When you’ve been a Womble yet were, possibly, offered the chance to, maybe, join The Rolling Stones, you’ve got a certain something. When your near-50-year solo career is critically feted yet still overshadowed by your work with others, from the rockabilly mayhem of Robert Gordon to the louche sounds of Bryan Ferry or the nascent Sex Pistols, it’s to be remarked upon.
Chris Spedding isn’t your normal guitarist, nor singer-songwriter, nor session player. And the fevered pace of his lifestyle isn’t slowing down. Not content with the big-time gig with Ferry, which includes a string of dates across Russia, his band Sharks, who break the surface every decade or two, have a new album, Killers Of The Deep, out. Yet refer to it as new and confusion sets in, as there’s a new, new album already underway. And as for his solo work, he hasn’t had fronted an album since 2015’s Joyland but he says: “I should be thinking about it.”
Spedding has played on records by everyone from Shirley Bassey to Joan Armatrading, Gilbert O’Sullivan to Nick Mason, and was even a pop star himself, briefly. If not for his other works, the public knows him for the 1975 hit Motor Bikin’, the perfect slice of 50s-influenced pop.
The self-titled album that was featured on has just been reissued as part of a celebration by Cherry Red records, a set of four albums in a neat box, The RAK Years.
For most, Motor Bikin’ was the debut of a new star yet in reality Spedding had been an admired guitarist – a jazz musician even – back in the 60s.
Spedding formed a band, The Vulcans, at school at the tail end of the 50s. By 1960, aged 16, he was working in a West End music shop, playing US Air Force bases with a country band – Bill Jordan & The Country Boys – and helping run a jazz club in Islington where he got to play with the likes of Dick Heckstall-Smith and Ian Carr, both influential in the later jazz-rock scene.
Come 1964 he was playing his first professional gig on the P&O liner Himalaya, cruising the Orient. He returned to a life playing in society dance bands at posh venues. “I never regret going through that scene,” he says. “Those guys could play any song in any key, really good musicians – it was very good experience.”
He went on to back both Alan Price, post-Animals, and Paul Jones, post-Manfred Mann. Not a fan of the blues scene in the late 60s, he avoided trying to compete with the likes of Eric Clapton by sticking to rhythm guitar – something that made him in demand for sessions.
In 1968 there was a brief spell in the short-lived bluesy band Denis Couldry & Smile, Spedding playing both guitar and violin on their Decca single Penny For The Wind.
But his story starts in earnest when he joined Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments, the arty, progressive ensemble revolving around the poet/singer who was making a name for himself as a lyricist for Cream. The album A Meal You Can Shake Hands With In The Dark emerged in June 1969, Spedding on guitar alongside Dick Heckstall-Smith on sax, and the band played the following month’s Hyde Park concert with The Rolling Stones.
Only thing was, Brown couldn’t sing and was ousted. A second album, Mantle-Piece, had Brown’s vocals removed with Spedding stepping into the breech.
“We unceremoniously got rid of Pete then realised that we didn’t have a singer, because none of us could sing any better than him – even though we didn’t like his singing which was why we asked him to leave!” says Spedding. “There wasn’t much thought that had gone in to this. But we did have an agreement with Harvest/EMI to come up with more product. They heard we were breaking up and said they wanted an album but none of the others were interested. So I became a singer-songwriter by default. I thought, well, we’ve got the opportunity to record at Abbey Road, do our own stuff and it’s not going to cost us anything. These guys were totally bonkers to not want to do a record but I thought, well, I’m going to do mine.”
And that’s how Spedding’s first solo album, Backwood Progression, arrived.
“George Harrison had block-booked studio 3 for All Things Must Pass and he took a couple of days off. We were offered the time but told ‘don’t touch anything’ because it was all set up. There was a harmonium, which we got to use even though we shouldn’t have done.”
Backwood Progression was a warm, meandering collection of music and songs that even with the delectable She’s My Friend, foreshadowed his three-minute pop success that would follow five years later.
