In part 4 of the 1970 Blues Rock article mini-series, we stay in the British Isles and focus on a number of bands and artists who emerged from the late 1960s boom of that music genre. 1970 may have been the year when the British blues rock explosion started waning, but many excellent albums were still being produced and released. We start with a drummer who remained mostly unknown even after performing at Woodstock festival.

In 1969, after leaving John Mayall’s group, drummer Keef Hartley started his own band. Signed to Deram, Decca’s sub label dedicated to progressive music, the band released two albums that year. In August 1969 they were offered an opportunity of a lifetime to participate at the Woodstock festival. Guitarist Miller Anderson recalled, “We were standing at the side of the stage waiting to play, when the guy went up to announce the band that was on before us—‘Ladies and gentlemen, a new band from San Francisco, Santana!’ They started playing, and they were FANTASTIC! And we just stood on the side and said ‘oh Jesus, we’re on next!’”. The audience had a chance for a breather after Santana’s exuberant and now-legendary performance, with John Sebastian playing a short set. Keef Hartley’s Band was next, and Miller Anderson continues: “It was a new line-up of the band, and we were very under-rehearsed… We did not play well as we could not use our own equipment. We used Santana’s gear.” The event was a missed opportunity for the band. Not only did they not feel that they performed to the best of their abilities, but their set was not even taped due to a dispute about money their manager had with the filming crew. While Santana propelled to the heights of stardom after the Woodstock film was released in 1970, Keef Hartley’s band remained relatively obscure.

In 1970 the band released their third album, The Time Is Near. While Keef Hartley used to recruit a large number of musicians for his live performances, naming his band The Keef Hartley Big Band, the lineup of the band’s studio recordings was smaller. During the recording of the album the group experienced a change in membership, with trumpeter Henry Lowther leaving in the middle of the recording sessions. He was replaced by trumpeter Dave Caswell and reed man Lyle Jenkins, both recruited from the band Galliard.

The album is a high watermark in Miller Anderson’s career. The lead singer, guitarist and songwriter wrote most of the songs on the album. Keef Hartley recalled in the 2008 CD release liner notes: “After two albums under our belt, Miller Anderson had now really developed his tunesmith abilities. I remember walking into rehearsal one day and I said ‘I’ve got the name for the new album’ and Miller said ‘What’s it called?’ ‘The Time Is Near’ I said, to which Miller quizzed ‘What does that mean?’ ‘The time is near to make a better album than the first two’ I quickly replied! I didn’t get any reaction from Miller, in fact he walked out of the room so I wondered if I’d upset him. Three quarters of an hour later he walked back into the room and said ‘What do you think of this?’ He proceeded to play on an acoustic guitar a great sequence and started to sing a complete lyric. Immediately I said ‘That’s it, that’s the one’.”

Also of note on this track and the whole album is the excellent work by bass player Gary Thain, who would go on to join Uriah Heep and participate in their classic early 1970s albums.

Disc Music & Echo gave the album its highest 4 star rating: “The whole album is full of drive and hope, and the band is better than it’s ever been.”

Keef Hartley – drums, percussion

Miller Anderson – vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar

Henry Lowther – trumpet, flugelhorn, violin, piano

Gary Thain – bass guitar

Dave Caswell – flugelhorn, euphonium, trumpet, electric piano, brass arrangements

Lyle Jenkins – tenor saxophone, flute, baritone saxophone

At the end of 1968, after the release of Jethro Tull’s debut album This Was, guitarist Mick Abrahams left the band due to artistic conflicts with Ian Anderson. Abrahams did not wait long before forming his own band, Blodwyn Pig. Asked about the curios name, he said: “The name just came out from a nutty friend called Graham Waller who, after hearing us rehearse one day, simply said to us on his way out of the room: ‘Thou shalt evermore be known as Blodwyn Pig!’ We all broke up laughing, as you can imagine. I am led to believe that the words Blodwyn Pig come from the poem by the famous poet, Dylan Thomas and the play named Under Milk Wood.”

Indeed the play includes a character named Blodwen Bowen, and there are repeated mentions of pigs throughout the play. As an aside, the first line of the play became the inspiration for one of King Crimson’s albums in the 1970s:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black

The band, which started as a blues rock outfit, was quite diverse as music styles go. Abrahams talked about that versatility: “I’ve always thought of myself as a blues player, but with a little country, jazz and other styles thrown in for good measure. I never wanted us to be seen as performing one type of music or another. However, we inevitably began to get lumped in with certain other bands of the era. Some called us blues while there were those who insisted we were progressive. When we did Top of The Pops playing the single Same Old Story in January 1970, the band were introduced as being ‘avant-garde’.”

