Family: Scene Through the Eye of a Lens

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'.

Spencer Davis Group: Watch Your Step

The closing track of the Spencer Davis Group's second album, which was imaginatively titled The Second Album. It was Bobby Parker, a Black American artist, who wrote and first performed this song.

Spencer Davis Group: Every Little Bit Hurts

Recorded at the Marquee Club in February 1965, so Steve Winwood (on vocals and piano) is 16 here.

The Charlatans: The Only One I Know

"It’s an unusual song construction. I’m still not sure which bit is the chorus. The title and main hook is in the verse, but the intro – before the main song crashes in – gives people just enough time to get on the dancefloor."

That's what the Charlatans' singer and the songs co-writer Tim Burgess told the Guardian in 2021.

He also explained one of the influences on its writing:

"I was 21 or 22, but still had those powerful emotions. I was a big Byrds fan so the line 'Everyone’s been burned before, everyone knows the pain' is a nod to their song Everybody’s Been Burned. I was ecstatic when the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn said he loved us."

The bass player and co-writer Martin Blunt explained another:

"To give The Only One I Know a bit more urgency, Jon Baker added a stream of repetitive guitar notes similar to part of the Supremes' You Keep Me Hangin' On. I remember telling him, ;Try to make it sound like morse code', which he did. After the second chorus, we dropped it down to the bass, like all the best old Stax and funk tunes."

The Only One I Know reached no. 9 in the UK singles chart in September 1990, even though the band refused to appear on Top of the Pops.

I also like what Brunt said about the Charlatans' development:

We’d been influenced by the Stranglers, Stax Records, Joy Division and the Doors, but when everything came together in the summer of 89 acid house was in full swing. The repetitive beats rubbed off on what we were doing, so we suddenly sounded like the Spencer Davis Group on E.

Child prodigies: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

Here's another of the discursive Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Chess, cricket, Steve Winwood... it covers several topics dear to this blog's heart.

You can see Aksel Rykkvin as a treble above and as a baritone below.

Prodigious talent

Prodigies aren’t always popular with their elders. When Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, encountered the nine-year-old John Everett Millais in 1838, he suggested the boy should be sweeping chimneys rather than seeking to train as an artist. 

And sometimes prodigious genius is misunderstood. At a very young age, my favourite musician, Steve Winwood, was turned away by the man round the corner who gave piano lessons. He found that if the boy heard a tune once he could play it from memory, so it was hard to convince him of the point of learning to read music.

Others were more appreciative. In 1959 his elder brother’s jazz group found themselves short of a pianist, so he brought Steve along:

"He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. Because he was under age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know." 

Soon after that Steve was jamming with newly arrived Jamaican musicians in his home city of Birmingham, and then backing some of the greats of American blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim.

So by the time he joined the Spencer Davis Group at 15, and they had their first number one when he was 17, Winwood was an immensely experienced musician. Something to open the eyes of these new Beatles fans who are convinced there was nothing before the Fab Four and precious little else at the same time as them.

******

The youngest person to play first-class cricket in England was Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCC University in 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days. He was also on the books of Leeds United as a goalkeeper.

Most of us heard nothing more of him for a decade. Then an article appeared in a cricket magazine saying Gibson had “chosen enjoyment and freedom” and given up professional sport:

"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."

I hope he is happy, whatever he is doing now.

******

I once attended the first London recital by an 18-year-old Norwegian baritone called Aksel Rykkvin. What was interesting about the event was that a few years before he had been the most celebrated boy treble in the world. For once the American term ‘boy soprano’ seemed justified.

It soon became clear that his wonderful clarity and instinctive understanding of the text had survived his change of voice unscathed. But not every prodigy is lucky or talented enough to pass through puberty with such grace.

Leaving aside the many chess talents lost to a discovery of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, a growth spurt can wreak havoc. The future England captain Nasser Hussain grew a foot in a single winter and found he could no longer pitch his leg breaks on a length:

"I went from bowling out Graham Gooch in the indoor school with everyone watching, to hitting the roof of the net or bowling triple-bouncers to deadly silence."

Hussain was able to reinvent himself as a batsman, but always said batting never felt as natural to him as spin bowling had.