The record startled many people who had known Spedding as a jazzer. “I’d had a fling with jazz in the 60s and by this time I’d played with Nucleus and all those jazz fusion people who were around, like Mike Gibbs and his orchestra and Mike Westbrook and his band.
“Yet by 1969-70, I was totally out of the jazz scene and into my rock’n’roll phase again, which was how I started out in 1959-60.
“I suppose my jazz phase made me a good person to get into a jazz-fusion band because I played both jazz and rock’n’roll. At that time most jazz players had only been into jazz and they needed someone like me to say, no, it needs to be more rock, we need to put a few licks in. And they’d never heard these licks before and they thought it was totally wonderful.
“So I was the rock element in it. I was not really interested in jazz anymore, but I knew how to relate to them and they called it jazz-rock.
“By this time I was interested in writing pop songs, that was my focus. I was very much into The Band, Bob Dylan, The Basement Tapes, hence the line-up that included piano and organ.”
It wasn’t, however, a great time for crossovers. “It didn’t attract the ear of the pop world at all,” he admits. “People were scratching their heads because I was known as a jazz player and they thought I must be selling out, getting lots of money, but I was probably earning more money playing jazz. But I loved the idea of the Phil Spector three-minute pop single, the sociological aspects of what makes somebody use their pocket money to buy your music. Could I do something like that? That was my motivation for the next few years.”
On the Spector front, Spedding may (or may not) have ended up on All Things Must Pass after a booking around that time turned out to be from the master of the Wall Of Sound.
“It was an Easter Sunday, which I remember because the Musicians’ Union allowed you to charge double scale,” he says. “I turned up at Trident Studios and there was Phil Spector and there were about four or five us playing acoustic guitars, some 12-string, and of course it became the signature sound for All Things Must Pass. I can’t remember what the song was, George wasn’t there, the rhythm section wasn’t there so I’ve no idea whether it ended up on the album.”
As he says, session players turn up and play, often with no idea what they’re creating, it’s only if “someone famous – like Petula Clark or Acker Bilk, and I’ve played with both – turns up you keep it in the back of your mind”.
Spedding’s recording credits at this time were relentless and varied, everything from the Pete Atkin/Clive James album Driving Through Mythical America (he later toured with them) to Harry Nilsson’s breakthrough Nilsson Schmilsson to Jack Bruce’s Harmony Row (he had earlier played on Bruce’s debut, Songs For A Tailor) to Elton John’s Madman Across The Water.
His second Harvest solo album, The Only Lick I Know, came out in 1972 by which time solo aspirations were being put on hold.
“I got the call from Andy Fraser,” he says. Fraser, fresh from conquering the world with Free, and having briefly led the band Toby (for which he’d previously sounded out Spedding) wanted a new start. “The idea that he was from a big [famous] band and wanted to form a group appealed to me,” muses Spedding. “Unfortunately he was only in the band for six months but we did get an album out of him, did some of his songs.”
The band, Sharks, with young, unknown singer Steve ‘Snips’ Parsons, was tipped for the big time. They recorded their debut album, First Water, flamboyant rock with perhaps a hint of glam, and supported Roxy Music on tour but a car crash on the road left Fraser with an injured hand and he departed before the album was released.
The group continued under the guidance of Spedding and Snips, a friendship that lasts to this day with irregular musical get-togethers. The band settled on Busta Jones from Memphis (later part of the expanded Talking Heads), adding keyboard player Nick Judd, still part of the Sharks team. “We did a very successful tour supporting Mountain in the US, reflects Spedding. “That was probably the peak but after the second album, Jab It In Yore Eye, we started to fizzle out. Me and Steve agreed that we’d given it a good couple of years and it wasn’t going to happen. Island dropped us while we were recording our third album, which was being produced by John Entwistle.”
The tracks appeared on CD as Car Crash Tapes – bluntly named after the Sharkmobile, the Pontiac Le Mans with roof fin and radiator teeth that the original band were in when they crashed.
