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Ray Cordell and I are sitting next to Simon and the rest of the guys from Marshall at Stables MK. The 400-seater
Jim Marshall Auditorium is completely sold out with the standing balcony packed too.
Great anticipation, the lights dim and the sound of Wish You Were Mine fades in over the PA. Robin Trower walks on stage to rapturous applause fronting a brand new band.
Welcome Richard Watts and Chris Taggart!
Robin’s new sidemen are hardly strangers to the project. Richard Watts toured extensively with Robin in the United States, over a decade ago. His bass
playing and fabulous vocals feature on Robin’s ground-breaking Go My Way album. More recently, Chris Taggart kept time on three of the top tracks on the What Lies Beneath CD.
Tonight, the game-changer is the three-piece, a very exciting thing. It’s a format Robin knows well. It’s how he started his post-Procol career.
It’s the line-up he became best known for and which helped catapult him to superstar status. As we are about to find out, it’s also a format he absolutely revels in.
It’s the first time, these three
players have performed together in public. Which songs will they perform tonight?
The show brings a very well chosen selection of Trower hits and classics and runs close to the set list, delivered on the last
night of the 2010 tour, in Brighton.
Confession Midnight and Lady Love kick start the show with the accent on Chris Taggart’s driving drum lines. Playing across the kit, Chris pushes the tempo and dynamics of the music. It’s difficult to make comparisons as Chris is very much his own man. Yet do I detect a slight ripple of Bill Lordan’s swash-buckling cymbal style in there?
Now I may be known for getting a tad hysterical when it comes to Somebody Calling. For me, it is one of best ever Trower tunes, right up there with songs like No Time and A Tale Untold.
Special mention goes to Richard on becoming the very first musician to handle the bass and vocal
parts simultaneously on this Trower tune at a live show.
Think on. Back in ’77 when the band performed this number live, these parts were played by two people - Rustee Allen and James Dewar. Richard
handles the ‘krypton factor’ of a bass part with ease, his vocal, strong and assured. Somebody Calling, with the first extended outro of the night, certainly rocked
tonight.
Evidence of more ‘work in progress’ follows the heaven that is For Earth Below, a brand new song from the brand new band, an airing of The Strangest Thought. Now don’t quote me on the title. I’m guessing but it sounds like the chorus runs something like ‘I had the strangest thought when I heard your
name’.
It’s a fresh and lively track, something which would have been perfectly at home on The Playful Heart. Something tells me that it’s a natural fact that we’ll soon be appending the words ‘new CD’ to the strapline that is fast emerging from tonight’s show.
New tour, new format, new band, new sound …
Enjoy it, we most certainly will. Tonight, Robin, Richard and Chris added their names to the illustrious roster of Trower trios we have known and loved. Joyfully
for us, there’s so much more to come. Catch this band, while you can!
Set List: Confessin’ Midnight; Lady Love; Somebody Calling; For Earth Below; The Strangest
Thought; Twice Removed From Yesterday; Day of the Eagle; Bridge of Sighs; Rise Up Like The Sun; The Turning; Too Rolling Stoned; Little Bit of Sympathy. Encores: Not Inside Outside; Daydream.
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