The Buddhas Of Suburbia
In the summer of 1969 The Action emerged from its Mod pupae a brightly coloured hippie butterfly. Now calling themselves Mighty Baby they had been transformed by pot and jazz, both mainstays of the Modernist scene. Ian Whiteman introduced them to jazz while new boy Martin Stone turned them onto jazz cigarettes. Gone were the sharp Mod anthems that got the Marquee regulars dancing and in came long, improvised numbers that their original audience found downright perplexing.
Ditching their original manager, Rikki Farr, they signed with Blackhill Enterprises. They were, however, far from happy hippies. Blackhill either didn’t know what to do with them or didn’t care. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Their former roadie, John Curd, offered to manage them and issue an album on his newly formed Head Records. “John’s like us you see,” said Roger Powell. “He’s a bit of a looner but he’s got a serious side as well. He’s worked so hard to get the company off the ground and he’s always been very fair with us. It was him who re-christened us Mighty Baby.”
The new name couldn’t have been more appropriate. They were a band reborn; full of life and with a rare gift of esprit. Their debut album, produced by Mod mentor, Guy Stevens, mixed an Eastern vibe with acid-rock and country overtones. Unfortunately bad karma continued to dog the group. Because four of its members were still contracted to Blackhill it threatened to place an injunction on the album and block its release. Curd had no option other than to pay off Blackhill so he could get the record out. When it was eventually issued the album sold poorly. This was due, in part, to Curd being unable to promote the record on account of being sentenced to three years at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for possession of cannabis.
With their manager banged up, Stone secured a deal with Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon label to issue their second album A Jug Of Love. Reflecting their continued interest in improvisation, it also revealed Stone’s growing interest in country music. The guitarist had developed a crisp country tone after seeing The Byrds at Middle Earth. “I was hooked,” said Stone. “I wanted to be a country and western musician. Fuck pop music! Eventually we turned country rock, although not really enough for my tastes.” Stone’s playing certainly hints at the full-on country styling he’d perfect with Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers. But Jug Of Love isn’t a country rock album, it has a baroque, meditative feel that points to a growing interest in the spiritual rather than the material. With the exception of Bam King, they developed an interest in Sufism and joined the Dervish order.
Despite Stones’ growing interest in country music, Mighty Baby continued performing long improvised pieces whenever the mood took them. When they appeared at the Glastonbury Fayre in June ’71 they played for three hours and finished with a 16-minute song ‘A Blanket In My Muesli’ that had developed from jamming on John Coltrane’s ‘India’. Issued on the Glastonbury Fayre triple album, it was a country mile from the down home rootsy country-blues that Stone would later record with Phil Litham.
Their devotion to Islam was the beginning of the end. “That killed Mighty Baby really,” Stone said. “We couldn’t just turn up at a gig where everyone’s swigging Newcastle Brown. We weren’t saying ‘You’re going to Hell... or anything: it just seemed like a world that was not relative to what we decided we were interested in, and so hence the end of Mighty Baby.”
It wasn’t long before Stone’s thoughts once again turned to music and his friend Phil Lithman. “After a while of doing next to nothing, I bought a guitar again, wrote Phil a letter and said ‘come back’,” Stone recalled. Lithman had been working with the Residents in America but dropped everything to return home and begin jamming with Stone on old country songs. “Before long I decided that this is really what I wanted to do. Originally we didn’t think about a band really, because Phil had gone through a personal musical fad — he’d gone back into straight bluegrass music. So we didn’t contemplate a band as such as it seemed easier to make a record. I met the people from Revelation and they liked us, so we made an album. So one day, fed up with being a hypocrite, I said I’m quitting all this: let’s start a group. That was the start of Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers”.
When it came time to record their debut album they called on Nick Lowe, Bob Andrews and Billy Rankin to flesh out their sonic signature. Issued in 1972, Kings Of The Robot Rhythm companioned the Brinsleys stripped-down aesthetic, right down to the washed out colours and textured card used for the Barney Bubbles designed sleeve. It was the quintessence of the down home aesthetic. Described by Stone as an “extremely chaotic and under-produced” album, it sounded like an old Carter Family record recorded on wax cylinders. It reeked of utility and dusty Mullard valves. The look, feel and combined weight of the thick vinyl record and heavy-duty sleeve reinforce the idea that it had somehow dropped through a hole in the space-time continuum and into the racks of your local record shop.
As wildly out of step as they were, Stone and Lithman were convinced the time was right to expand the duo and become a full-blown band. “The Brinsleys were on a couple of tracks, which gave it enough push to make us decide to go rock ’n’ roll.” says Stone. The process of acquiring musicians began with Stone and Lithman asking friends and acquaintances for recommendations. Jo-Ann Kelly, who sang on the album, suggested a multi-instrumentalist called Keith who played banjo for Country Fever. “He came round and we realised straight away that he was too good for us,” says Stone. “He was a bluegrass player, whereas we were old rock ’n’ roll blues freaks who liked bluegrass music.”