And then, of course, there were The Wombles, Spedding famously a part of the hit-making team alongside producer Mike Batt. “I did the first Wombles’ single even before I left the session world. Then Mike called me and said ‘We’ve got a hit, you’ve got to come and do the follow-up!’ and I said I’m not doing sessions now. I didn’t want to do anything like that as I was in Sharks, because you know what everyone would have said!
“There’s just the one Wombles track I’m not on, because shortly after that Sharks did break up and I did the rest of the Wombles’ records. I lived in Wimbledon at the time – the only Womble who did.”
And did you dress up in a Womble suit? “Just once, for Top Of The Pops…”
The two years concentrating solely on Sharks only enhanced his reputation and he found himself more in demand than ever, working on everything from Cass Elliott’s The Road Is No Place For A Lady to John Cale’s Slow Dazzle. But Spedding by the end of 1974 had decided on a post-Shark attack on the charts, and achieved it with chart supremo Mickie Most.
“Given that I’d written some decent pop songs even on the Harvest albums, I thought, ‘I need a producer who knows how to do this.’ Top of the list was Mickie, who’d had all those hits with Suzi Quatro, Mud…”
“I’d worked with him on Donovan’s Cosmic Wheels, so I went to him when I had the idea for Motor Bikin’. It was like a classic movie situation, when an artist goes into a producer’s office and he’s sitting there smoking a cigar with his feet on the desk and I’m singing him a song on acoustic guitar and he says, ‘That’s gonna be a hit son,’ – it was literally like that.
“He got on the phone to Chris Blackwell to get me out of Island, put me on his own RAK label and by the end of the week we’d cut the track. There was no album at that time – that was the way he worked – and when we knew there was an audience there we did the album.
“I calculatedly tried to write a hit song. Session musicians are often asked to recreate the feel of something in the charts – you’d go into the studio with Radio 1 on so you knew what was being played. In 1975 there wasn’t that much exciting stuff so I thought why don’t I write what I think is missing from the charts and that’s how I came up with the retro rock’n’roll biker thing.”
Motor Bikin’ was a classic of its time, somewhere between the legit rock roar of Mott The Hoople and the glam hits of the day, with an entrenched appreciation of 50s rock’n’roll. It reached the Top 20 and looked set to make a solo star of Spedding who was still darting between musical camps.
“I was still doing sessions and was touring with John Cale – I was playing with him the week I did Top Of The Pops,” he says. “The sort of people who would go and see him wouldn’t have been conscious that his guitar player was on Top Of The Pops. I’d leave a gig and no one would be interested and yet I’d leave the TV studio and people would be clamouring for autographs.”
But despite a classy album full of pop-rock gems (including his Guitar Jamboree run-through of licks from guitar greats) and a cool, elegantly raffish image, Spedding never troubled the charts again – the gap between the June single release and the album following the next April couldn’t possibly have helped.
“I think the timing was wrong,” he says. “I was too early for the Stray Cats’ rockabilly revival, a year early for the punk thing. Top Of The Pops had people like Roy Wood with his beard and platform shoes, the de rigueur uniform, and there was me with my straight-leg jeans, leather jacket and greasy hair.
“It came off for me, but only once – and a year later all the punks started looking like that.”
And around this time the Stones came calling. “At the time Sharks broke up and I was looking for a gig Mick Taylor left the Stones. But I didn’t get the call until six months later so I knew I wasn’t top of the list, so I wasn’t that flattered!” he laughs. “It was Mick Jagger that called and it was a week before Ronnie Wood was announced so I think it might have been a last-gasp attempt to get his own guy in rather than Keith’s guy. And Motorbikin’ was just about to enter the charts, I had tours with John Cale and Roy Harper, I couldn’t just up sticks. And since he didn’t give me a solid offer, just asked what my availability was, I said I was not really available.
“It was like, ‘Are you free?’ and I said I’m not and he said, ‘That’s a pity because the Stones are doing a tour of America in August,’ and I said that is a pity, maybe another time!”