And puberty is the great killer of child actors – boys at least. Either you lose your fetching looks and no one casts you, or you keep them and find you are still playing schoolboys when you are 20, with no one seeing you as a possible adult lead.

But maybe being a child actor isn’t much like being an adult actor. Take the case of William Betty, ‘the Young Roscius’, who enjoyed phenomenal success as a boy at the start of the 19th century. His appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre sparked extraordinary scenes:

Shrieks and screams of choking, trampled people were terrible. Fights for places grew; Constables were beaten back; the boxes were invaded. The heat was so fearful that men all but lifeless were lifted and dragged through the boxes into the lobbies which had windows.

Betty announced his retirement at the age of 17, only to spend the rest of his life making comebacks that failed to excite the public. Perhaps the great Sarah Siddons had him right: “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy but nothing more.”

******

If I didn’t love the music so much, I might agree there was something ridiculous about white, middle-class British boys playing the blues – “Can blue men play the whites/Or are they hypocrites?” as Viv Stanshall asked. But then I generally prefer to leave dreams of cultural purity to the right.

Besides, it’s widely claimed that the Spencer Davis Group had to film what we’d now call a video before their records could get played on white radio stations in the US. It had been widely assumed there, because of Steve Winwood’s vocals, that the band was black.

Eric Clapton had no doubts about Winwood’s authenticity. Here he his explaining his decision to switch to a Stratocaster guitar:

“Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.”

Or as Clapton once put it more strongly:

“I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.”

Prodigious talent does encourage such reverence, though personally, when drawn against a chess prodigy, I found myself with a sneaking sympathy for Sir Martin Shee.

Blues Britannia: Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?

This is the first part of a programme broadcast by the BBC in 2009 – YouTube will offer you the other five.

There is some great music and lots of relevant talking heads, but I have two complaints:

1. The programme accepts the stereotyped view of the 1950s and even adds to it. It wasn't just sexual intercourse that was invented in 1963, but colour vision too.
2. There's not a mention of the Spencer Davis Group – see the opening of this documentary on Steve Winwood to see what they were doing in this era.

Les Fleurs De Lys: Circles

This great 1966 single is a Pete Townsend song, originally recorded by The Who and to be found on the B-side of Substitute. And it's produced by Jimmy Page.

Les Fleurs De Lys originated in Southampton, issued several singles but never recorded an album. They had an ever-shifting membership, which an article on Add Some Music to Your Day does its best to catalogue.

Two people playing on Circles are of particular interest. The guitarist Phil Sawyer joined the Spencer Davis Group after the Winwood brothers left, though he didn't stay with them long. And Pete Sears, who played both bass and keyboards, backed Rod Stewart during his best years (the early Seventies) and then joined Jefferson Starship.

Tintern Abbey: Vacuum Cleaner

All Music explains:

British psychedelic band Tintern Abbey were active for only the blink of an eye in the late '60s, leaving behind just one single, "Beeside"/"Vacuum Cleaner," made for Deram in 1967. But on the strength of that sole 45, they qualify as one of the very best (if one of the more obscure) one-shots of the British psychedelic era. 

The band formed in 1966 and was gone before 1968 came to a close, but accrued a wealth of unreleased recordings that were eventually collected on the 2021 anthology Beeside (The Complete Recordings).

Their only single became a collector's item, fetching up to £1000, because of this track and its guitar solo. But you can enjoy if here for free.

There's much more about Tintern Abbey from The Strange Brew, which interviews their bassist Stuart Mackay.

To celebrate St Pancras Day: The Beatles at Old St Pancras and a 1983 Steve Winwood interview

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.

Slade: Coloured Rain

I never got on with Slade. The worst kids at school loved them, and I could (just) remember the music of the Sixties. Though I followed the charts avidly in 1973 and 1974, I sensed even at the time that it was no golden age for the singles chart. And they couldn't spell.

But this is a good cover of a song from Traffic's first LP - respectful, but stamped with Slade's identity. It's taken from the album Live at the BBC and is on the first disc, which is taken from sessions the band played between 1969 and 1972.

Coloured Rain was also covered by Eric Burdon and the Animals during Andy Summers's short stay with the band. That version includes one of the longest guitar solos that had then been recorded.

