What subsequent records did he play on? Was he in the band at the theatre residency or just doing a support thing? Are there any photographs?
On the last point, it would seem there are photos of John with the Blue Flames circa 1962. Certainly, Georgie has some. I wasn’t able to access them for inclusion in the book but perhaps such a circumstance only enhances the enigma. As to the other questions, I think the contents of Bathed In Lightning manages to close in on them – to surround them in a finite space without exactly taking them into custody. Along the way, there are some suspects we can discount as red herrings.
Fame expert Uli Twelker was working on his book There’s Nothing Else To Do: Georgie Fame And His Music during the same period that I was working on Bathed In Lightning and we were able to help each other out on some matters. Actually, one of the pleasures of writing a book about a period of time in popular culture is coming into contact, almost inevitably, with others working on books or documentaries in the same area and sharing information, ideas or just a bit of moral support. Writing is a lonely business otherwise.
Uli was a great help on discographical questions and very kindly probed Georgie on my behalf on his associations with John. It’s no criticism of Georgie to say that he’s a man who is focused on his privacy these days. He’s not easy to reach for interviews and I understand that he has mixed feelings about his experiences in the record business at that time. During an interview with Georgie for his own project, Uli very kindly asked a couple of questions on my behalf. While the answers arrived too late for inclusion in Bathed In Lightning, Uli is happy for them to appear here.
But first here’s a scene-setting extract from Bathed In Lightning:
Born in Lancashire in 1943, Clive Powell had left home at 16 to seek fame in the first wave of British rock’n’roll. He found it, quite literally: after a false start backing forgotten rocker Rory Blackwell, impresario Larry Parnes – a man obsessed with changing people’s names to abstract nouns – had christened him Georgie Fame and made him pianist in Billy Fury’s backing band, the Blue Flames. With Fury, Fame saw Britain alongside American rock’n’roll icons Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran in 1960 – an infamous tour which crippled Vincent and resulted in Cochran’s death in a road accident. In mid ‘61, after a falling-out with Parnes over musical differences, Georgie and the rest of the Blue Flames were out of a job.
‘We were fed up with the British rock thing,’ Georgie later explained. ‘We had been listening to Ray Charles, Louis Prima and King Pleasure, and we wanted to do some of that – but gigs were impossible to find.’[1]
Georgie (or a ghost writer) described his change in fortunes in period pop-speak in the 1965 Radio Luxembourg Annual. Having left Billy Fury, Georgie was kicking his heels for some months, broke, at the flat of his friend Mike O’Neill in Soho, listening to Mike’s collection of jazz records (many of the same names which had appealed to John McLaughlin):
‘One night a friend took me down to the Flamingo Club in London. It was crazy there, full of happy coloured people having a ball with some swinging rhythm-and-blues band… One Sunday I arrived there to find they were short of a band. ‘Let me have a go,’ I asked. We grabbed a group together and went down a bomb! In fact, Rik Gunnell, who owns the club and later became my manager, was so impressed he took me on permanently… With the Blue Flames I began to build a following for our rhythm-and-blues and jazz… From one night a week we progressed to doing all-night sessions on Fridays. I was mad because I could never make up the sleep I lost, but, somehow, it soon didn’t matter. Then we got the Saturday and Monday dates and I began to learn more about the music I was playing… American GIs would come to the club and bring me records by people like Mose Allison and Oscar Brown Jnr. I was learning all the time. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were swinging like mad.’[2]
(…)
The Blue Flames were to dominate the scene at the Flamingo – arguably London’s most happening ‘underground’ venue of the time – from March 1962 until January 1965, when Fame exploded nationally with his debut hit ‘Yeh Yeh’. For much of that period, from June 1962 through to March/April 1963, a key part of their sound and reputation as an exciting, unique fusion of R&B and jazz, with a bit of soul and West Indian groove thrown in, was John McLaughlin.
The link in the Fame/McLaughlin chain was tenor saxophonist Mick Eve. Mick would be a galvanising force all round in the early days of the Blue Flames, organising their rehearsals and constantly refreshing the repertoire with new material.
