Still singing the Blues

Formed from the remnants of Manfred Mann, McGuinness Flint and the John Dummer Blues Band, they have become recognised among the most enduring and popular exponents of British blues music.

The band was started in 1979 by former Manfred Mann group members, Paul Jones and Tom McGuinness. Slide guitar ace and vocalist Dave Kelly was recruited, Gary Fletcher filled the bass post. Original drummer, Hughie Flint, was replaced by Rob Townsend in 1982.

With four singer/songwriters in the band, they have become widely known for the quality and variety of performance and material, their passion for the music and their showmanship.

Gary Fletcher has been there throughout and as they prepare to go back out on tour he has been recalling the early days when they came together and he can even remember the date.

“It was April the 21st 1979 I think. I’d been working with Dave Kelly in a band called The Wildcats which was more of an occasional thing. Dave was asked by Paul Jones to come along and play on these two gigs. They only had two booked. I’m not even sure if Dave knew who Paul Jones was at the time and I wasn’t familiar with the Manfreds’ stuff really. Anyway they wanted to get this thing together and they asked Dave if he could think of a bass player and he put me forward.

“I think Gerry McAvoy, from Rory Gallagher’s band, was originally going to do the two gigs but Rory’s manager didn’t like his guys playing away. Gerry backed out and his loss was my gain.

“They just had the bookings at the Bridge House, in Canning Town, and the Hope and Anchor, in Islington. We didn’t do anything after those gigs until a festival in Belgium and thereafter people started contacting us and we just did the pubs up until January 1980.

“We recorded the first album but we couldn’t pay for the studio time because originally EMI sent us into the studio but then there was a change of management or whatever and they decided to pull out.

“They didn’t want to pay the studio bill which ironically suited us ultimately because it meant that we owned the copyright to all the recordings and then in April 1980 we played Rockpalast in Germany – a huge thing – and that really got the ball rolling in Europe for us, “I was in my 20s and I had been a professional musician on and off and my mum was still at that point saying, ‘When are you going to get a proper job, son?’ In fact, it’s proved to be a much more steady job than anything around as not even a job in the bank is secure now so there’s a certain irony in that but no, I had no idea the band would keep going.” Blues is very much a niche market and the British version is sometimes portrayed as a poor imitation of the original artistes but despite that unfavourable backdrop, The Blues Band have continued to do their thing to highly appreciative audiences. Gary said, “It’s not a big global market in the way that pop is. You don’t sell huge numbers of albums with the blues. Let’s be honest, nobody sells huge numbers of albums today but, even in our heyday, although we had a couple of albums that got in the charts, it wasn’t huge numbers.

“I suppose as a genre it is and always was a live form and so the market is the live gigs. Germany and Scandinavia are probably our two best markets outside the UK. Australia probably would be if we could get there more often.

“We’ve toured Canada but we only went to America once, for a week in 1980 to New York. That was on our own initiative to try and get a deal which we were offered but stupidly turned down. I’ve no idea why we did. I was really annoyed about that, still am but there you go. Going to America was like taking coals to Newcastle really.

“The band is something that’s kept us going, put a bit of food on the table. We’d be lying if we said we’d made a lot of money out of it because we haven’t but we’ve done a lot better than a lot of people. We were just in the right place at the right time at the end of the day.

“If you talk to a lot of blues musicians from that era, they weren’t making much of a living. Even the big three – Hooker, Wolf and Muddy Waters.

“Even somebody like Buddy Guy, he wasn’t making much. It was only these guys coming over to Europe that enabled them to start making a reasonable living out of it and to this day it’s very hard for American artistes to make a living out of playing the blues.

“It’s probably harder, the competition’s tougher, the gig fees are generally lower. If you go to Memphis you’ll see amazing bands in the bars. Acts that knock most European bands for six in terms of musicianship but they play for tips in bars.

“The British interest in blues did a lot for the American guys but it wouldn’t be there at all if it wasn’t for them. At the end of the day, we’re borrowing somebody else’s culture, end of story.” Gary spoke of the blues’ enduring popularity. “It’s so accessible, it’s so fundamentally simple as a musical form that it means a lot of people can understand it. A lot of people can play it – with varying degrees of skill of course. The rhythms tend to be almost body rhythms if you like. Listen to ‘Mannish Boy’ by Muddy Waters, it’s probably the sexiest music ever put on record.” Gary was first inspired by the Fleetwood Mac of the Peter Green era. “I was quite a late starter with music and didn’t pick a guitar up until I was 18.

“I wasn’t interested in music to the point of going out and buying albums or singles even until around ’67/’68. The first album of that period I bought was Eddie Boyd with Fleetwood Mac. Eddie Boyd being the great piano player and I was just very taken with his music, his piano style.

“I loved the directness of the album with Fleetwood Mac. A friend of mine was a piano player and between the two of us we tried to learn and follow what was on the record. It was that record initially and also some of the groups in the UK that came later. Even the likes of Fairport Convention. I saw them do a song called ‘Mr Lacey’, which is basically 12-bar blues.” Looking ahead to the tour, Gary said, “We look at what we’ve got in the back catalogue which is immense. We have key cornerstone tunes in our set. We know where we are in terms of who is going to sing the song. For example, Dave will sing the first, somebody else the second etc but we don’t know what they’re going to sing. Anybody in a band would say normally it’s good to know what’s coming next – but we don’t. It’s a way of keeping it a little more fresh. They’ll just call it there and then. We always try and shake it up a little bit.

“One thing we can lay claim to is that we’ve never become a revival band. In The Blues Band for good or bad we’ve had that continuity, we never stopped making new albums even if there was quite a gap between them. It’s also still quite important to us to be introducing new material from time to time.” l The Blues Band played the Carnegie Hall on Saturday 13th September.