It was unveiled on Sunday 2 August, which would have been Capaldi's 82nd birthday.
Among the people who gathered to see the plaque unveiled were Capaldi's wife Aninha and their daughters Tabitha and Tallulah, and figures from the world of music including Steve and Muff Winwood and Bob Harris.
The plaque, which was installed by The Marlow Society, commemorates the home where Jim lived from 1971 until his death in 2005.
Photo from the Jim Capaldi Facebook page.
In the Sixties there was more than one way of getting it together in the country. You could, like Traffic, have your own cottage out in the wilds, or you could get a place at Reg Calvert's boarding school of rock.
Pete Clemons explains:
Reg Calvert started to promote rock n roll shows, but then he quickly hit on a difficulty. The best acts were not to be found in and around Southampton. And it was at this point he decided he needed to up sticks again and find somewhere in the Midlands.
He found Clifton Hall near Rugby and it was just right for what he wanted. It was big enough to house three top groups. The were Danny Storm and the Strollers, Buddy Britten and the Regents and Robbie Hood and his Merry Men. Additionally Clifton Hall was central enough for him to promote his shows. And from that base he was able to promote shows at places like Andover, Banbury, Cheltenham, Worcester, Evesham, Kidderminster, Burton, Atherstone and Nuneaton.
Clifton Hall gained the nickname 'The School of Rock' as it conjured up images of young pop singers practising all day for the shows to come. And that was exactly what it became. The hall had spacious gardens, recording rooms, a billiard room, a football pitch and a large and luxurious lounge that Reg would get his singers to work to make the shows he put on as perfect as possible. Songs had to be sung over again in order to get the vocal and any backing correct.
And Reg was a strict disciplinarian, his rules included no alcohol and no girls to be brought to Clifton Hall. But they also had plenty of freedom. There was no set time for bed for example. And if someone wanted to play drums in the middle of the night then there was no irate neighbours to come knocking on the door complaining. They were a world unto themselves.
'Clifton Hall', as far as I can tell, was New Hall at Clifton upon Dunsmore, near Rugby, which no longer stands.
You probably haven't heard of any of the acts mentioned above, but some of Reg Calvert's students did go on to greater things.
Danny Storm was a Leicester lad, and at various times his backing band The Strollers, who later became The X-Citers, contained two future members of Family: Roger Chapman and Ric Grech. I can't spot them in the video above though.
Robbie Hood's backing band The Merry Men later changed their name to The Fortunes. They had two top-5 hits in 1965 and two top-10 hits in 1971.
There's lots more about Reg Calvert on the Reg Calvert - Plays site, and you can also buy three books about him.
And if you're wondering what became of Reg Calvert, as longstanding readers may recall, he was shot dead by a former vice-president of the Liberal Party.
This one ticks a lot of Liberal England boxes.
Family grew out of a band called The Farinas that was formed at Leicester School of Art in 1962. By 1966 they had moved to London, and the following year they recorded Scene Through the Eye of a Lens, their first single.
The track's producer was the American Jimmy Miller, who had previously worked with the Spencer Davis Group and was now working with Steve Winwood's new band Traffic.
Which is why you will find three members of Traffic – Dave Mason, Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood – contributing extra percussion here. And Winwood himself is playing the Mellotron.
Family's first album, Music in a Doll's House from 1968, was produced by Mason, with the result that the band was obliged to include a song by him that they didn't much like. The rest of Traffic knew how you felt, guys.
I had assumed that this connection with Winwood was why Family's bass player and violinist Ric Grech was asked to join Blind Faith alongside Winwood, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker.
But Danny Wilson, who later played with Grech and has written about him, tells me that Eric Clapton had been an admirer of his bass playing since his days with the Farinas and it was Clapton's agent who signed him up to the new 'super group'.
Not only is a book without an index less satisfactory after you've bought it, but that lack makes you less likely to buy it in the first place.
I can't be the only person who, faced with a promising new title in a bookshop, turns to the index and looks up a couple of relevant topics I know something about. What the books says about them gives me an idea of the author's thoroughness, judgement and originality.
Without an index it's much harder to gain this insight, which makes an impulse purchase less likely.
Besides, the absence of an index means there are none of the juxtaposed entries I so enjoy.
The other day I turned up a Liberal Democrat Voice post from 2010 in which a number of bloggers made their choice of Christmas books.