‘If it hadn’t been for Mick Eve, there wouldn’t have been any band,’ said Georgie, in 1974. ‘He brought Johnny McLaughlin down and it was because of him that Glenn Hughes [later] joined the band.’[3]
Mick joined the Blue Flames in May 1962, a few weeks ahead of John. As he explained to Pete Frame: ‘My most recent band [the US bases sextet], which included Brian Auger, Glenn Hughes and John McLaughlin, used to play the Flamingo – so we all knew each other. We used to play jazz there – but we did other gigs backing [British rock’n’rollers] Dickie Pride, Davy Jones, Terry Dene and so on… so the Blue Flames was like a fusion of both sides – jazz rock!’[4]
‘I heard the band and that was enough for me,’ says Mick, ‘hearing this 17 year old singing like Mose Allison. I thought, ‘I can’t compete with this – I’d rather join it!’ And they wanted a guitarist ‘cos Colin Green didn’t want to do it anymore. We tried to get Joe Moretti, but his wife didn’t want him to do it. At the time he was backing Eddie Calvert at the London Palladium, getting £12 a week and she thought he’d made it now, ‘cos he was at the Palladium. Alright, we were only getting £2 or £5 a night or whatever – but he would have made his £12 back, alright, doing the gigs. We were doing so many of them.’
When Mick Eve joined Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames in May 1962, it coincided with a move up from the Monday night ‘Twist session’ (promoted on the back of a short-lived dance craze) to a Monday and Thursday night residency. The addition of Friday and Saturday All-Nighter sessions was but a few months away. Aside from Georgie, the other musicians in the band were Billy Fury-era veterans Tex Makins (bass) and Red Reece (drums) plus new recruits Joe Moretti (guitar) and Speedy Acquaye (congas). When Joe left after a few weeks, Mick knew the very man to replace him.
There are, alas, no recordings of John with the Blue Flames during this exciting time (although there are several awe-struck recollections of John’s contribution to the band from other musicians and punters in the book). The closest we can get to the sound of the Blue Flames at the Flamingo during John’s tenure is a live album, Rhythm And Blues At The Flamingo, recorded there in 1963, not long after John had moved on to the Graham Bond Quartet. Aside from a couple of low-key instrumental singles on a tiny independent label, the album was the band’s first release. It was recorded by writer/producer Ian Samwell, who brought in session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan to augment the band for the night of the recording. Both Ian and Big Jim were good friends of John throughout the decade.
The live album – atmospheric and exciting, like the same-period recordings of Merseybeat icons the Big Three at the Cavern in Liverpool – became a sort of cameo player, or perhaps more accurately an Alfred Hitchcock-esque ‘McGuffin’, in London music scenester/svengali Ronan O’Rahilly’s founding of Britain’s first pirate radio station the following year. Pirate radio, which existed and thrived from 1964-67 in Britain, and its TV equivalent, Ready Steady Go!, which spanned a very similar period, were the above-ground embodiment of the Mod movement: clothes, music, lifestyle, aspiration. That movement in a sense fuelled John’s career as a club player during the middle ‘60s, first with the Blue Flames and subsequently with Graham Bond, with Ronnie Jones and with Herbie Goins. It was a time when the boundaries between R&B, soul and jazz were very fluid and not at all as codified as we would now understand, even expect.
Here’s an extract from one of the bonus chapters in the ebook edition of Bathed In Lighting, on the London Mod scene:
In a way, Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames were responsible for changing the world, or so the Scene Club’s co-owner/manager, 24-year-old Ronan O’Rahilly, would have had people believe. His pirate radio station Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship just outside British territorial waters in March 1964. It was swiftly followed by rival station Radio Atlanta and then by Radio London and a host of others, all broadcasting pop, soul and R&B to millions of kids in Britain. Ronan’s widely reported impetus for creating the station was simply that he had made a record independently for Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames and was appalled to discover, on touting it at the BBC and Radio Luxembourg, that airplay was a closed shop. Either you were an established artiste (warranting BBC attention) or you were on EMI, Decca, Phillips or Pye (who all bought slabs of time on Radio Luxembourg).
It was a great story. Everyone likes the idea of an underdog fighting for his right to fair play. What didn’t quite chime on closer examination was that Ronan had made no such record. Ian Samwell had produced, for EMI, the LP Rhythm And Blues At The Flamingo, released in January 1964. Radio Caroline would have happened anyway – as, almost simultaneously, Radio Atlanta did. Pirate radio, or something to bridge the demand/access disparity with popular music airplay in Britain, was a development that was surely inevitable. A fleet of rusting old ferries anchored three miles offshore, beyond the reach of existing UK law, was merely the solution that caught on.
