I was a great fan of the 60s British blues thing, and will certainly never forget the first time I met Jo-Ann Kelly. I was using my then PA rig to run the disco at a flash party at Nottingham University and a small slim young woman with slightly surprised spectacles started towards me. I thought "Hello, here comes another reggae request" (not my favourite sort, although it is another story how I got shanghaied into running a reggae club one summer) and a voice that seemed to come from somewhere underground husked "Hi, I'm Jo-Ann, are you the man with the PA". Totally velutinous vocal vibrations that shook me to my core. I knew her rough edged singing, but the husky speaking voice was amazing.

I later settled down with one Jacqui Walker who was such a close friend of Jo-Ann Kelly's that they used to swap maternity clothes and that is why my oldest step-daughter is named Jo-Ann. So no, I don't forget Jo-Ann Kelly. But I disgress.

I was also a great fan of TS McPhee's playing, and the usual stuff, Fleetwood Mac when they played blues, and Chicken Shack, and somewhere I still have the first half dozen or so Mayall albums, and some electric US stuff like the Climax Chicago Blues Band, some Chess albums and so on. The usual suspects.

But I still don't really think the British blues performers had whatever it is or was. Recently I went to see the Blues Band and they were just tame. When I was younger and saw Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, they were a lot older than the Blues Band are now, but they still had vibrancy.

If you listen now to Alexis Korner stuff it is rather embarrassing, and the Cyril Davies Allstars always sounded lead-footed.


Peter Green, before he got spiked, was a wonderful sensitive guitarist. I doubt whether anyone will ever match "Greeny". But "Greeny" was not blues. He could emulate Chicago blues as well as any Englishman. But it never really sounded authentic.

The British blues pianists somehow missed by rather further - remember the "Brunning Sunflower Blues Band" - yet there was a "highly regarded" British blues pianist wholly failing to sound quite right.

Eventually I realised that I wasn't ever going to be able fully to connect to the blues, as a player and singer I was an invader, a parasite, no matter how I enjoyed listening to it, and so I stopped trying to sing and play it. Somewhere out on the internet is a recent-ish vid of my leading one of my sessions in the new-country-blues archetype "I washed my hands in Muddy Water". It ain't all that bad - but it ain't right. The 60s UK blues boom wasn't bad, it was better than me, but it wasn't quite right either.