But Spedding was definitely cool. Even before the album came out he’d been voted as the best-dressed musician of 1975 in NME – and shortly after its release he played on Bryan Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together album and found himself producing the Sex Pistols’ demos. He knew Pistols’ guru Malcolm McLaren (those cool threads had to come from somewhere) and he took up the invite to help the band.
“People were putting the Sex Pistols down and I’d heard them and they were good. I thought if I produced a demo people would be able to hear them. People warned me not to be associated with them – so I thought I must.
“I went to rehearsals, they played me all their songs, I chose three and we booked a day in the studio. So it was maybe two days out of my life. They were as good as gold, showed up, played very efficiently – I just switched the machines on and that was it.”
He sent the tapes to up-and-coming producer Chris Thomas (who had played keyboards with him in Cale’s band) and the rest is history.
Spedding’s punk links continued at the 100 Club punk festival, where he joined the Vibrators on stage and struck up a rapport that led to the joint single Pogo Dancing, and occasional guest spots at other gigs. He swipes away any criticism, saying: “I wasn’t in any way jumping on the bandwagon – the bandwagon had rather jumped on me.”
Switching styles again, he was on Ferry’s In My Mind album and spent most of the first half of 1977 on the road with him in the UK, Europe, Australia, US and Japan. Returning, it was straight to work on the next Spedding album, Hurt, produced by Chris Thomas, which was darker and louder than its predecessor. “It was a conscious effort to make an album I could recreate live,” he says. “And having worked with Chris with John Cale’s band I knew he could make it sound good. He was having a very good year – Sex Pistols, The Pretenders.”
Despite great tracks such as the single Get Outta My Pagoda that married pop tunes with punk-like intensity, the hits wouldn’t come. He did play his first solo tour, almost two months – put together by Roxy’s EG management in return for Spedding spending so long on the road with Ferry.
Come 1978, a frustrated Spedding was planning to depart to the US to start over when a phone from producer Richard Gottehrer (who taken Blondie into the charts) call led him into a new phase.
“Robert Gordon and Link Wray were playing a song of mine from the Hurt album, Wild Wild Women. I got a call from Richard asking if I would like to play rhythm guitar on the session. I said sure, and I’m thinking of going to New York. Two days later he called back and said I think they’re breaking up and there’s a gig waiting for you as a guitar player with Robert. I thought fantastic, I get to live in a New York and I have a gig where people can see me.”
Spedding’s imaginative, off-kilter guitar blasts and English style proved the perfect foil for Gordon’s post-punk rockabilly, on albums such as Rock Billy Boogie and Bad Boy. The relationship has lasted 40 years, with Gordon appearing on Spedding’s 2015 album Joyland.
“It’s an on-off thing, I didn’t want to just be a sideman,” he says. “I left after the first tour but kept getting invited back. It was always a sideline playing with other people – at least I thought that back then, I’m not so bothered now, just to play with good people is my focus now.”
There’s a slight frustration that only on 2007’s It’s Now Or Never (recorded in Nashville with the Jordanaires on backing vocals) was an album credited to both rather than simply Robert Gordon.
Spedding continued his solo path with two further albums for Mickie Most’s RAK label. Guitar Graffiti, from 1978, which was more sharp pop, and 1980’s I’m Not Like Everybody Else, which saw him reunited with Mickie Most for a mix of self-penned material and covers such as The Crying Game and The Kinks’ title track.
In 1980 Spedding reunited with Snips to produce his solo album, La Rocca, a classy record of its era that had 80s pop glitz along with a deft, rocking touch. The hits didn’t come though. “It’s difficult to understand why there are certain things in which you invest a lot of time and love that are totally ignored, yet things I do in my spare time without any real commitment are the ones I get remembered for,” says Spedding. “I’ve never been able to figure out how that works!”
The solo output – 1986’s roots-rocking Enemy Within – continued to avoid success. He played on Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards To Broad Street and his own 1991 Just Plug Him In! is a live compendium from 1977-’89.
