"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
I'm coming across increasing numbers of new non-fiction books that lack an index. No doubt it's done to save costs, but I wonder if it's a false economy.
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:
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.
Here's Steve Winwood in 1973 playing what came to be called "world music" more than a decade later.
"Aiye-Keta" (which means "the third world" or "the third life" in Yoruba) was a collaborative project between Winwood, who plays guitar and keyboards, the percussionist Remi Kabaka and Abdul Lasisi Amao, who plays saxophone and flute.
Remi Kabaka, who died last year, played with John Martyn, Hugh Masekela and, on Rhythm of the Saints, Paul Simon. He is the father of Remi Kabaka Jr, the drummer and producer of Gorillaz.
Abdul Lasisi Amao died back in 1988. He was a founder member of Osibisa, the London-based group that did much to bring African music to the wider world.
Together they produced one album of Afro jazz-rock. Perhaps because Winwood's name was not on the cover, it failed to sell. Later, if it was remembered at all, the project became confused in people's minds with the Jamaican reggae band Third World.
For me, they produced perfect music for weather like this.
Someone posted a track by String Driven Thing on Bluesky the other day and I wondered why I knew the name. And then I remembered this.
It's a Game was covered by the Bay City Rollers in 1977 and provided them with their last top 20 hit. But I already knew the song, so this original version by String Driven Thing must have received airplay in 1973, even though it didn't make the charts.
String Driven Thing began as a folk trio, but were encouraged by their record company to adopt the folk rock sound that you hear on It's a Game. They toured America, supporting Lou Reed at one point, but never troubled the singles chart there or here.
Their Wikipedia entry reveals rapid line up changes, and also the interesting destinations of former members. These include being the guitar technician for Steve Winwood and Jeff Beck, and membership of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra.
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.
"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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
When I write a song, I don't like to have to explain it afterwards. To me, it's like telling a joke, then having to explain it. The explanation doesn't add to the song at all.
Eddie Harris (1934-96) was a saxophonist, singer and inventor of musical instruments. He pioneered that very Seventies idea, the electronically amplified saxophone.
I've Tried Everything is a track from E.H. in the U.K., an album he recorded in London. It's pleasant enough, but the real interest lies in the people who are playing with him.
On guitar, Jeff Beck and Albert Lee. On bass guitar, Rick Grech. Looking very relaxed on electric piano, Steve Winwood. Ian Paice on drums. Loughty Amao from Osibisa on congas.
"In cases of adult rape, it takes the police an average of 344 days to decide whether to press charges (for all other crimes, it is 41 days). During this period, victims have no right to independent legal advice or representation unless they pay for it themselves. The court backlog of rape cases is at a record high. Court dates can be scheduled and then postponed with as little as 24 hours’ notice – I’ve heard of this happening to a victim more than twenty times." Lili Owen Rowlands volunteers with a rape crisis helpline.
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?'"
"Farage isn’t here to build anything. He’s here to brand himself. He wants viral clips, retweets, headlines. He wants you angry, not informed. He’s a master of the bait-and-switch - say something outrageous and emotionally charged, then let others waste time debunking it while he soaks up the spotlight." Owen Williams on what Nigel Farage wants from Wales.
David Baines, Labour MP for St Helens North, says it was well past time that a Rugby League player - Sir Billy Boston - was knighted.
Underground Culture 12 celberates the days when bands got it together in the country: "First and foremost on this list, Traffic began the getting-it-together-in-the-country trend by renting a remote cottage in the Berkshire village of Aston Tirrold in April 1967, just two months after the Band located to the Big Pink house near Woodstock."
"[Captain] Richard Todd ... was one of the first British officers to land on D-Day. Todd was part of the British airborne invasion, that took place June 5 through June 7. During Operation Overlord, Todd’s battalion were the reinforcements parachuted in after the gliders landed and captured Pegasus Bridge to prevent German forces crossing the bridge and attacking." Comet Over Hollywood surveys the actors who saw action on D-Day.
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.
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."
Fil from Wings of Pegasus has been looking at what exactly it is that we hear in the Eurovision Song Contest final.
The rules now allow a prerecorded backing track, and that track can choose to use pitch correction and autotuning as an artistic choice. And guess what? Everyone makes that choice.
That in itself is worrying, but what Fil uncovers here is that, for some songs, the backing track contains a fair part of what we think is the lead vocal.
So it looks as though Eurovision isn't particularly interested in enforcing its own rules.
Fil has disappeared down this rabbit hole because he has discovered just how widespread the use of this technology now is. A lot of music sold as being 'live' is nothing of the sort.
He began these videos by analysing the technique of musicians like, to take a purely random example, Steve Winwood.
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.
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."
This week's music video reminds us of a better world: an American President and First Lady honouring a Mexican immigrant.
Each year Kennedy Center Honors are awarded to prominent figures in the performing arts for their lifetime of contributions to American culture. And in 2013 the recipients were the opera singer Martina Arroyo, Herbie Hancock, Billy Joel, Shirley MacLaine, and Carlos Santana.
Here is part of the segment of the awards ceremony that honoured Santana, with Barack and Michelle Obama in the audience.
Because this is Liberal England, yes, that is Steve Winwood in the Cotswold landowner sideburns that he affected for a while. Winwood has played and recorded with Santana.
With him is the percussionist Sheila E., who collaborated with Prince for many years and is the daughter of one of the members of Santana's original band.
And on guitar is Orianthi, an Australian singer and songwriter who has played with Alice Cooper.
Helen Coffey argues that The Traitors, where intelligence is a hindrance that should be hidden at all costs, is a metaphor for society's increasing suspicion towards, and rejection of, intellect, especially when it comes to those in charge.
"It’s really nice when we get people through the yard – the positives far outweigh the negatives ... Farms are very isolated places. It used to be tens of people working on this farm and now it’s just me and my husband." Patrick Barkham meets some of the growing number of farmers who are joining forces with right-to-roam campaigners to boost public access to the countryside.
Harriett Baldwin, a former chair of the treasury select committee, argues that the power afforded to 11 Downing Street can have unintended and negative consequences for democracy.
"For some, school meals evoke memories of austerity and control, as in Daniel’s recollections of being forced to eat everything on his plate. For others, they represent moments of community and care, as Julia’s experience of encouraging her children to embrace school dinners illustrates." Heather Ellis and Isabelle Carter introduce their oral history project on school meals.
"What 1969-70 means is loads of background (and foreground) material beginning with Steve Winwood’s involvement in Blind Faith and ending with King Crimson’s third album, Lizard. Among those featuring heavily are Spooky Tooth, Free and Mott the Hoople, three classic early Island rock bands whose largely student and mostly male following tended to sport ex-army greatcoats, along with plimsolls, loon pants and cheesecloth shirts." Richard Williams reviews the second volume of Neil Storey’s The Island Book of Records.
Casmilus watches the 1971 film Unman, Wittering and Zigo, which stars David Hemmings and is set in a minor public school: "Like all films set in such locations, it gives an insight into the early character formation of the men who play a large role in running Britain for the next 50 years."