The pirate stations would broadcast unchecked until the passing of the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in August 1967. Radio 1, launched by the BBC in September 1967 and staffed largely by presenters from the pirates would fill the gap. BBC Radio would belatedly join the Swinging Sixties. After a fashion. As Nik Cohn put it: ‘After three years, everything was right back where it had started – you switched your radio on and you couldn’t hear pop when you wanted it, you were stuck with Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck instead… Government-sponsored pop…’[5]
Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames second LP, a studio set called Fame At Last, released in October 1964, was also produced by the late Ian Samwell. The Blue Flames had no guitarist in their line-up at this point, yet a mysterious guitarist is audible on four of the tracks on Fame At Last.
Ian was asked once, many years later, if he could name the musician involved. He couldn’t recall but suggested that ‘John McLaughlin is a good bet. He was the best session player in town and he lived just down the street from me.’ [6]
The tracks in question are those arranged by Earl Guest: ‘Let The Sunshine In’, ‘The Monkey Time’, ‘Monkeying Around’ and ‘Pride And Joy’. The guitar, purely rhythmic, doesn’t suggest John either sound-wise or style-wise. Colin Green, the Blue Flames’ original guitarist who was to rejoin in late ’65, told me: ‘I did record some tracks with Clive around that time [mid ‘64] but can’t recall if the Fame At Last tracks were amongst them. (Jim Sullivan may have done some as well).’
Ian Samwell’s recollection – or rather, his off the cuff guess – must come with the caveat that John McLaughlin didn’t become the in-demand session man that he describes until a little later (although his earliest known recordings as a hired hand, including a Dionne Warwick LP produced by Burt Bacharach, do indeed date from 1964).
Nevertheless, in terms of the discography, part of the work has been to discount some titles to which John’s involvement has been attributed in previous listings, online or elsewhere. And I believe we can safely discount Fame At Last.
Colin Green had rejoined the Blue Flames as their guitarist in time for the band’s two-year run of chart successes, beginning with ‘Yeh Yeh’, spanning 1965-66. The collapse of the band in October ’66 was largely down to exhaustion and a persistent tendency for its members to succumb to dependencies. Georgie would continue as a solo artist, and continue having successes as a recording artist, in the years immediately subsequent to this, expanding his influences and the instrumental palette of his releases along the way. This is the period in which the shadowy figure of John McLaughlin reappears in his tale.
Here’s another extract from the book:
Since calling time on the chaos of the Blue Flames at the end of 1966, Georgie Fame had been doing solid business as a recording artist, and had performed convincingly at the Festival Hall with the Harry South Big Band as well as touring Europe with the Count Basie Orchestra.
Asked at the end of 1967 if he would ever give up pop for jazz he replied: ‘No, I couldn’t do it. It would be like cutting off one of my arms. It’s not a matter of compromising one or the other but of liking what you do.’[7]
‘For my money he’s equally good at either [pop or jazz],’ opined one critic, ‘and fans’ complaints that he should stick to one or the other seem pointless… because most of the time it simply isn’t possible to characterise his performances.’[8]
With a new single, ‘The Ballad Of Bonnie & Clyde’, heading towards No.1 in the UK and across Europe, Georgie was in a position to indulge himself. He began a season at London’s Mayfair Hotel on Friday December 22 1967, which became three weeks by public demand.
‘The first half of the show is with a quartet and is very experimental,’ he explained, ‘with things like three part harmonies with voice, guitar and flute and new treatments of new tunes as well as some standards. The second half is with the whole band. I’m trying to utilise all the band has to offer and I’ve added Johnny McLoughlin [sic] for the gig. He’s tremendous. He’s definitely the best guitarist working outside America.’[9]
Drummer Jon Hiseman had joined Georgie’s band by October ‘67, from the wreckage of Graham Bond’s dis-Organisation, replacing Hughie Flint. It was a blessed normality, with reliable money and decent hotels. If Jon had any tinges of regret because of the sheer excitement, musically, which a gig with Graham Bond still had the capacity to be, these were allayed by Georgie’s plan for his opening turn at the Mayfair:
‘[It was] a small theatre inside the big Mayfair Hotel,’ says Jon, ‘and Georgie had the idea that he would get John McLaughlin, to open the show. So we would go on as a kind of jazz quartet, with John, myself, the bass player [probably Rick Brown] and Lyn Dobson on tenor, I think. Georgie wasn’t going to play on this section – but he was standing in the wings and he loved it. He’d be bopping from one foot to another – ‘Yeeeeah!’, you know. The audience couldn’t see him but he was really into it, and we were playing some seriously ‘out’ stuff, and I mean ‘out’! And when his manager turned up [a few dates into the run], Rik Gunnell, he was absolutely horrified, ‘cos Georgie was using this to put on something that people hadn’t paid money for at all.’