He played on Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs; the John Cale connection continued through the 80s, and he toured with former Modern Lover/Talking Head Jerry Harrison and even worked with original French rock’n’roller Johnny Hallyday. He contributed to French label New Rose’s 1989 Every Day’s A Holly Day tribute to Buddy Holly with a low-key yet sublime It’s So Easy). Two other tributes both deserved to be hits: Hey Little Boy (Little Girl) a growling duet with Chrissie Hynde for an Otis Blackwell set and Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots, a Lieber & Stoller number that was actually an Edith Piaf tribute (she’d managed to score an unlikely hit with it).
Both appear on Café Days Revisited, an expanded version of 1990’s impressive Café Days, recorded in LA by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin.
In 1993 Snips and Spedding reconvened for a new Sharks album, Like A Black Van Parked On A Dark Curve. “Steve [Snips] would come to Los Angeles to work on his music as a TV soundtrack composer. He’d occasionally get me to play and we just said, ‘Hey, why don’t we do another Sharks album – might as well.’ It was mainly us and we got Pete Thomas from The Attractions on drums, and played our one gig of the 90s at the Orange in Kensington in 1993.”
Spedding contributed to Willy DeVille sessions and played with French veteran rocker Dick Rivers (at one show forming a twin-guitar attack with former Stone Mick Taylor), and releasing the live album Gesundheit! in 1995.
Studio work swung from Mike Batt’s Watership Down (no furry costume this time) to producing and playing on Dee Dee Ramone’s solo set Hop Around, while he was reunited with Mike Batt for Katie Melua’s Piece By Piece and its hit Nine Million Bicycles.
By 2001, the working relationship with Ferry had resumed with his album Frantic and then being asked to contribute to Roxy Music. “I’d been in the US 28 years but came back in 2006, prompted by all the work with Bryan,” he says. “I was doing an 11-hour commute from Los Angeles and it didn’t seem to make any sense.”
Solo albums, increasingly rootsy, included: 2002’s One Step Ahead Of The Blues, 2005’s Click Clack (an eclectic, bluesy set with a Captain Beefheart title track, Danny Thompson on bass and Ferry contributing harmonica), and Pearls from 20ll. “It’s not really intentionally rootsy but I guess if you stick at what you’re doing for 50 years, what you’re doing sounds rootsy!” grins Spedding.
There was also King Mob, uniting Spedding and Snips with ex-Pistol Glen Matlock and Pretender Martin Chambers. They made the album Force 9 before fragmenting.
His own Joyland in 2015 was his most impressive solo work in a while, his vocals sitting alongside those of both Ferry and Arthur Brown with contributions by everyone from Glen Matlock to Johnny Marr. Solo dates continue to come – he’s fronted a power trio with Jack Bruce’s son Malcolm on bass – when they can be fitted in. And he popped over to Spain to play with Scandinavian country chums the Piggyback Riders. And next year is fast booking out with a Bryan Ferry tour in spring and War Of The Worlds later in the year. Spring should also see the release of the next Sharks album, Dark Beatles/White Temptations, their fifth across 45 years, almost certainly with some live dates. One track, Kink Mess, can be heard at 3msmusic.com. Paul Cook is now Sharks’ full-time drummer, reconfirming the Pistols connection.
So how does Spedding see himself? A session player who puts out solo albums or as a solo performer who also plays with other people?
He thinks and then says: “A session musician to me is someone who shows up at the studio but that doesn’t happen much these days. I go over to Mike Batt’s place for a Katie Melua recording and we play like we would have done in the 70s, which is unusual. I can’t really call myself a session guy. I just do what I’ve always done. When I started there wasn’t a name for it. I wasn’t a session guy all the time, I wasn’t a side man all the time, I wasn’t even jazz or rock all the time, so I don’t know what you’d call it.
“I just keep doing whatever it is – someone must come up with a name for it. Just playing music I guess.” Chris Spedding – The RAK Years is out now on 7-Ts/Cherry Red