My choice was Electric Eden by Rob Young, which is a history of the folk rock genre. I ended by saying:
The book has a wonderfully complete discography to guide your own exploration of folk and folk rock, and the most engrossing index I have ever come across. Richard Jefferies stands next to Jefferson Starship. Traffic next to Thomas Traherne. Steve Winwood next to Gerrard Winstanley, It reads like notes towards my own vision of Britain.
But the real master of unlikely couplings in indexes is Mike Brearley. In included a collection of finest work in one of my JCPCP columns:
Dave Mason, one of the founding members of Traffic, has died. Steve Winwood, now the only one of the four still with us, paid this tribute:
We were deeply saddened to hear of Dave Mason’s passing.
Dave was part of Traffic during its earliest chapter, and played an important role in shaping the band’s sound and identity during that time. His songwriting, musicianship and distinctive spirit helped create music that has lasted far beyond its era, and continues to mean so much to listeners around the world.
Those years remain a special part of the band’s story, and Dave’s contribution to them is not forgotten. His place in that history will always be remembered, and through the music, his presence endures.
At this sad time, our thoughts are with his family, his friends, and all those who loved him and his music.
It's no secret that there were tensions between Mason and Winwood – indeed between him and the rest of the band. While the other three liked to jam and allow songs to emerge organically, Mason sat down on his own. wrote songs and had firm ideas about how the other members should play on them.
And, while Traffic are best known in Britain for Mason's Hole in My Shoe, his home-made take on psychedelia was not the way the rest of the band wanted to go. So for these reasons he was pushed out by them.
Mason would probably have replied that they were happy enough to use his songs on their second LP when he made the first of two brief returns to Traffic. And maybe he got his revenge by turning up as a black-hatted bad fairy on English Soul, the BBC documentary about Winwood's career.
Mason enjoyed a long career as a singer and songwriter after Traffic. He also played the acoustic guitar at the start of Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower and produced the Leicester band Family's first album Music in a Doll's House.
The video here shows the four founder members of Traffic playing at the Christmas on Earth Continued happening in 1967. I like to think that the second track, Giving to You, is how they sounded when they were jamming at the cottage where they got it together in the country.
One of the label’s most collectable singles is Bill Oddie's On Ilkley Moor Baht’at. I think I was behind that. It was another one of our jokes that nobody got. He’s a clever boy is Bill Oddie, but people thought it was a serious record, as the lyrics went unnoticed, so it disappeared without trace.I mentioned it to John, who said he was up for it, and we managed to get most of The Grease Band, Jim Capaldi and Sue and Sally who were on the original Joe Cocker Reprise band release, and it was great. John and his producer John Walters produced it. It was a one off, and quite expensive to record, as it featured all of those amazing players. But, again, no regrets. It was worth doing and still gives us a smile.It’s now one of the most collectable Dandelion records and was one of the records in John’s box of 50 favourite records, along with The White Stripes and Medicine Head.
The Grease Band members playing on the record are Henry McCullough (guitar) and Alan Spenner (bass).The organ player is Verden Allen from Mott the Hoople, while Jim Capaldi, of course, was the drummer from Traffic.
And the backing singers are not "Sue and Sally" but Sue and Sunny. The Wikipedia entry for Joe Cocker's album With a Little help from My Friends says Sue, Sunny, Madeline Bell and Rosetta Hightower sang on the title track, which Oddie is affectionately parodying here.
As Dandies in the Underworld also mentions Python Lee Jackson's In a Broken Dream, I'll end by sending you to my post about staying at a bed and breakfast in Bishop's Castle run by the man who overdubbed the organ on that record.
Charles Wright looks back on Kemi Badenoch's two years as a member of the London Assembly: "Interestingly, she went on to compare the treatment of 'white and middle class' protestors with the tougher treatment of those arrested during the 2011 London riots, who she said were 'young, relatively working-class and poor, including a 'high proportion of ethnic minorities. 'Why is it that they can get away with criminal damage that young black people doing exactly the same thing get strict sentences for?'"
Today is St Pancras Day. To celebrate it, here's another showing for this video recreating the Beatles' visit to Old St Pancras churchyard on their London Mad Day Out in 1968. You can read more about their time in the churchyard in an old Guardian article.
When you add in the fact that today is also Steve Winwood's birthday, it's clear 12 May should be a public holiday in the Midlands.
Certainly, it's a big deal here on Liberal England. To celebrate, here's a 1983 interview with our favourite musician.
Winwood talks about his past with the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and Blind Faith, and about his then burgeoning career as a solo artist.