With his new single (recorded with session men) taking off, Georgie was in demand for promotional activities across Europe and America, and in mid February his live band were laid off. Nevertheless, a new LP was being recorded in February/March, titled The Third Face Of Fame (following on from his previous live/studio collection, The Two Faces Of Fame), and John was hired on guitar. There would be a 13-piece horn section and pianist Gordon Beck, ‘one of the shining lights of the British Jazz scene’.[10]
With arrangements by Derek Wadsworth, Harry South and Tubby Hayes, the album mixed material by Gershwin and other veteran American writers with Mose Allison, Lennon/McCartney and Donovan. There was a vaudeville, consciously faux retro feel. As the original LP notes explain: ‘Producer Mike Smith… originally intended the LP to be a spoof on the music scene of the 1930s, highlighting Georgie’s gift for comedy, but in the event it has transpired to be something wider in scope.’[11]
The dry comedic aspect – gently exaggerated regional accents – certainly appealed to the man at The Gramophone, who felt the album ‘makes me wonder whether there’s a possible new career ahead of him’.[12] There wasn’t.
As good as the arrangements are throughout, it is the ‘straight’ material which appeals most to repeat listening: ‘This Is Always’, ‘St James Infirmary’, ‘Ask Me Nice’, ‘Mellow Yellow’. John shared the guitar credit with Terry Smith, presumably because he couldn’t make all of the sessions (there is never more than one guitar present). The album was an opportunity to hear John playing in a classy, structured big band setting, mostly swing-flavoured but equally capable of understatement.
Unlike the various Fame singles with which John’s name has been linked in later years, he was credited, along with all the other players, on the sleeve of The Third Face Of Fame. Georgie’s recent hit ‘The Ballad Of Bonnie & Clyde’ was added to the album, with the players involved in it (which did not include John) also fully credited. Terry Smith, incidentally, would top the ‘British Guitarist’ category in the Melody Maker’s Readers’ Polls for 1968 and 1969. Not a naturally progressive player, Terry would go on to form the British ‘jazz rock’ band If, with saxophonist Dick Morrissey, but never sustained the kind of career that might have been hoped for on the early promise of those poll ratings.
Before looking in detail at the Fame/McLaughlin discography, here is the exclusive recent interview extract very generously supplied by Uli Twelker:
Uli: How involved was John McLaughlin the 67/68 period? Was it just a case of an old friend doing a couple of studio sessions, a guest thing at a run of theatre shows, or was it the case that you hoped John would join full-time again?
Georgie: I was invited to do a short season at the Mayfair Theatre. I still got the programme. The plan was to do the first half to concentrate on the jazz side of things – I think Jon Hiseman might have been playing drums by that time. So I decided to put a kind of jazz quartet together for the first, and then the second half was more of a Blue Flames kind of set, and I asked John to be part of it – he might have been part of both, I can´t remember. I specifically got him to do the first half, because it was going to be a jazz quartet. I was asked to do a special evening which went on for a couple of weeks. It was a small theatre, a nice theatre, and we decided to do whatever the gamut of my bloody career or talents were up to that point. And my jazz interest was increasing all the time, so I decided to do the first set with some of the Chet Baker things, and other jazz things. In the band were surely John McLaughlin and I think Jon Hiseman. Maybe Lyn Dobson, and I can´t remember who played the bass. But I have the programme, I would have to look.
Uli: What´s your opinion on how John’s playing/personality had developed since the days when he was in the Flamingo band?