The band’s sound was unique in no small measure due to reed man and multi-instrumentalist Jack Lancaster. With a background in jazz, the improvisation skills are evident in his playing. Lancaster talked about one of his major influences: “I saw Roland Kirk at Ronny Scott’s jazz club in Soho. His playing was tremendous and I always thought that he was a vastly underrated musician.” Unlike many of other reed players in a rock setting, he preferred his sound to remain acoustic, unadorned by electronic gizmos: “There is a tendency among some groups to use the saxophone like a guitar and not how it was meant to be played. The saxophone has its own form of expression, and I don’t like using amplifiers and electronic effects. I just use the PA microphones. I have tried amplification but it cuts up the tone.”

After a successful and busy year in 1969, in which Blodwyn Pig was featured at major events including the Bath Festival of Blues, the Isle Of Wight Festival and the Reading Festival, they released their second album, Getting to This, in April 1970. Years later Mick Abrahams reflected about the album: “I have to say that maybe I allowed my input on this album to be reduced too much when compared to what went on with the previous album. So, it wasn’t as coherent as it should have been. Jack’s influence was obvious, in that he wanted the sound to be more orchestral, and to a large extent he pulled this off. But then he was a very talented musician.”

My favorite track on the album is the multi-part suite San Francisco Sketches, composed by Jack Lancaster. He talked about that track with Melody Maker magazine a month after the album release: “Sketches was inspired by the people and places we encountered in San Francisco. It was the only city I liked in America, apart from Boston. I’m not conscious of producing a tone as such. It is probably more noticeable on the LP because I was trying to get a West Coast jazz tone, because the suite was about the West Coast.”

Mick Abrahams – guitar, vocals, seven-string guitar, tenor guitar

Jack Lancaster – flute, violin, electric violin, tenor sax, baritone sax, soprano sax, phoon horn, cornet

Andy Pyle – electric bass, six-string bass

Ron Berg – drums, tympani

In 1970 Savoy Brown, one of the most enduring British Blues Rock bands, released the album Raw Sienna. This was their fifth album and the first not to involve famed producer Mike Vernon. Kim Simmonds, who kept this formidable group with one lineup or another going for decades, said this about how the name Savoy Brown came to be: “There was Charles Brown, Nappy Brown, James Brown, Gatemouth Brown, there were tons of Browns. Savoy was always connected to the jazz and popular world in America with the Savoy theatre, Savoy records was a label. Savoy was like an old time American name but there was also a Savoy hotel in England so you know it really had a touch or history to the name Savoy in England and Brown with all the people. So it was Savoy Brown.”

Raw Sienna was recorded after Savoy Brown came back from a tour of the US, a country where they earned a level of success not granted to them at home. Kim Simmonds told Beat Instrumental magazine in January 1970 about the difference in their stage act on both sides of the Atlantic: “When you’re playing blues clubs, which was practically all we did, it’s like all the people there are friends. You know them, they come up and talk to you afterwards, and you’re just one of them so you can’t really put on an act as such. In America we knew we’d have to try harder, and playing bigger places on a proper stage, the act just developed.” Melody Maker expanded on that live act in its April 1970 issue: “Part of their success in the States is undoubtedly due to their highly entertaining stage act which is centered around Chris Youlden, the band’s lead singer. His cigar smoking, top-hatted demure image seems to have found a place in the hearts of American youth but it is an image he reserves solely for America as it is questionable if British audiences would find the image quite so appealing.”

1969 and 1970 were a high watermark in Savoy Brown’s career. The band released no less than four albums in that time span and toured constantly in the US and the continent. Years later Simmonds looked favorably on this incarnation of the band: “We were a very heavy band. There were no pop guys in the group; we were the real deal.” After the release of Raw Sienna Simmonds told Beat Instrumental in July 1970: “The record is really the fulfilment of all the ambitions I had when I started to play in a group. It’s the logical conclusion of everything we’ve done in the past.” In another article in Melody Maker he said: “Raw Sienna is a personal achievement for me. Both from the production side and musically. It’s our best album to date partly because everyone had so much freedom while we were actually recording.”

