Chris Spedding - Pearls - 2014

Chris Spedding’s new album, ‘Pearls’, appears with the warning on its sleeve: “Some of these tracks may contain jazz, rock, Americana and/or other less well-defined genres.”

Spedding, who is now 67, is possibly Britain’s best known session guitarist. In a professional career that has expanded fifty years, he has worked with musicians such as Jack Bruce, Harry Nilsson, Tom Waits, Joan Armatrading, Paul McCartney, Roy Harper, Bryan Ferry and John Cale. He has also worked regularly as a producer, most famously producing the Sex Pistols’ first demos in 1976. Alongside this he has played in various bands including 1970’s cult rock ‘n’ roll outfit Sharks and run a sporadic, but eventful solo career, which gave him a Top 20 hit with ‘Motorbikin’ in 1975 and has seen him release over fifteen albums.

‘Pearls’, which was recorded in Spedding’s own home studio, features contributions from well-known session players, bassist Herbie Flowers (T. Rex, Sky, David Bowie, Lou Reed and George Harrison) and drummer Andy Newmark (John Lennon, Sly and the Family Stone, Pink Floyd, Steve Winwood), and also multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Glasson, who fronts her own jazz outfit the Charlotte Glasson Band.

Tracks such as the opening number, Ry Cooder-style anti-love song ‘No Love’, and the title track will be familiar to fans of Spedding’s last three Americana blues-influenced albums, ‘One Step Ahead of the Blues’ (2002), ‘Click Clack’ (2005) and ‘It’s Now or Never’ (2007). Several songs on ‘Pearls’ are co- or solo writes by Sharks’ former frontman “Snips” (Steve Parsons), and numbers such as the meandering pop of ‘Temple Heath’ and the sleazy garage rock ‘n’ roll of ‘Abuse’ maintain that band’s reputation for edginess and lyrical viciousness.

Other tracks are more of a radical departure, and find Spedding returning to his early roots for the first time since the last 1950s and early 1960s when, as a young guitarist, he fronted his own jazz group, the Chris Spedding Trio. There are three covers of Muddy Waters’ ‘Louisiana Blues’, Gerry Mulligan‘s ‘Cherry’ and the Jimmy Giuffre 3’s ‘The Train and the River’, the latter two of which are instrumental jazz classics. Some of Spedding’s own compositions such as ‘Air Guitar Woogie’ and ‘Dripping’s’, both of which are also again instrumental, and vocal track ‘Rhumba’ are also traditionally jazz-influenced and in a similar vein. (pennyblackmusic.co.uk)