Traffic: Giving to You

Young performers pose problems for music management. 

In his newly published memoirs, Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, reveals that to make it possible for them to tour abroad he became the legal guardian of, first, Millie, who gave him his early big hit with My Boy Lollipop, and then Steve Winwood of the Spencer Davis Group.

Winwood's next band was Traffic, who famously "got it together in the country". Blackwell describes life at their cottage near Aston Tirrold in Berkshire:

Traffic soon settled into a musical routine, which involved a lot of aimless jamming through the day into the early hours, whoever was in the mood, with any musicians who happened to visit them, checking out this new way of doing things.

There was an exposed concrete patio in front of the house where they could set up a rigged-up generator and send music out across the fields as the evening light lasted longer and the Summer of Love approached.

Traffic probably played some of their best shows when there was no one to hear but some sleepy friends and a few sheep.

Giving to You is how I like to think they would have sounded in those evenings. This version of it was on the B-side of Traffic's first single Paper Sun.