Georgie: He had even been a jazz player when he joined the Blue Flames. He was incredible. He was in the band in 1962/63. Well, he just got better! I don´t think that at that time he had done the album with John Surman [and] with Brian Odgers, Extrapolation, a great, revolutionary album – because I didn´t meet Brian Odgers until 1969/70 when we started working together. And he had just done that album. I haven´t seen him for several years. He was very close with Alan Skidmore, and Skid hasn´t heard from him for a year or two. He lost interest in playing, I think – a pity ‘cos he was a fantastic musician. John (McLaughlin) was still in London, and also he played rhythm guitar on my recording of ‘Sunny’ in the studio. I did learn a lot from him. Just playing, chords, melody – ‘cos he was way ahead of his time. When he was playing in my band, I always thought perhaps that that was restricting for him, because it was kind of too simple for him. But he was glad to do the gig, and it was great when he got back. That time we weren´t recording anyway, we were just gigging. And then he joined Graham Bond.
Extrapolation was recorded in January 1969, just before John left for New York and a whole new career. But Georgie’s recollection of John’s involvement in ‘Sunny’ – the first of his post-Blue Flames solo releases, albeit recorded before the band split, and a minor UK hit at the end of 1966 – is previously unknown information.
Georgie’s next single A-side, ‘Sitting In The Park’, released in December 1966 has a prominent, clean rhythm guitar part with a few solo notes towards the end. The track, however, is not a stand-alone single but comes from Georgie’s Sweet Things LP of 1966 and very likely features Colin Green on guitar.
Various online McLaughlin discographies, probably all deriving from the pioneering work of Johann Heidenbauer, do however link John’s name to Georgie’s next two 45 RPM releases: ‘Because I Love You’ (a single released in March 1967) and the four-song Knock On Wood EP (released in June 1967). These discographies give identical personnel involved in both releases, including John and drummer Hughie Flint.
Hughie, working with Alexis Korner at the time, after a couple of years with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, was hired in as the drummer on the ‘Because I Love You’ session and would later work with John McLaughlin, in early ’68, in Pete Brown’s band. I asked him if John was on the single:
‘He’s not, is he? Maybe he is… I was in slight awe of doing a recording with them anyway because, even though I knew Georgie quite well as colleagues from the Flamingo, and I knew Lyn Dobson as well, we were good friends, to actually do a recording with quite a big band in a studio was quite new to me. I was just used to John Mayall, you know, and Alexis. So I haven’t remembered if John McLaughlin was there.’
Hughie would be the first to admit his memory is a little hazy in places but, certainly, no guitar is audible on ‘Because I Love You’. Hughie is clearer, though, on Knock On Wood – at least regarding his own involvement: ‘I certainly wasn’t on that.’
Hughie joined Georgie’s live band for a brief period in the middle of 1967 and played on The Two Faces Of Fame LP, including live tracks with the Harry South Big Band.
Simple rhythm guitar parts are audible on the Knock On Wood EP tracks and Uli Twelker believes it is played by Georgie Fame himself, with the rest of the players probably being similar to the line-up of Georgie’s concurrent LP The Two Faces Of Fame – bar Hughie Flint. One wonders, then, who the drummer was…
We’re on surer ground with Georgie’s next single, the August 1967 release ‘Try My World’, and its B-side ‘No Thanks’. The session was notable for John’s first meeting with baritone saxophonist John Surman, who would subsequently appear on John’s Extrapolation (1969) and on the jointly credited Where Fortune Smiles (recorded in New York in 1970).
Surman was a rising star on the London jazz scene but McLaughlin, while a ‘musician’s musician’, managed to traverse the decade as a somewhat mercurial presence, by no means known to every other player.
Here’s another extract from Bathed In Lightning:
‘The funny thing is,’ said John Surman, ‘that when you’re in the middle of the action it seems like there are lots of people doing lots of one really big thing, but they’re not, they’re really doing lots of different things. John was special in that he was never really one of the guys who was playing in the clubs all the time. I actually met him in the studio when we were making a record with Georgie Fame, the pop artist. John was jamming in between takes and I thought, ‘Wow, this guy really sounds great’.’[13]
The Fame session involving John Surman and John McLaughlin was for the immortal single coupling ‘Try My World’ / ‘No Thanks’ (recorded circa July 1967). Curiously, John Surman told the Melody Maker a few months later that he never played pop sessions: ‘I don’t think you [can] do that and still give your best for your own thing.’[14]
‘Well, there’s pop and there’s pop!’ he concedes, on reflection. ‘I guess Georgie Fame was more interesting. I was probably booked by Alan Skidmore who was in [his band] at the time, I think. I doubt that Georgie knew much about me. I remember John M jamming on [Miles Davis’] ‘So What’ between takes and I joined in…’
Despite some discographies listing it, John was most definitely not on Georgie’s next single, December 1967’s ‘The Ballad Of Bonnie & Clyde’ (a UK No.1). While he is present on The Third Face Of Fame LP (recorded in February/March 1968), there has never been any suggestion he was on the non-album single released concurrently with it in May ’68, ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’.