Chris Youlden – vocals; piano

Kim Simmonds – lead guitar; piano

“Lonesome” Dave Peverett – rhythm guitar, acoustic guitar; bottleneck guitar

Tone Stevens – bass

Roger Earl – drums, percussion

Savoy Brown was not the only British blues band that was able to survive through multiple decades of activity. Another band that started in 1965 became one of the torchbearers of that musical genre. In 1970 Chicken Shack, led by guitarist Stan Webb, released their fourth album and their last on the music label Blue Horizon. Label head Mike Vernon described them in comparison to the label’s best-known band, Fleetwood Mac: “For me, The Shack’s recorded output was more varied and contained better original material, albeit that they were unable to come up with anything to match either ‘Black Magic Woman’ or ‘Albatross’ in terms of sales.”

Stan Webb was certainly one of the best blues guitarists to come out of the British Isles, a superlative compliment given the number of standout masters of the instrument that emerged from that region in the 1960s. Band mate Christine Perfect, who left the band in 1969 for a solo career, said of him: “He’s a blues man and nothing else. If the boom died tomorrow it wouldn’t make any difference to Stan – he’s only happy playing the blues.” Interestingly, the band’s first album without her marked a shift in style to heavier rock territories. Mike Vernon was not in favor of that transition, but he changed his mind once the material for the album surfaced: “I cannot truly say that I was looking forward to the recording session in December 1969. Our joint plan was to cut two titles for a single release that would pre-empt the album. I had heard a rough demo of the proposed A-side and felt that perhaps it might work out, but I was not overly optimistic. I knew nothing of the coupling, although Stan has intimated that it would be an instrumental. In a hindsight, I should have had more faith. ’Maudie’ and ‘Andalusian Blues’, is in my opinion perhaps the strongest of all their single releases.

Maudie is indeed quite a different tune than the rest of the band’s repertoire, with an eye to the charts. Mick Abrahams of Blodwyn Pig listened to the song on its release in a blindfold test. He said: “Sounds like the Everly Brothers. Wait a minute – It’s not the Chicken Shack is it? That voice in the beginning threw me at first. I thought they could have had a bit fuller sound but maybe that was the effect they were striving for and it is certainly reminiscent of early Everly recordings. I think it has a big chance commercially. That little guitar interval, playing the breaks before the band comes back in, that was very catchy.”  Alas, the single did not make a dent in the charts. But the change in direction was noticeable enough for Beat Instrumental magazine, reviewing the album in June 1970: “The songs now are composed, arranged, and the new album, Accept, Stan feels is the first real Chicken Shack record. There aren’t any 12 bars. And it’s happened that audiences, even the hard-core blues fiends, are raving over the new stuff.”

Here is Andalusian Blues, the B-side of the single, and also a track on the album Accept.

Stan Webb – guitar, vocals

Paul Raymond – keyboards, vocals

Andy Sylvester – bass guitar

Dave Bidwell – drums

Our last review moves naturally from Chicken Shack to one of its previous members, who in 1970 released her debut solo album, the self-titled Christine Perfect. Her story is unique, as she was maybe the only female musician in the emerging British blues movement of the mid to late 60s. She started in an early incarnation of that band as a bass and harmonica player before moving to the piano. While switching to piano was not a problem for her, playing blues with the instrument she began to study as a child was a different story. She remembers: “I didn’t have a clue as to what to do on piano. Stan Webb bought me a Freddie King album and that was the beginning of my absolute love for the blues.” Perfect was listening intently to Sonny Thompson, the legendary pianist who played and co-wrote many songs with blues guitarist and singer Freddie King.

While this was not her main focus at the time, Christine Perfect contributed a number of songs to Chicken Shack’s repertoire. On the band’s 1968 debut album 40 Blue Fingers, Freshly Packed and Ready to Serve, she composed and sang When the Train Comes Back and You Ain’t No Good. Two more contributions followed with the next album, O.K. Ken? with Get Like You Used to Be and A Woman Is the Blues, both of them co-written with Stan Webb.

Early in 1969 Chicken Shack recorded their version of the song ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’, with lead vocals by Christine Perfect. After Etta James gave the song its definitive version in 1967 you would think that a British girl at the beginning of her singing career picking up that song was a mistake. Not so. Perfect won the Melody Maker Award for best female vocalist that year.

Soon after Chicken Shack’s single release Christine Perfect (now McVie, after marrying John McVie of Fleetwood Mac)) left the band, but she did not stay retired long. In the autumn of 1969 she was persuaded by Mike Vernon to record tracks for a solo album, in which she performed a different version of I’d Rather Go Blind. Her delivery of the song is one of the best in her career. It is soulful but in a British way reserved and devoid of vocal theatrics, a trap that some female soul singers fall into when they sing lyrics concerning being ditched by their man.