"Of all the bands I saw in those days, they were the ones who impressed me the most. They had this small public address system, one of the smallest I had seen and were very unassuming on stage, and then this spotty kid on the organ suddenly opened his mouth and screamed "I LOVE THE WAY SHE WALKS..." and launched into an old John Lee Hooker number. Gosh - my mouth fell open and I felt a chill down my spine! That was the night I discovered Rhythm and Blues for the first time."
"When they receive the annual service charge statements, they find costs that bear no relation to the services they receive - street lighting for a block of flats, access to facilities they are not allowed to use, or simple paint jobs costing tens of thousands of pounds with no say over who carries out the work or how it is done." Labour MP Kate Osborne says the end of the feudal leasehold system cannot come soon enough.
Seventy years before congestion pricing landed in New York City, Lewis Mumford sounded the alarm on letting automobiles run amok in America’s downtowns. David Zipper tells his story.
Tim Radford reviews The Age of Diagnosis by the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan: "How do you take on a real set of problems in medicine, concern about which can be seen as conservative-coded, without getting into bed with the vibes-based bores who will bang their hammy fists on tables in prejudiced agreement? The answer is: carefully. O’Sullivan is an excellent, fluid writer, and an eloquent speaker, but I’m bracing myself for braying allyship from right-wing broadcasters during her very well-deserved media appearances."
"At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn't a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: 'I think you should look into incel culture.'" Jack Thorne on writing Adolescence.
Luka Ivan Jukic casts light on an unexpected corner of European history: Latin remained a live language in Croatia until the middle of the 19th century.
The Liberal Democrats held the Cholsey ward of South Oxfordshire DC last night, polling 949 votes to the second-placed Conservative's 362. You can see the result expressed in percentages at the bottom of this post.
I take particular pleasure in this victory because Cholsey ward takes in Aston Tirrold - and near that village is the cottage where Traffic famously "got it together in the country" in 1967.
Until 1974, Aston Tirrold and the cottage were in Berkshire, which explains the title of this Traffic song from their first album, Mr Fantasy. If the backing singers sound familiar, they're Steve Marriott and the rest of the Small Faces.
And as everyone is talking about The Box of Delights at the moment, I had better mention that John Masefield also lived at Aston Tirrold for a while.
Cholsey (South Oxfordshire) Council By-Election Result: 🔶 LDM: 62.2% (+16.1) 🌳 CON: 23.7% (+0.9) 🔴 SDP: 7.6% (+2.3) 🌹 LAB: 4.7% (New) 🙋 IND: 1.8% (New) No IND (-25.7) as previous. Liberal Democrat HOLD. Chnages w/ 2023.
— Election Maps UK (@electionmaps.uk) December 6, 2024 at 12:11 AM
Jon Neale pays tribute to this blog hero Steve Winwood in the Birmingham newsletter The Dispatch...
Sometime in the mid-1960s, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell was staying overnight in Birmingham. He’d managed to turn teenage Jamaican singer Millie Small into a star with the single ‘My Boy Lollipop’ — the first ska track to go mainstream. She was filming for Thank Your Lucky Stars, the teatime pop show that preceded Top of The Pops, at the Alpha Studios in Aston.
Later that night, Blackwell was taken to see an early version of the band The Move, called Carl Wayne & the Vikings. Unimpressed with the group’s sharp suits, and polished, ‘showbiz’ performance, Blackwell headed to another venue: the Golden Eagle pub on Hill Street. He was warned that the band playing might not be to his taste, that they might be “a bit different.” This would be Blackwell’s introduction to a remarkable teenage prodigy, perhaps the greatest musical talent Birmingham has ever produced. It would be an encounter that would shape Britain’s music scene for the following decade.
As Blackwell climbed the Golden Eagle’s stairs, he heard a voice which could only be described as “Ray Charles on helium”. He was immediately absorbed by the “incredible” musicianship on display. “On this stage was this skinny white kid with floppy hair, about 16, the same age as Millie Small, playing guitar and sometimes amazing keyboards as well, like it was second nature… I’d never heard anything like it — white boys playing the blues like it meant the world to them,” he would later recall.
The skinny white kid in question was Stephen (Steve) Lawrence Winwood, of Atlantic Road, Kingstanding. He became one of the most celebrated musicians of the 1960s and 1970s: moving between the worlds of R&B, blues, psychedelia, jazz and folk — playing on albums such as Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and Lou Reed’s Berlin. Winwood topped the charts with the Spencer Davis Group and defined the shape of the 1970s rock album with his band Traffic, before reinventing himself as a very different sort of pop star in the 1980s.
