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The Herald Scotland
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
This Scottish rock trio shared a dressing room with Hendrix
The band's two Sunday shows there, on the evening of May 7, 1967, saw Hendrix, who had already tasted UK Top Ten chart success with Hey Joe and Purple Haze, assaulting his amplifier with his guitar while, out of sight of the cheering audience, a diminutive roadie struggled to keep the speakers upright. Sharing the bill – and Jimi's dressing-room – that night was a powerhouse trio from Scotland, called 1-2-3. They consisted of Billy Ritchie on Hammond organ and guitar, Harry Hughes on drums, and Ian Ellis on bass guitar. Ritchie and Hughes were just 20, Ellis a year older. For a band that had made its debut at Falkirk's La Bamba only the previous November, 1-2-3 had made stunning progress. In London, they had impressed the manager of the Marquee venue after playing a mere half of one song at an audition. The venue's newsletter remarked that the band had created 'an entirely new sound in 'pop group music''. Jimi Hendrix was supported by 1-2-3 in 1967 (Image: PA) Their subsequent residency at the Marquee was a series of riotous affairs, with half of the audience loving them and the other half taking an active dislike. Fellow musicians such as Greg Lake, Robert Fripp and Keith Emerson watched them play, however, and were impressed. Epstein was, too, to the point that he signed them to his NEMS Enterprises management company. The Saville Theatre gigs in May 1967, then, were another step forward for 1-2-3. The concert programme (copies of which are for sale online at eyebrow-raising prices) noted that they had a wide-ranging repertoire dominated by standards arranged in modern jazz style" and that NEMS would shortly be releasing plans for a debut album release). Not everyone shared such upbeat assessments of 1-2-3, however. Derek Boltwood, a writer on the Record Mirror music weekly, wrote in a review: 'It seems to be all the rage for groups to have a line-up of only three people. There were two such groups at the Saville last week — The 1-2-3, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience — the 1-2-3 should take a lesson from Jimi Hendrix — you've got to be very good musicians if there are only three of you to make the sound'. Someone who took umbrage at this was a young man named David Bowie, who was about to release his debut album. He had been friends with Billy for a while, having heard their adventurous version of one of his earliest songs, I Dig Everything. And it was Billy who introduced him to Hendrix at the Saville. Not long after Boltwood's review appeared, Bowie bumped into the band at the Marquee and told them that he had written an indignant reply to Record Mirror. His letter spoke of 'three thistle- and haggis-voiced bairns who had the audacity to face a mob of self-opinionated with a brand of unique pop music which, because of its intolerance of mediocrity, floated as would a Hogarth cartoon in the Beano …' The story of 1-2-3 would evolve further – a change of name to Clouds, the release of three albums, and high-profile tours, but for a variety of reasons the trio never received the acclaim their musicianship and ambitions deserved. In later years. however, they have been rediscovered and favourably reassessed. Ellis and Hughes had been in a Bathgate-based group, The Premiers, when they first came across Ritchie, who was already renowned as an expert on the Hohner organ and was capable of playing front and centre rather than on the side of the stage – a decidedly unusual arrangement for the time. At length, the three formed 1-2-3. The first rehearsal, as Billy wrote in his revealing memoir, The ABC of 1-2-3: The True Story, 'was the best musical experience of my life. We all knew we had hit on something special. '1-2-3 was, I believe, one of the finest bands ever to emerge in popular music. It was a tragedy that the band, in that form, never recorded. 1-2-3 wasn't as polished or as powerful as Clouds later became, but what it lacked in experience, it more than made up for in soul and inspiration… Clouds at the 1971 Reading Festival. Photo courtesy of Billy Ritchie (Image: unknown) 'The band', he added, 'was rooted in blues and jazz and pop principles that were not only musical gold dust, but a godsend to all who took from it, and that band would still sound unique today… there really hasn't been a band like 1-2-3 before or since'. A good example of their boundary-stretching work is their version of Paul Simon's song, America, before it had even been released on Simon and Garfunkel's 1968 studio album, Bookends. Rewritten by Billy to include new time signatures 'and as much scope as possible for the three of us to express the song in every way', it showed what the trio were capable of; it was 'Prog before there was such a thing' They also reworked a very early Bowie song, I Dig Everything, even dropping a snippet of Bach into the middle section. A recording made at the Marquee can be listened to on YouTube. Epstein certainly liked 1-2-3, but his sudden death at the age of 32 in late August 1967, just a few months after he had signed them, rendered their immediate future uncertain. Impresario Robert Stigwood, who had just merged his own company with NEMS, took control of their career, but his priority was the career of a promising young act, the Bee Gees. His relationship with 1-2-3 did not last long, and the band and NEMS parted company. Soon, however, they came into contact with Terry Ellis, of the Ellis-Wright agency, who became their manager and agent. When Clouds's debut album, The Clouds Scrapbook, was released in August 1969, tracks such as The Carpenter, I'll Go Girl, Scrapbook and Waiter, There's Something in My Soup all played superbly to the band's individual and collective musical gifts. Today, writes Billy, Scrapbook is regarded as a really good