Rooster

After far too long, I was so much looking forward to seeing the Rambert Dance Company, but I’ve been under the weather with a nasty cough this past week, and decided that Debussy and the Rolling Stones and others didn’t need to be shared in duet with my chest infection.

So we had dinner together in Oxford – Sophie, who used to work with Rambert, and Dora, who loves her dance (this being her introduction at eleven, nearly twelve, to the professional contemporary variety) and me – and I left them at the theatre and caught the train back to a quiet, dark home in King’s Sutton.

Rooster. That was the headline name of Rambert’s show. It’s a series of eight classic Stones songs, opening with the great blues from 1964, “Little Red Rooster”, all wailing slide guitar and harmonica, choreographed in 1991 by Rambert’s artistic director at that time, Christopher Bruce, and a popular favourite for the company ever since.

Sad to miss it in the flesh, I played it on YouTube when I got home. Such an elegant transformation of the song. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bTW8tPL6qY

Then I played the Stones version of the same song with the sublime guitar-playing of an unannounced Eric Clapton. Simply amazing music-making: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blfy4XV1kRQ

Sorry you’re missing them in Australia and New Zealand.

On not being Eric Clapton

Playing with the Idle Hands in the mid-1960s was an exciting and joyful experience. We had plenty of work. Much was around our north London base (Hampstead, Highgate, Golders Green…), where we played well-paid birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs and so on for the offspring of wealthy parents. Quite frequently, it seemed, the police would show up in the early hours of the morning following complaints from neighbours about the noise level. Not surprising, I guess, given that we often played in a marquee in daddy’s garden.

The rest consisted of regular (but miserably compensated) club gigs – mostly the Witches Cauldron of blessed memory in Belsize Park, and the wonderful Marquee in Wardour Street, Soho. Alongside the slave-labour wages in those clubs, there was always the chance that we might get spotted and be given fabulous recording contracts.

One evening, after our set at the Marquee, I settled down with a beer to listen to the headline act – John Mayall’s Blues Breakers. As usual, good, I thought. But not especially so. The Idle Hands was a pretty good band too.

Then, in the middle of their set, on slouched a young guy with longer hair, shoulders hunched, back to the audience. He plugged in, twiddled a bit, turned round, and took off.

It was Clapton. Eric. Slowhand. God.

This was a kind of virtuosity so far out of my league that it persuaded me that I should no longer be dedicating my life to becoming a career rock-musician.

Maybe there was some other way in which I might excel. But what?