YouTube is a good place to appreciate how startling seeing the teenage Winwood must have been, in particular the clip of the Spencer Davis Group performing the song ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ It seems almost impossible that an 18-year-old is making that sound, especially while executing a virtuoso Hammond organ performance.
...and then asks why he isn't more celebrated in is home city.
But what is equally remarkable, aside from his precocious musical talents, is how little Birmingham, his native city, remembers him. There is no Steve Winwood bridge or Traffic-related sculpture in Victoria Square. Asked in the street, older Brummies would probably mention a few other artists before getting to him.
This indifference from Brummies might be understandable if Winwood had left early on to pursue fame in London. But his musical roots are entirely in the city, from Perry Barr choirboy to stoned hippie performing at Erdington’s legendary Mothers. Both his major bands were formed, and had their debut gigs, locally: featuring either Birmingham natives or those long-immersed in the city’s vibrant scene. And it’s not as if he is forgotten globally either: ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’ was heard by millions a few years ago at the start of the film Avengers Endgame.
One reason he comes up with is that heavy metal has come to be seen as the musical genre that defines Birmingham:
There’s something about Heavy Metal and Black Sabbath in particular — its working-class associations, its unsubtle sound, its honesty and directness and the disdain it used to generate among the cognoscenti — that appeals to a working-class, industrial city that always wants to make itself out to be rougher and tougher than it is, or was (see the TV shows Peaky Blinders and This Town).
But Winwood represents another, underacknowledged and awkward, Birmingham: one that is softly spoken, self-effacing and self-deprecating, one that ploughs its furrow regardless of what the world thinks, constantly reinventing itself, with sometimes questionable results. In some ways, that’s a more honest identity. It’s time to celebrate that legacy and reclaim one of Britain’s finest musicians as our own.
Paul Rees tells the story of Steve Winwood's second band, with more of an emphasis on its darker side than you normally see:
With the extravagant Capaldi cheerleading, and fragile, mystical Wood bringing with him a traditional English folk tune called John Barleycorn – which he’d heard on Frost And Fire, a 1965 album by Hull folkies The Watersons – the stage was set for Traffic to at last become the band Winwood had wanted all along: one capable of harnessing a dizzying array of musical styles and then make them over into a fresh, original form that ebbed, flowed and soared.
The John Barleycorn Must Die album was the first, giant step along that path. From there they conjured three more records that marked them out as prodigious explorers and rare virtuosos. Yet it also extracted a heavy price from the three principals – it could be said that not one of them was ever the same again.
The 2010 BBC profile of Steve Winwood, English Soul, was enlivened by the appearance of his former Traffic bandmate Dave Mason as a black-hatted bad fairy. Winwood, according to Mason's account, was jealous of his success as a songwriter and threw him out of the band as a result.
Fourteen years on, he is no more reconciled to those events. Today's Guardian has a interview with Dave Mason by Jim Farber about his memoirs Only You Know & I Know, and he's still complaining about them. Not just for that reason, he doesn't come over as particularly likeable.
My impression is that the roots of the clash between Winwood and Mason lay in a different approach to songwriting. Winwood wanted to jam with the band and allow songs to emerge, while Mason wanted to write the words, write the music and tell the others how it was to be played.
The problem with the Winwood approach, particularly if you add in the consumption of waccy baccy, is that it wasn't calculated to produce an album's worth of new songs to a deadline. Hence the band's need for Mason's more direct approach.
It also has to be said that Mason really didn't get psychedelia, but was determined to write it. It's a shame that Traffic are best remembered in Britain for Hole in My Shoe, but at least it has better words than Mason's House for Everyone:
My bed is made of candy floss, the house is made of cheese;
It's lit by lots of glow-worms, if I'm wrong correct me please.
I've chosen the video above because it shows Traffic in the days when everyone was talking and because I suspect it's the nearest thing we have to the band jamming at their cottage while they got it together in the country.
This is a note-for-note cover of a song from Traffic's first album by a Scarborough-based band, recorded in 1969.
What's interesting about it is the identity of the lead singer of The Mandrakes. It's a 20-year-old Robert Palmer.
He was to join The Alan Bown! and then Vinegar Joe before enjoying his greatest success as a solo artist in the Eighties. Like Steve Winwood, the original singer of No Face, No Name and No Number, he was signed to Island Records.
