Jones, who returns to Inverness as lead singer of the Blues Band, made his first appearance at the city theatre in a very different guise, as the star of Eden Court's first ever panto a few months after its opening in 1976.

"Paul doesn't mention his panto past much," Tom McGuinness, his partner in both the Blues Band and earlier in Manfred Mann, chuckled. "I know he has great fond memories."

Jones probably has less fond feelings of a later visit with the Blues Band, which ended with a visit to Raigmore Hospital.

"Paul fell off the stage," McGuinness recalled. "Luckily for the audience it was right near the end of the show, so we just stopped. Paul's always pretending to fall off stage, well this night he did. He ended up in the local hospital, though just accident and emergency."

That was probably one of the scarier evenings in the career of a band which, McGuinness points out, is now entering its 29th year.

In 1979 Jones was working mainly as an actor in London's West End and though squeezing in a few harmonica sessions in the day time, he missed playing his favourite music.

"Paul phoned me up and asked if I fancied getting a band together to play some blues around the pubs of London. 'It'll just be a couple of gigs,' he said. So here we are 29 years later," McGuinness laughed.

Jones and McGuinness recruited ex-John Mayall drummer Hughie Flint, with whom McGuinness had enjoyed chart success in the 1970s as McGuinness Flint, bottleneck guitarist Dave Kelly from The John Dummer Blues Band and bass player Gary Fletcher.

The band recorded the first album, "The Official Blues Band Bootleg Album", on their own and sold it directly to their fans by mail order. After Radio One DJ Simon Bates raved about it, several major record labels became interested and a record deal was signed with Arista Ariola.

Their profile continued to rise and three years after coming together for a couple of pub shows, The Blues Band was headlining at Glastonbury, by which time Rob Townsend had replaced Flint on drums.

The band now have 17 albums to their credit and continue to tour around the world, though McGuinness and Jones also play together in a spin-off of their 1960s' group, The Manfreds.

"The thing about the blues is that it is always there, like jazz," McGuinness said.

"We travel a lot around the world and there are jazz fans everywhere we go — North America, Australia, Singapore. Every now and then the music business sits up and takes notice and you have a bit of a revival, then it goes quiet. Dave Kelly, our guitarist, has a nice way of putting it. He says, we don't bother the record industry and the record industry don't bother us.

"We're always willing to play if someone comes along. It's not work. Not work like a deep sea fisherman."

Music has been McGuinness's work for a long time, having turned professional in 1963 and then going on to a five-year stint with the Manfred Mann Band the following year, but he had been involved with music long before then.

The Blues Band — celebrating their 29th year together.

One of his first bands paired him with a fellow blues aficionado who McGuinness was introduced to by his then girlfriend, now his wife, a young guitarist by the name of Eric Clapton.

"Whatever happened to him?" McGuinness asked. "We had a band together, but it fell apart after a year. It didn't fall apart because of musical differences, it just fell apart because we weren't organised enough to get gigs."

For that generation of white British youngsters, the blues appealed in a way which it never had to their American counterparts, until the British bands reintroduced it to the US mainstream media.

McGuinness recalls the chill he felt the first time he heard Howling Wolf sing "Smokestack Lighting".

"All the people I grew up with were playing this music — The Stones, The Animals, the Spencer Davis Group, John Mayall — and at every stage we gave credit to our mentors," he said.

"White colleges would start booking them to play after that and some of them got the opportunity to make some money, but not all of them did. Arthur Crudup, a great blues player, never made any money. I remember him coming to stay with me in London in the 1970s and he took out his stage jacket and rats had eaten the back of it. He should have been a millionaire."

McGuinness is now something of an elder statesman of the blues himself and it is not uncommon to see three generations of a family in a Blues Band audience.

"I never thought age had anything to do with it. It might seem slightly comical to hear The Who sing 'My Generation', but why should we stop?" he asked.

The musician who had a hit with "When I'm Dead and Gone" with McGuinness Flint, has definite ideas of how he would like to go, and retirement does not figure into it.

"My vision is to get to an incredibly venerable age and drop dead on stage," he said.

"But as I get older, the venerable age gets further and further ahead. I'm thinking 116 would be a good age."

* The Blues Band play Eden Court's Empire Theatre tonight at 8pm.

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk

Printer friendly version

Email this article to a friend