While Georgie was a friend, not just another pop act needing a hired player on a record, John had moved on from routine sessioneering by this stage. He would appear – as a credited, featured, creative participant – on three further albums, all in a jazz vein, during the latter half of 1968: Sandy Brown’s Hair At Its Hairiest; Jack Bruce’s Things We Like; and Ken Wheeler’s Windmill Tilter. Aside from those sessions, he would spend much of that period working in Europe with Gunter Hampel’s free improvisation quartet Time Is Now.
Here, then, is the Georgie Fame/John McLaughlin discography, with some caveats indicated by question marks. Guilty parties are identified, a couple of other suspects are hauled in (awaiting definitive evidence) but still, regrettably, we can never hear what those regulars down the Flamingo were hearing in 1962, when Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames with John McLaughlin on guitar were the most exciting band in town and the ‘R&B boom’ was bubbling underground, readying itself to change British pop music on a national level the following year.
Sunny / Don’t Make Promises (Columbia DB8015) UK No.13
Recorded: London, ?/66
Released: September 19 1966
Prod: Denny Cordell
(?) Because I Love You / Bidin’ My Time (CBS 202587) UK No.15
Recorded: London, 13-17/2/67
Released: March 17 1967
Prod: Denny Cordell
(?) Knock On Wood (EP) (CBS EP 6363)
Knock On Wood / All I’m Asking / Didn’t Want To Have To Do It / Close The Door
Recorded: London, early 1967?
Released: June 2 1967
Try My World / No Thanks (CBS 2945) UK No.37
Recorded: ?/67
Released: August 1967
+ John Surman (baritone sax)
The Third Face Of Fame (LP) (CBS (S) 63293)
Recorded: London, February/March 1968
Released: May 1968
(NB Personnel below is for the LP minus ‘The Ballad Of Bonnie & Clyde’)
Georgie Fame – vocals, piano
Harry South – conductor
Ian Hamer, Derek Healey, Derek Watkins, Les Condon, Albert Hall – trumpets
John Marshall, Gib Wallace – trombones
Tony Coe, Tommy Whittle, Art Ellefson, Harry Klein, Ronnie Scott, Cyril Reubens – saxes
Gordon Beck – piano
John McLaughlin, Terry Smith – guitar
Phil Bates – bass
Bill Eyden – drums
Note:
The Georgie Fame 3CD set The In Crowd (Verve, 1998) credits John without being specific on tracks. Johann Haidenbauer and Uli Twelker believe that the previously unreleased ‘Jelly Jelly’ and ‘Lil’ Darlin’’ feature playing that suggest John. There was reputedly a further session of unreleased material around the time of The Third Face Of Fame recordings.
Endnotes:
[1] The Beatles And Some Other Guys (Omnibus Press, 1997), Pete Frame
[2] ‘It’s Tough At The Bottom’, Georgie Fame, Radio Luxembourg Annual, 1965
[3] ‘Georgie Fame: Fanning the Flames’, Chris Welch, Melody Maker, 3 August 1974
[4] The Beatles And Some Other Guys (Omnibus Press, 1997), Pete Frame
[5] Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (Weidenfield & Nicolson,1969), Nik Cohn
[6] Ian Samwell interviewed by Nick Rossi; extract posted online 29/8/06; http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/georgiefame/message/2051 Accessed: 29/10/12
[7] Melody Maker, 6/1/68
[8] Review of Knock On Wood EP, Frederick Woods, The Gramophone, 3/68
[9] Melody Maker, 6/1/68
[10] Melody Maker, 11/11/67
[11] Sleevenote to The Third Face Of Fame, Nigel Hunter, 1968
[12] Review of The Third Face Of Fame, Frederick Woods, The Gramophone, 6/68
[13] John Surman interview, Bill Shoemaker, Point Of Departure, 7/09. Accessed 29/11/12 at: http://johnsurman.com/?page_id=72
[14] Melody Maker, 28/4/68
Great stuff, Colin. I never knew that John Surman recorded with Georgie. It couldn’t have been that long after he moved up from Plymouth with Mike Westbrook. It just shows you what a tight, small scene it was then peopled by a wealth of fantastic musicians. And Georgie was incredibly infuential at the time.