And perhaps covering a Traffic song was a way of Noddy Holder paying his dues to Steve Winwood. Here he is talking about the Spencer Davis Group:

"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."

Jon Bon Jovi: Staring at Your Window with a Suitcase in My Hand

Fairly or not, I have Jon Bon Jovi down as one of those white American "let's raaq" artists that made us welcome grunge so much. But I've always liked this track because of the guitar sound.

I used to assume it had been sampled from some old bluesman, but I think the truth is that it's just Jon Bon Jovi playing with the help of a little recording wizardry.

Incidentally, Jon Bon Jovi was born John Bongiovi, and adopted his stage name so people would pronounce his real name correctly. Less spectacularly, Spencer Davies became Spencer Davis for the same reason.

Who Steve Winwood played with as a young teenager

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I've heard stories about Steve Winwood, as a young teenager, had played with the some of the American blues greats when they visited the UK.

Now I've found some detailed information in an interview with him from 1982 - it's on his own website.

In the first extract here he talks about his involvement in those years with Jamaican musicians in Birmingham

As for Chris [Blackwell], I met him in 1964 at Digbeth Civic Hall in Birmingham, which has always been a big center for Jamaicans in England; they used to hold their dances there, and naturally Chris was in on the ground floor in terms of Jamaican ska and rocksteady. Business-wise, he and Island were the ground floor.

Anyhow, I'd been playing at Digbeth since I was 14 with the Muff Woody Jazz Band, my brother's group. And that was where I met Spencer Davis, too. But my own Jamaican connection goes back to Digbeth Hall in 1961, when I jammed there with Rico, the trombonist who had worked with the Skatalites and all the other great early Jamaican acts. 

I was just 13 but I used to go there and play with Owen Grey, Tony Washington, and Wilfred 'Jackie' Edwards. Jackie, you'll recall, wrote the Spencer Davis Group's first number 1 hit in England, Keep on Running, and a followup, Somebody Help Me. I wrote When I Come Home with him for the group.

And the second, on American musicians starts with the interviewer:

There must have been some unheralded live backup work in the early days, when the Spencer Davis Group and the early Yardbirds were doing gigs at haunts like the legendary Crawdaddy in Richmond, Surrey.

Sure! I did backups for Sonny Boy Williamson - as everybody did - but also for T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim. John Hammond, too. 

I met John on a train, while going down from Birmingham to London; this would have been about 1963 and I was 15. He told me he had a gig in Birmingham the next week at the College of Advanced Technology and I showed up and played piano behind him. 

Those kinds of spontaneous musical meetings were special back then, and definitely helped shape my growth.

The Winwood brothers before The Spencer Davis Group

Before Steve Winwood was in The Spencer Davis Group, he played in his big brother's jazz band. Here's an advertisement for them from the Walsall Observer of 14 June 1963.

All the books say that band was called the Muff Woody Jazz Band, but this suggests they are wrong.

Muff Winwood, incidentally, was christened Mervyn, but nicknamed Muff at school after the popular mule of the period.

Steve Winwood had just turned 15 at the time of this concert. In an interview with Mojo from 1997, Muff described his kid brother's first appearance with him in a jazz band:

Muff soon found his way into a real trad jazz band. "We needed a piano player so I brought Steve along. He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. 

"Because he was under-age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know."

Lou Donaldson: Good Gracious!

I've chosen this not so much for Lou Donaldson saxophone as for John Patton's Hammond organ.

Good Gracious! is the title track from a 1963 Donaldson album, and Patton's playing is just the sort of Hammond work that must have inspired the young Steve Winwood.

It is worth emphasising, though, that Winwood was a guitarist and jazz pianist before be became known for playing the organ.

It is said that when Keep On Running topped the charts at the start of 1966, Spencer Davis bought a house and Steve Winwood bought a Hammond.

First newspaper listing for what became the Spencer Davis Group?

It's not much to look at, but this notice from the Birmingham Mail for 23 October 1963 sets a new record for the earliest press mention of Steve Winwood I can find.

The previous record was 3 December 1963, and because new titles are being added to the British Newspaper Archive all the time, it's possible that this one will be broken too.

