..Love. Perhaps it is fitting that in 2009 Spector was convicted of the second-degree murder of actress Lana Clarkson and is serving a prison sentence of nineteen years to life. There was a dude who surely changed the perception of popular music but just as surely believed his own publicity citing him as a genius.
Mick Jagger was baffled as to how ultimately somebody could be happy just singing ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ but some of the mostly black women ‘background’ singers were clearly very happy doing just that, as are, no doubt, the famous artists they perform with and help make sound so good. Nonetheless it’s poignant when somebody with the obvious talent of Merry Clayton tries to break out and become a solo artist - and then fails significantly because, well, nobody can quite put their finger on what ingredient it is that she’s missing.
But missing it she is, and I imagine that it’s quite difficult and possibly even demeaning to slip back into the slightly out-of-focus background world where you were once so happily ensconced with your dignity intact after you’ve tried and failed to crack it as a solo artist.

I was very happy as a young chorister/choir boy to be in the background singing with all the lads in the cantoris ranks, but my musical ear was too good and I was marked for church choir stardom by the choir master/organist Charles Foster Browne (Fossy) very early on in the piece. I rose through the ranks of pre-pubescent angels at a meteoric place and was singing solos in the first six months, but perhaps something of the rock & roll rebel was percolating inside me and I got into trouble for making the decani lads opposite snicker and giggle during a service by wiggling my ears – first simultaneously and then one at a time.
Anyway, by the time I left the choir, (rather ignominiously with an inguinal hernia), I’d had enough of the rigors of church singing and cried off formal singing of any sort by claiming I didn’t want to damage my vocal cords while my voice was breaking.
In fact, my voice’s transition was effected without any drama at all, but life at Christ’s College was demanding enough without any extra-curricular choral singing and anyway, I’d just begun to cherish my adolescent role as a natural-born slacker.
Having said that, I’ve since led all the bands I’ve been in apart from Ross Wilson’s The Party Machine and the Sons of the Vegetal Mother, but I believe I’ve been a fairly benign dictator and I’ve always thought of my fellow musicians as my political equals as well as quite often my musical superiors and entitled to put their view before I get my way.
Still, it’s nice to slip into other bands on occasions as I’ve been fortunate to be asked to do more than a couple of times by Ross Wilson, for instance. The very recent foray with Chain was great fun of course, as well as instructive, especially regarding band dynamics and their Chainy ways of doing things. Maria was fascinated as to how this merging was actually done, but when you’re dealing with blokes roundabout your own age who’ve been in the music business for forty or fifty years, ego is not going to be a problem for a start.
I was interested to discover that I could still get jittery about playing blues standards, some of which I’ve been playing for a very large number of years. How could I get the riff for Crossroads wrong? It happened at the Gateway Hotel with Chain on Saturday night. The audience is still trying to work out what was going on.
Chain’s men of steel, Manning, Dubois and Draper ploughed on as though nothing had happened and even managed some wan, reassuring smiles at the end. And, of course, most of the audience didn’t really know I’d stuffed it up so comprehensively.
Maybe those nuances of difference you get when playing with someone other than your regular team were enough to throw me into a tizz. Or maybe, given Chain’s low-key dress sense, I’d gone too far by electing to wear my shiny, pink shirt that night. Come to think of it, Matt did say it deserved its own website.

*Cantoris (Latin: "of the cantor") is the side of a church choir occupied by the Cantor. From the perspective of the congregation facing the altar, which by convention is regarded as liturgical East, this would be on the left (liturgical North) side.