Lovely stuff Colin. McLaughlin plays Donovan, eh? Who’da thunk it?
Indeed. Here’s one of those tracks – blistering soul – ‘No Thanks’!
Great stuff. Georgie Fame was fantastic.
Speaking of Terry Smith, right through the mid/late 70s he had a residency with the Tony Lee Trio at the Bull’s Head in Barnes. I must have seen him there at least 15 or 20 times, including a new year’s eve gig. I’m not much of a straight jazz fan, but Smith is such a great player I was drawn back time and again.
I can still see Terry now from 1974, lank hair and scruffy beard, looking like death warmed-up and probably nursing a hangover, chain smoking and wringing all sorts of magic out of his Gibson 330.
Here’s some audio from the Bull’s Head in 1977.
Splendid, I’ll listen tomorrow JC. I’m working through some 1966 MMs at present and Terry had a Bull’s Head residency (Mondays) even then…
I thought he was long gone, but he’s involved in a new IF reuinion album.
He also played on some truly anaemic mid-60s covers by the Beatles and the Small Faces for a couple of guys called Twice As Much, championed by Andrew Loog Oldham. What he saw in these drips is beyond me. Alas, one will will look in vain for much musical interest in their two luxuriantly produced Immediate albums…
Twice As Much were two schoolfriends who had a hit in June 1966 with the Jagger–Richards song “Sittin’ on a Fence”. One of them, Dave Skinner, later joined the pub rock band Clancy who were briefly discussed in the “Bands you’ve never got around to . . . .” thread.
He went on to tour and record with Roxy Music, Phil Manzanera, Chris Rea and others before settling in Australia near Sydney. He’s produced and co-written with loads of people since then and now writes for films and documentaries (@mousey may know him).
So he’s done alright in the music biz!
https://youtu.be/rhehNS3_CTA
http://daveskinnermusic.com/index.htm
Well, I take my hat off to him (truly – anyone who survives in the music biz through the glory days must have had something), and I’m surely he’s a lovely bloke, but, deary me, those Twice As Much recordings sound like aural blancmange – like Peter & Gordon’s even wetter younger brothers…
well… I just happened to be working through some 1966 Melody Makers today and came across rave reviews of a Twice As Much LP and one of their singles plus Steve Marriott in a ‘blind Date’ review of singles totally knocked out by them and by Andrew’s production – how fabulously new it all was.
Maybe their records were something that could be more keenly appreciated at the time and in the context of British pop records. I just can’t hear it 50 years on.
Whereas I can certainly hear the magic in Judy Collins’ 1966 recordings with Joshua Rifkin as arranger (which seems pretty similar in concept to what I think was the intention with the Twice As Much recordings – giving a quasi-baroque ‘prettiness’ to more visceral pop/rock covers etc).
here’s Judy’s ‘Tom Thumb’s Blues’. Magical.
Yep, I’m not going to try to defend the music of Twice As Much as it sounds now. It was very much of its time but I still have an understandable nostalgia for that time.
I was 15 and have a vague memory of seeing them on “Thank Your Lucky Stars” or some such and thinking they were ok. But as the attached chart shows they had some serious competition for the kids’ pocket money that week so they did really well to get to number 35.
The Andrew Loog Oldham / Stones connection is fascinating: I think it’s interesting how a duo can be plucked from local fame to find themselves mixing with stars more or less at random; earlier there had been Shrewsbury’s wonderful Paper Bubble adopted by Dave Cousins of the Strawbs and then Splinter championed by George Harrison. There’s probably more.
Oops
http://www.officialcharts.com/charts/singles-chart/19660623/7501/
And the two LPs by Twice As Much now sell for around 100 quid each, although this is probably due to the Stones connection and the fact they were on the collectable Immediate label than the music itself.
Scenery by the wonderful Paper Bubble is also highly collectible on vinyl and yet is free on Spotify!
The second of the two LPs by Twice As Much That’s All features Vashti Bunyan which can only add to the collectability.