CHRIS SPEDDING
Chris Spedding (born Peter Robinson; 17 June 1944) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and record producer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, Spedding is best known for his studio session work; and, by the early-1970’s, he had become one of the most sought-after session guitarists in England, meaning that Spedding has played on and produced countless albums, and singles. Spedding has also been a member of eleven rock bands: The Battered Ornaments, Frank Ricotti Quartet, King Mob, Mike Batt and Friends, Necessaries, Nucleus, Ricky Norton, Sharks, The Stax Pistols, Trigger, and The Wombles. (More from Wikipedia)
A long time ago in a city far, far away . . . well, okay, it was Christmas 1977 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (I always had trouble fitting that loooong city and state on various forms). We Winfree kids often bought records for each other as presents, and I guess my tastes were already getting tough to read. My sister Julie Winfree (now Julie W. Kovasckitz) told me that she went to the local record store and asked them what album was the most “b-e-e-a-a-r-r-r-w, w-e-e-a-a-r-r-r-r-w” in the store. In case you can’t figure that out, that is my cruddy impression of a loud guitar all spelled out as best I can. It was often just shortened to “bow wow” music.
Well, she hit the jackpot: The album she gave me for Christmas that year was Hurt by Chris Spedding. Oh, did I love that record – I played that LP all the time and just about wore it out. When I started making compilation cassette tapes for myself some years later, one of my favorite series, Wild Wild Women (nothing but woman-fronted rock bands – the Volume 2 in that series was the best one that I ever put together) was named after one of the songs on the album. The album cover is a black and white shot of Spedding striking a guitar chord with some day-glo colors overlaying it, and with more day-glo lettering on the back cover. Looking back on it, Spedding must have released this album as his response to the punk rock movement that was just starting to take hold, since loud colors were one of the hallmarks of punk rock cover art early on.
I got several more albums by Spedding over the years and was never disappointed, though none ever topped Hurt. One in particular, his 1986 album called Enemy Within, is really quite different from Hurt but no less wonderful (it is no exaggeration to say that Chris Spedding has played just about every kind of rock music that there is); the ad that prompted me to buy it by mailorder had a short but perfect description: “Moody, under-stated work”. A compilation album called Ready Spedding Go that I cleaned up from the Katrina mud not long ago ends with a cut that I think is called “Guitar Jamboree”, imagining a gathering of a dozen or more of the great rock guitarists – and Spedding did a brief impression of all of their playing styles to end the song: Quite a tour de force. That compilation album also includes his only hit song, even in England, “Motor Bikin’” (from about the same time period as Hurt).
Chris Spedding is well known in his home country of England (at least by other musicians) but, sadly, has never really taken hold over here. Even the so-called experts don’t seem to get him right; Allmusic’s review of Enemy Within (talk about under-appreciated – they only give the record 2½ stars out of 5; of course, Hurt only got 3 stars) shows the songwriter as being “Speeding” instead of “Spedding”, except for the opening track “Hologram”, which I believe he co-wrote with Marshall Crenshaw. Also, I seem to recall that this album is actually a re-issue of an early self-titled solo album, but there is not a hint of that on this write-up; I could be wrong about that though.
Chris Spedding is also one of the most versatile British session guitarists; like Bo Diddley before him, he played violin first before switching to the electric guitar. Spedding has played with a lot of the English heavy hitters, including early work with a band called Pete Brown and His Battered Ornaments. They played at a famous Hyde Park concert in July 1969 that also included the Rolling Stones, Blind Faith and, at the very beginning of their career, King Crimson. When Pete Brown was later pushed out by basically everyone else in the band, Spedding became the front man in the Battered Ornaments; and his fame began to grow.
Spedding went on to play with Cream bassist Jack Bruce (including his first solo album in 1969, Songs for a Tailor) and former Manfred Mann singer Mike D’Abo, plus a host of others, from Elton John to John Cale to Brian Eno to Harry Nilsson (including one of his best known albums, Nilsson Schmilsson). In 1973, Andy Fraser, the former bass player for Free (“All Right Now”) brought Spedding in as the lead guitarist for his short-lived band Sharks.
In 1978, Chris Spedding was a key musician in one of the most ambitious concept albums of all time (and the best selling British concert/cast album ever), Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. Actor Richard Burton handled the narration, and the musicians are a virtual Who’s Who of the British rock scene of that era: Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, bass guitarist Herbie Flowers (that’s him playing the prominent bass line on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”), David Essex (“Rock On”), and actress/vocalist Julie Covington; she and Essex had been appearing together in early performances of the rock musical Evita. The album tells the story pretty much as The War of the Worlds was written by H. G. Wells (much of Burton’s narration is word-for-word from the novel) decades before Steven Spielberg’s film basically did the same; I consider War of the Worlds to be one of Spielberg’s best movies and certainly his most disturbing.
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Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I am looking over some mailorder sheet or other (usually it is Bomp!, but I have ordered from plenty more over the years). I spot a compilation album called Disorder by a first-wave Canadian punk rock band called THE UGLY that was remastered by Chris Spedding in 1995, and I had to order it just on the strength of Spedding’s having a hand in it.
The first thing I noticed was how clear the sound is. I am used to the lo-fi quality of early punk records that normally ranges from muddy to unintelligible (and the last several tracks on Disorder are like that), but there was none of that on the main tape from which this compilation was taken. Chris Spedding did yeoman’s work to really bring out every last wrinkle of this band’s work.
So why was Chris Spedding called in anyway to clean up the music for this CD? Well, as it turns out, Spedding was the producer on the first demos made by Sex Pistols, back in May 1976 – the Ramones album that had also fired up the Ugly was released in the previous month.
The Sex Pistols demos have recently been reissued on CD; according to Spedding though: “They are not the same mixes that I did. Dave Goodman, the other producer besides Chris Thomas, went in and re-did them and added a lot of echo to them and added stuff to them. . . . The mixes I did sound better. I’m quite proud of the Sex Pistols demos, especially when compared to their other later recordings. . . . Part of why they ([manager Malcolm] McLaren and the Pistols ) didn’t like my demo was because I like R&B. . . . The whole point of my demo – to prove they could play – that’s what I pushed. . . . And that’s what McLaren wanted people to think: that they couldn’t play, that was just an idea, a way of making all this anarchy stuff happen.”
(November 2011)
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Items: Chris Spedding
