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My story: Just One Fan In Olde Blighty!
I suppose the first time Robin Trower’s music grabbed me was in
the early part of 1975. Just blown away by the band’s ‘For Earth Below’
album having been alerted to it by reading the headlines in the then UK weekly music press titles such as ‘Melody Maker’ and ‘Sounds’.
Living in Letchworth Garden City, 35 miles north of
London, we’d (school mates Colin, Melvin, Kevin, Steve and Tony from Willian School) spend the weekends in local record shops (remember them?) and or concert venues (there used to be so many of them too!)
I remember we’d buy chips and drinks from the shops on Ivel Court and then crash out in Tony’s front room floor to take in the full glory of the complete album.
The fabulous design for the LP cover by Funky Paul Olsen made its mark too.
Of course, we were rock stars in our own right at that time, or so we
thought. We’d gleefully try and play some of the album’s more catchy tunes like ‘It’s only money’, ‘Fine Day’ and ‘Alethea’ when the band, at that time called Dynamo, rehearsed on Sundays at Melvin
and Kevin’s Mum and Dad’s Crossways café on Works Road.
We couldn’t play them properly then and, after a time, we gave up. But I never really lost the sense of harmony that Robin poured into
his music.
It was always exciting to discover what stunts he would pull next as the chords got progressively more dense and complicated.
It always seemed like Robin’s logic would run along the lines
of something like “why play a straight E minor chord when you can play an E minor ninth instead?”
Of course, I’m sure in real life, it was never ever that calculated.
James Dewar
‘on vocals’ was something of a cult figure to us young would-be musicians in those days and I remember at the time we’d go out of our way to find the records he’d crop up as guest backing vocalist – UFO’s ‘Force it’, Frankie Miller’s ‘The Rock’ etc.
To this day, he is still for me the greatest voice in rock ever! All those recordings live on today, gigantic, emotional, timeless.
So it was in March 1976, we got the chance to see the band at
the cavernous Wembley Empire Pool, now the Wembley Arena.
A young north-easterner who had recently hit the pop charts, John Miles
and his band took the support slot. As it turned out, he proved to be a formidable guitarist in his own right, on the night, and in subsequent hit album releases.
It was a short UK promo tour for the
‘live’ album. A couple of days before the tour started, Robin was the guest on John Peel’s BBC
radio show. It was a famous encounter, packed with comments of surprise and subtle understatement.
The tour heralded the release of ‘Long Misty Days’ which would appear six months later. On the
night at Wembley, I vaguely remember we missed out on ‘The Fool and Me’ due to some effects problem, as Robin ushered his technician on stage to try and sort the problem.
And so it grew from
thereon in for me. It seemed that at every step of the way, there’d be a new Trower release to lighten my day.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table at Colin’s house in Fleetwood, Letchworth listening
to the Friday rock show on the radio for an exclusive preview of the then new album ‘In City Dreams’. The opening track ‘Somebody calling’ caught us all by surprise.
It remains, for me, one of the best things the band ever put out on record. Why o why the record company never released ‘Sweet Wine of Love’
as a UK single is beyond me, of course we all thought we knew better than the industry experts.
‘It’s for You’
got the red vinyl treatment a year later but by then of course it was too late in England, the punk thing had well and truly killed off rock 45s.
’Dreams’ was very important to me personally. In the
autumn of ’77, I’d moved out of home to live in student digs in Richmond, Surrey.
The superb Funky Paul promo poster for the album was given pride of place in my room. I practically wore the vinyl
out as I sought to calculate every word and every chord from listening to the record as I avoided knuckling down to essays on Mahler and other such musical legends
The title track ‘In City Dreams’ brought
back visions of my home town, Letchworth Garden City although I could never make out whether James Dewar’s vocals were prompted by Glasgow or Los Angeles.
Robin’s musical inspiration for this
number was Maurice Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. It was probably one of the few European influences he’d admit to, or so I suspected.
It flows majestically to my mind, building in intensity with each
verse, layer upon layer of orchestration, quite theatrical but totally impossible to ever play ‘live’.
’Caravan to Midnight’ arrived the following summer. The critics here in England slated it but, of
course, we all thought differently. This time it was ‘I’m Out to Get You’
that got us. Robin had anticipated the marvellous ‘open string harmonics chime bells’ intro of this track in his live rendition of ‘Somebody calling’ on the ‘Dreams’ tour in the States.
Alan Howard, 9 March 2005
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