Stone remembered meeting another banjo player called Paul Bailey and set about tracking him down. “I re-introduced myself to try and click everything into place for him, and then I asked him to join the group. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t play banjo anymore’. So I said, ‘OK, I’m just living round the corner, come by sometime’. I went back home and tried to think of who else we could try, but Paul came by and said, ‘I had a go on the banjo last night and I can still do it’. So that was that, he joined on banjo.”
All that remained was to find a rhythm section. By chance Stone met fellow musician Robin Scott, who he’d played with a few years earlier, and who was looking for a record deal. Stone suggested he visit Revelation Records and see if they might be interested. Scott turned up with his bass player, Paul Riley, and Stone suggested they join forces. Scott’s musical vision didn’t dovetail with Stone’s, but Riley’s did and he signed up as the forth member of the group.
The four-piece Chilli Willi debuted at the Roundhouse supporting either the Pink Fairies or Hawkwind, memories appear a little hazy. It wasn’t long before they headed to the pub rock circuit and introduced London’s drinking community to their unique brand of Western Swing.
Although Lithman wanted to continue as an acoustic outfit, the rest of the group wanted to introduce amplification and that meant they needed a drummer. Paul Riley knew just the chap. He called up the drummer from Robin Scott’s old group, Pete Thomas, and asked if he’d like to join the Chilli Willi. He did and with the addition of Thomas on drums the line-up was complete.
Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers worked the live circuit like it was going out of fashion. In January 1974 they supported T. Rex on the Truck Off tour. Not that it helped because the audience was only there to watch, and in this case scream at, the headline attraction. Signing with the semi-independent Mooncrest label and the Charisma Agency the group headed for Chalk Farm Studios to begin work on their new album. They decided to take the low-key pub rock approach and produce themselves, something their record company frowned upon once it heard what they’d been up to. It wasn’t necessarily that the recordings weren’t up to scratch, but it was thought that a named producer would give the album a little more gravitas. Several well known people were approached but few showed any interest. That was until ex-Monkee Mike Nesmith suggested he was the man for the job and signed up to produce the record.
On paper Nesmith looked ideal. But he wasn’t the chirpy, carefree pop star who’d appeared on TV. “He turned out to be a fervent Christian Science believer, had a Bible on the mixing desk and was generally the most po-faced and humourless producer we’d ever encountered,” explained Stone.
The situation wasn’t helped by the Willis know-it-all attitude. Having started producing the album themselves they thought they knew best. “We fiddled around with his mixes after he’d gone,” said Stone. “But he was right and we were wrong. His mixes were much better than ours. I realise now that we should have listened to him.”
Things came to a head when some one in the group took exception to something Nesmith said. “Professionally, perhaps, this should have made no difference to us at all, but it did – specifically to Martin and Phil,” said Riley. Nesmith quit and returned to America leaving the group without a producer and the album unfinished.
Having blown out the only producer willing to work with them, there was nothing left but to finish the album as they’d begun it; without him. Like all good hippies they headed for the country to get their heads together and finish the record. “We took Ronnie Lane’s mobile down to Cornwall and recorded in the cowshed. We had Ron Nevison, who worked on Pet Sounds, as engineer/producer. That was a lot more fun,” recalls Stone. Riley, however, remembers differently. “Nevison was a sports fan and brought a portable television with him. It soon became apparent that tape would only roll in moments stolen from Ron’s busy viewing schedule.”
Mooncrest Records poured all it had into the group‘s Bongos Over Balham album. Full page adverts designed by Barney Bubbles appeared in several music papers and the album sold a respectable 16,000 copies. The album was also promoted with a high profile tour. ‘The Naughty Rhythms Tour’ would feature Kokomo, Dr. Feelgood and Chilli Willi. But while the tour was the making of Dr. Feelgood, it was all too much for Chilli Willi, who decided to call it a day. Lithman had became very disillusioned at his group’s lack of success. “When you get a view close to the top you kind of think what it is all leading to, and what do we do when we get there. I mean the interest just goes,” he said. “You’ve built something up and there’s nothing more for you to do than maintain it. It was just boredom on behalf of everyone. We didn’t want to spend years of our lives maintaining some illusionary position that we have close to the top, and the idea for me is to keep going onwards and upwards.” By the time the tour ended, Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers were no more and the Pub Rock scene that had given it life was itself close to the end.
Remixed and extracted from A Howlin’ Wind: Pub Rock and the Birth Of New Wave.
Thanks to Martin Stone and Pete Thomas.
Dedicated to Phil Litham and Martin Stone.
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