It's strange how some music dates and some doesn't. You still hear the Spencer Davis Group singles Gimme Some Lovin' and I'm a Man in television commercials, and they're used to convey modernity rather than nostalgia.
By contrast, Steve Winwood's Eighties records now sound dated. Winwood has said himself that he was still doing what he had done in Traffic - combining folk and rock and blues and jazz - but the production of the day gave those Eighties records a surface gloss that has not aged well.
Arc of a Diver was Winwood's second solo album and the one that established him as a solo star - it sold more in the United States
The title track has magic for me, because the lyrics are by Viv Stanshall, but Night Train is more representative. What I like about it is that it features Winwood as a guitarist - he played all the instruments on Night Train.
This reminds me of a story I read online recently. An American remembered watching some Eric Clapton's Crossroads guitar festival on television, but missing the name of the brilliant guitarist he'd been listening to.
He found out a few days later that it had been Steve Winwood - that guy all of whose records his Mom had and who he hated.
When Paul Weller released his second solo album, Wild Wood, in 1993, two quips did the rounds.
The first was that it had taken Weller 15 years to go from being a mod to being a hippy, when in the Sixties people managed it in 15 months.
The second was that it owed so much to Traffic that it should have been called Winwood.
Never mind. I was pleased Weller was back and connecting with the ruralist strain in English culture. And, more than 30 years on, it still sounds good.
A recent Mojo article describes how Weller and his collaborators got it together in the country, not at a Berkshire cottage, but at Richard Branson's residential studio The Manor at Shipton-on-Cherwell in Oxfordshire.
In it, Weller talks about the influences on the record:
Elsewhere, in The Manor’s living-cum-listening room, records were spun, and cassette mixtapes played into the wee small hours, shaping the contours of the album. Traffic are often cited as the chief source of inspiration for Wild Wood. “Definitely an influence,” Weller nods, “but I mean, people were probably saying that because it had a flute on it!
“From the ’90s onwards, I was listening to so much different music which I’d cut myself off from in the past. I was sort of blinkered when I was younger. To the point of not buying records because someone had long hair or a beard. I dropped any sort of barriers at all and so it was a real learning curve as well.”
Other names on the Wild Wood sessions playlists included CSNY, Nick Drake, Free, Donald Byrd, Shuggie Otis and A Tribe Called Quest, whose Luck Of Lucien from their 1990 debut People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm led Weller, via their sample usage, back to jazz-funk trumpeter Billy Brooks’s 1974 album, Windows Of The Mind.
That's an interesting list, particularly as Nick Drake was not then the ubiquitous figure he has become in the 21st century.
Another Mojo article ranks all of Weller's solo albums and has Wild Wood in first place:
A classic with a capital C, Wild Wood has lost none of its allure and magic over the last thirty years. The aforementioned Sunflower was a more nimble version of future hit The Changingman, Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) could be Traffic themselves, while the title track was a folk standard for a new decade; mystical, soulful and stoned. The formula would be tweaked to more commercial success a couple of years later, but here is Weller truly finding his voice as a solo artist.
This is the title track.
Caspar Hughes became a human bollard to enforce a bus gate when the authorities wouldn't: "We don’t need one LTN in Exeter, we need every residential neighbourhood turned into an LTN, protected cycle lanes on all main roads, and regular, cheap, and reliable public transport. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that people have become so accustomed to the privilege of driving, it feels like it is a right. For them, equality must feel like oppression."
Joshi Herriman took his worries about the declining quality of local newspapers to a House of Lords select committee.
The Victorian way of financing new railways was better than the one we use today, say Padraig McKee and Chris Colvin.
Claire Meadows celebrates Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971): "I’m glad that the film has enjoyed a critical appraisal. Because I think it is a minor masterpiece. The casting - with Jon Finch and Francesca Annis playing against the historical norm as a younger and beautiful couple - is inspired. It feels new, yet acutely traditional.
"In typical Pym fashion, a series of amusing encounters ensues, comprising dinner parties, church bazaars and chance meetings, all of which show Rupert to be a slightly pompous, tactless man lacking in self-awareness. For an academic who studies human behaviour for a living, Rupert seems to have precious little understanding of how to apply this knowledge to his relationships with women!" JacquiWine enjoys Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment.
McCartney's father was a trumpet player and pianist who led Jim Mac's Jazz Band in the 1920s. He kept an upright piano in the front room, encouraged his sons to be musical and advised McCartney to take piano lessons. However, McCartney preferred to learn by ear. When McCartney was 11, his father encouraged him to audition for the Liverpool Cathedral choir, but he was not accepted. McCartney then joined the choir at St Barnabas' Church, Mossley Hill.
