READERS who caught my preview of John Mayall’s Anvil appearance may recall a slightly awkward telephone interview with an eighty year-old blues legend in L.A. who doesn’t like interviews.

As I arrived at the venue there was the vaguest sense of foreboding in anticipation of the great man asking if I was ‘that clown he spoke to on the phone’ but I needn’t have worried.

As the decidedly ageing crowd arrived, they found Mayall already on duty, selling his newest CD album from a stall. That’s how it works these days; a live performance doubles as a personal appearance. CD sales are important and public relations are, in the case of artists best-known for their work in previous eras, vital to the success of the tour.

Thus, totally alone at that moment and deep in thought about something, John Mayall shook the extended hand of the bloke who’d phoned him from Basingstoke.

He duly signed the LP sleeve that I’d brought along and at that moment, I noticed Paul Taylor heading in our direction and I summoned an impromptu introduction.

“When you first played here at the Haymarket Theatre in 1965, there was a local band on the bill with you called the Evil Eyes. This man played the drums for them...”

Actually, I don’t think Paul had joined them at that point but it made no difference. Mayall didn’t remember, nor seem to want to.

That very afternoon it had been announced that Cream bassist Jack Bruce had died at 71. I let the opportunity of asking John Mayall to reflect on one of so many of his side-men slip through my fingers (Bruce had played in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1965 and was in the line-up for at least one of the group’s shows for the Galaxy Club at Basingstoke Town Hall).

There was general surprise among the audience that Mayall didn’t make some mention of Bruce’s passing. We actually wondered whether he hadn’t been told.

To make matters worse, I also failed to show John Mayall the T-shirt that I had worn specially for the occasion. It depicts a man named Bob Hite and the words ‘the bear’. Mayall wrote ‘the Bear’ in honour of Hite, who was the frontman in the band Canned Heat.

Basingstoke Gazette:

During our awkward phone interview I had asked him about the song and had, perhaps foolishly, remarked that when I was a boy, I had heard it and believed that it was actually about a bear.

The eighty year-old blues legend at the end of the phone in L.A. had misunderstood and interjected: “No, no, it’s about a man called Bob Hite who was the singer in a group called Canned Heat”.

Oh, thanks John, I thought to myself. Thus another opportunity was wasted as a posse of album-purchasers arrived to shake his hand.

The action got underway with Mayall’s support band for his extensive tour, King King. My friend Richard Horner (a founder-member of Evil Eyes) had been at one of the earlier gigs of the tour and had said that King King were more impressive than Mayall’s ensemble.

On this night, it was about 50/50; both bands were excellent.

King King are fronted by chunky, kilt-clad guitarist/singer Alan Nimmo. He quickly established a rapport with the sizeable audience and they ran through a tight set of songs; mostly blues with the odd slice of country or mid-seventies Fleetwood Mac.

Basingstoke Gazette:

Though most of King King’s material is their own, two well-chosen covers stood out, Jealousy by fellow Glaswegian Frankie Miller and an Eric Clapton song called Old Love.

The latter number was truly remarkable. The band slowly turned their instruments down until there was no amplification at all, just Nimmo playing a beautiful solo on an unamplified electric guitar (a Strat if I remember correctly).

You would have heard a pin drop (or ‘land’, strictly speaking). They then reversed the process and gradually turned up again, building to a crescendo. I’d never seen or heard of such a thing before. You couldn’t do it at Sanctuary.

I stood next to Nimmo during the interval as he signed and sold King King’s current CD album. Successive customers asked him about ‘the one where they turned down’.

What is it like touring with John Mayall?

“He’s a friendly, chatty guy. He sometimes gets his keyboard and jams with us.”

I then impudently asked Alan whether Mayall had asked him to join his band. “Not yet”, he replied with a wry smile Mayall’s band plays the blues. It’s what they do. No excursions into alien territory, just twelve-bars of varying description, though nevertheless wide-ranging in terms of tempo and mood.

Mayall directed the four-piece group from a piano (centre front) sometimes strapping on an ancient Gretsch or blowing his harmonica in between his strong and familiar vocals.

His own guitar-work is ‘enthusiastic’ by comparison with his lead guitarist, Rocky Athas. Rocky is from Texas. His playing is brilliant as you would expect from the current successor to a position previously held by Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Coco Montoya and many others, but he’s not one for pyrotechnics; everything is straight out of the text book.

Bass player Greg Rzab, from Chicago, cut a slight figure on stage. Most of the time his playing was simple and solid but he cut loose during a fabulous call and response duet with drummer Jay Davenport (also from Chicago) during a rendition of Parchment Farm which originally appeared on the 1966 Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton LP commonly called the Beano Album because Eric is shown reading a copy of the kids’ comic on the sleeve.

The remainder of the set was made up of songs from the intervening forty-eight years, Nothing to do with Love, Do I Please You?, Speak of the Devil, That’s All Right (Jimmy Rogers), Walking on Sunset, So Many Roads (Otis Rush) and the eco-conscious Nature’s Disappearing.

They treated us to Freddie King’s Hideaway as an encore.

As the crowd thinned, I found myself talking to Greg Rzab who convinced me that I needed to buy his solo CD which includes contributions from Clapton, Buddy Guy and Jeff Beck.

It was £20 but I chiselled him down to £12 as that was as much as I could find on my person. At that moment another opportunity arose to show John Mayall my ‘Bear’ T-shirt. He didn’t seem that moved or impressed by it and assumed (wrongly) that I wanted him to sign it.