horsemouth and the british blues boom

horsemouth has been taking care of business - and sorting things out for the upcoming week - he didn’t (in the end) get a free ticket to see congo natty play (drat and double drat jungalist massive - ah well).

horsemouth spent a while in the library thursday listening to rory gallagher (ok ok - pride of cork/ ballyshannon etc. so not technically british but you know what horsemouth means), robin trower, ten years after (alvin lee), the list could go on - jeff beck, jimmy page, peter green, eric clapton even. almost all of these were jobbing musicians before the blues boom and yet what you can hear in their playing is a love of blues and soul - and yet the other thing you can really hear in their playing is the influence of jimi hendrix - either positively as emulation or negatively as avoidance. clapton (cream), trower, gallagher worked in power trios - none fell too far from the tree.


and yet none had (for horsemouth) the genius of hendrix - there’s no equivalent of 1983 (and a merman I should turn to be).
this was the music horsemouth found on vinyl in the basement of the camden record and tape exchange remaindered down to a pound in the early to mid eighties. indeed at one time he had a double album - one side rory gallagher’s calling card, the other robin trower’s long misty days. he had a lot of robin trower but bridge of sighs he never owned (for earth below he did, b.l.t, truce, in city dreams). jack bruce’s solo stuff also.

the who he never really bothered with (he’s not sure why). peter green he never heard at the time (he would have loved it - it’s smart stuff).

this was (however) possibly the worst decade to like this music - the anarcho-punks ran a strict year zero policy - either anarcho-punk or reggae (perhaps some earlier punk) and that’s your lot. horsemouth transferred his attentions to folk - bert jansch, john renbourn etc.

almost all this vinyl went west when he moved in 1995 - the door simply blew shut behind him as he was moving and horsemouth decided he couldn’t be bothered to break back in (he thinks cumbian chris and friends returned it to the record and tape).

the guitar changed too - van halen and a legion of shredders arrived. the edge in U2. horsemouth began to work on understanding how funk, reggae and african music worked and how to play it, hip-hop arrived, house arrived...