From 1955 to 1959, Richards attended Dartford Technical High School for Boys. He never sat the eleven-plus due to illness. Recruited by Dartford Tech's choirmaster, R. W. "Jake" Clare, he sang in a trio of boy sopranos at, among other occasions, Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth II.
His maternal grandfather, Augustus Theodore "Gus" Dupree, who toured Britain with a jazz big band, Gus Dupree and His Boys, fostered Richards's interest in the guitar. Richards has said that it was Dupree who gave him his first guitar.
His father Lawrence, a foundryman by trade, was a semi-professional musician, playing mainly the saxophone and clarinet. Steve Winwood began playing piano at the age of four while interested in swing and Dixieland jazz, and soon started playing drums and guitar. He was also a choirboy at St. John's Church of England, Perry Barr.
His father, Les Argent, was an aeronautical engineer who machined parts at the De Havilland aircraft factory; he had also been the leader of two semi-professional dance bands, the Les Argent Quartet and Les Argent and his Rhythm Kings. Although his father did not teach Argent music, he was raised hearing him playing the upright piano in the family home.
He decided to become a musician "aged eight or nine", and as a child, he sang as a chorister in the St Albans Cathedral Choir.
Traffic, the band Steve Winwood formed after leaving the Spencer Davis Group, played their first concert at the Saville Theatre in London on 24 September 1967.
That's what the books say, and what I said when blogging about my own appearance there with lovely Danny La Rue.
But, when researching my post on John Masefield at Aston Tirrold, I came across the story of an earlier appearance by the band.
Rob Southern tells the story on the music website Elsewhere.
In the summer of 1967 he was working for Coxhead’s Electrical, a company with branches around Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire:
One morning in 1967, Steve Winwood entered Coxhead’s. He had recently left the Spencer Davis Group to form Traffic. The band had rented a cottage on the Berkshire Downs, a few miles from Wallingford.
I recognised him immediately and, without wanting to look too star-struck, ambled up to him to ascertain his requirements.
It became clear that he wanted one of those new colour TV’s. I guided him round the showroom, stopping in front of one of our larger screens. The deal was done. The TV rented for 12 months at a cost of seventy-five pounds and five shillings.
Most people would want to pay in monthly instalments. Steve didn’t have cash on him (long before the days of credit cards) and we agreed that I would collect c.o.d. ...
On this sunny Friday I drove to Aston Tirrold to deliver the colour TV. ...
At the cottage, I unloaded the van and carried a very heavy TV through the front door. Setting the appliance down at the chosen corner of the lounge, removing an electrician’s screwdriver from my pocket, I diligently tuned and set-up the TV ready to receive all three channels available.
I looked up. The numbers present had swollen and all were sat looking at this new technology, waiting for their first glimpse of colour pictures on a television screen. Steve Winwood came over. We sat at a table, a glass of beer arrived for both of us and he signed the rental contract, handing over four £20 notes.
"Sorry, Mr Winwood, I’ve no change.”
"Keep the change,” he replied.
£4-15s-0d! This was a week’s wages! I couldn’t believe my luck!
It got better. “We’re having a bit of a party” said my new friend. “Do you want to stay?”
I explained that I had to return to the shop, park the van and hand over the cash to my manager.
"But I can get back later, Steve,” confident enough now to use his first name.
And get back he did:
Friday evening turned into Saturday morning, Saturday morning became Saturday night. I was in a paradise, rock stars a-plenty, music playing from the assorted collection of guitars and other instruments.
Probably there were drugs involved. I left the party late into Sunday evening and never did find out who opened the shop on Saturday.
Needless to say, another employment opportunity was closing. Did I care? I was friends with Stevie Winwood. I had partied with Traffic. I had met Led Zeppelin, even got to one of their parties later that year in Pangbourne.
Shortly after this experience, we were organising a gig with local band the JB Roadshow headlining. I met Stevie in town and, over a coffee, told him what we were up to. At this time Traffic had yet to perform live.
"How about we come and play as support?” Stevie asked. “You can’t advertise it, but we’d love to use the opportunity as a rehearsal.”
Posters had just gone to the printers. “Stop Press!” There was an addition to be made to the line-up! “Plus Surprise Guests” was added to the poster.
Traffic’s first live gig was played at the Masonic Hall, Wallingford and I was involved in a little piece of Rock History.