Here again, though he was only 15, Steve Winwood shares top billing with Spencer Davis. The band has not yet become the Spencer Davis Group.

This notice is on page 2 of the newspaper. Stories on page 1 include:

• Final moves made to allow prime minister Alec Douglas Home to renounce his peerage;
• All seven aboard a test flight of the BAC III die when it crashes in Wiltshire;
• Michael Foot continues to recover from a serious car accident.

Spencer Davis is in the Manchester Evening News for 18 October 1963, but it looks as though he was sitting in with the Graham Bond Organisation the following evening rather than playing with the rest of the SDG.

Why isn't Steve Winwood more celebrated in Birmingham?

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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.

The Joy of Six 1278

Christine Jardine believes that dying people should be able to make their own choice about whether they want palliative care or to end their life: "I would want that choice to be mine. More importantly perhaps I feel I don’t have the right to deny that choice to others. I believe the law as it stands does not offer those facing such circumstances the compassionate and humane options they deserve."

Berna León reviews a study of how Britain’s elite continues to reproduce itself through entrenched structures of privilege, despite the appearance of increased meritocracy and diversity.

"It would introduce a legal requirement for local authorities and the Department of Education to collect and publish data about the extent to which they are finding local placements for children in care ... Local authorities would also have to develop and publish sufficiency plans, setting out what steps they are taking to meet their requirements to find local homes for children in care, under the Children Act 1989." Jake Richards introduces his private member's bill.

"Rural voters stopped caring about the Democrats because the Democrats stopped caring about them." Tom Zoellner searches for solutions to the Democratic Party's "rural problem".

Mary Colwell remembers her early encounters with curlews: "I saw a large group in a field in northern Scotland as I waited for a ferry. It was autumn and they must have been migrating. I remember thinking how elegant and strange they looked with their long bills and legs, and I watched them for ages. When I reached Orkney, one flew over a loch, crying an unearthly, evocative call. It fitted the landscape and the mood of the day perfectly They were with me from then on."

"Rod Argent was the engine room of the Zombies. He wrote She’s Not There and his playing takes it to another level. It’s very English-sounding, very reserved and melancholy, then out of nowhere he plays this incredible solo that’s soulful but slightly classically influenced. It both fits the song perfectly and takes it somewhere else." Elton John on the piano and organ players who inspired him.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

The Spencer Davis R&B Quartette: Mean Old Frisco

This is the Spencer Davis Group, before they were called the Spencer Davis Group. They're auditioning for Decca in late 1963 or early 1964. Steve Winwood must be 15 here, and I believe this is his earliest recording.

The instrumentation is interesting too: drums (Peter York), bass guitar (Muff Winwood) and two harmonicas (Spencer Davis and, when he's not singing, Steve Winwood). Nothing else.

Decca wanted to sign the band, but Chris Blackwell persuaded the band to go with his Island Records instead.

And the really good news is that this is the first Sunday music video from a YouTube channel I've found that's devoted to Steve Winwood rarities and cover versions of his songs.

You lucky people.

John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers: I'm Your Witchdoctor

In all my excitement at the rise of Talking Pictures TV, I've been guilty of neglecting my first love ITV3.

But I did watch an episode of Heartbeat on ITV3 the other day, and it provided me with this week's music video.

Heartbeat was a police drama set in the Sixties and with a soundtrack to match. Whoever chose the music tended to be literal-minded - Keep on Running by the Spencer Davis Group turned up regularly to accompany someone fleeing the rozzers - but they knew their stuff.

So my episode of Heartbeat this week, which was about a herbalist who was overreaching himself and poaching patients from qualified medical professionals, threw up this track.

I'm Your Witchdoctor was an unsuccessful 1965 single for John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.

Mayall, who was a hugely important figure in the development of the British blues scene, wrote the song and is the singer.

The guitarist is Eric Clapton, the bass player is John McVie (later of Fleetwood Mac) and the drummer is Hughie Flint (later of McGuinness Flint).

And the producer is someone called Jimmy Page.

Andrew Hickey says somewhere that in order to make British blues work, you needed an outstanding singer. 

Maybe Mayall, who is still with us and was recording up to a few years ago, wasn't that, but as a spotter and encourager of talent, he was unrivalled.