album, one that attracted rave reviews at the time; 'it was', he observes, 'a strange mixture of pop songs, muso playing, and flashes of what would become progressive rock. For me, Waiter … is the best piece of work on there, as close to the bridge between Beatles pop and progressive rock as you will ever hear'. Promotional material by Island Records, issued in advance of the album's release, said: "It would be nice if we could just tell people that Clouds are an extraordinarily talented group playing exciting music in a totally original style". However, it continued, "mental barriers are thrown up against anything new and uncategorised and we are forced to be sneaky and use an easily accepted superhype method of attracting attention to Clouds and their album 'Scrapbook' - again, not what one would expect to hear. Clouds have successfully utilised all their talents to present a varied piece off aural entertainment. Presenting something new, which you believe in, is always something of a crusade, although always most rewarding. So watch Clouds tonight, listen to their album and well ... JOIN THE CRUSADE". Clouds on tour, pictured with friends. Photo courtesy of Billy Ritchie (Image: unknown) Clouds now began to enjoy to a new level of public exposure. They gigged around Europe with the Island Records Tour alongside Jethro Tull and Ten Years After (including a memorable gig at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1969), and the Bath Festival of Blues the following month, headlined by Led Zeppelin, The Nice and others. They played prestigious venues in the States, including the Fillmore West in San Francisco, New York's Fillmore East and (alongside the Stooges) Los Angeles' Whisky-a-Go-Go. In Montreal, they shared the bill with Van Morrison and Johnny Winter. Every time, they delivered a storming set that often put other acts in the shade. In June 1970 Billboard magazine, reviewing a gig at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom noted enthusiastically: 'On the basis of its showing here June 5, Clouds will be a giant. The group is a trio from Scotland that drew a standing ovation on the basis of its hard-driving sound that never lets up ... The group is young, talented ..." There was a second Clouds album, Up Above Our Heads (1970), which was issued only in the States, and finally, that same year, Watercolour Days – 'a beautiful piece of rock orchestration with piano, organ, harpsichord, guitars, mouth organ, drums and violins', said Florida's St Petersburg Evening Independent. But Chrysalis – the record label eventually established by Ellis – was, in Billy's telling, more concerned with Jethro Tull, another band on their roster, and made little or no attempt to promote Watercolour Days. Disillusioned, Clouds broke up in October 1971. Discussions continue to this day after the effect that 1-2-3 had on music at the time. Many fans take the view that 'prog' – progressive rock – was influenced at the outset by 1-2-3. As one fan argues on the progarchives site: 'Many British musicians would strongly argue that UK Prog began with Billy Ritchie and his band 1-2-3. Their residency in late '66 and early '67 at the Marquee introduced musicians as diverse as Jon Anderson, Jeff Lynne, Deep Purple, David Bowie and Keith Emerson to the idea of complex orchestrations played in extended works'.
The Guardian
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Everyone knew who he was: James Hamilton, the ‘eccentric aristo' who catalysed British club culture
Norman Cook can remember the first time he met James Hamilton very clearly. 'He was enormous,' he laughs. 'Enormous and very well-spoken, called everyone 'dear boy', quite camp. He looked so … unlikely. Not a party animal, not into anything apart from dance music and the vibe and the culture of it all. Not interested in being cool, he was like, 'it's OK to be nerdy as long as you really know your music', but I think he really enjoyed the fact that every club he went to, everyone would know who he was and they were all going to tell him some gossip or give him a record.' Moreover, Cook remembers their meeting because James Hamilton had caused him a whole world of trouble. It was the 80s, a decade before Cook became Fatboy Slim, superstar DJ and multi-platinum producer of countless dancefloor hits: he was still the bass player in indie band the Housemartins, who had quietly put out his first solo single – 'a kind of cut-up rap record called The Finest Ingredients' – under a pseudonym, DJ Megamix, further masking his identity by trying to make the 12in look like an American import. 'And James Hamilton found out who I was, and when he wrote about it in Record Mirror, he put 'Norman from the Housemartins'. And all hell broke loose: the rest of the band were going 'What are you doing? You have to stop this! We'll lose fans if they think that you're into hip-hop!' It was that era of 'hang the DJ' – you couldn't be in an indie band and like dance music. So the first thing I said to him was 'oh, thanks for outing me – how did you know?'' It's a very James Hamilton story: it makes reference to his imposing physical stature, his fabled public school poshness (he was 6ft 8in, and variously described as resembling 'a country squire', 'an eccentric aristocrat', 'a headmaster that had turned up in the middle of a nightclub' and compared to James Robertson Justice, the fearsome star of the Doctor at Large films). It notes the sheer improbability that someone like that would be a pivotal figure in the world of dance music, however encyclopedic his knowledge. But a pivotal and pioneering figure in dance music history is exactly what James Hamilton was: so important that Pete Tong describes him as 'the oracle'. At a time when Black music tended to go ignored by the mainstream music press, he wrote a column in Record Mirror that began in the mid-70s, reviewing every new release that might conceivably be of interest to club DJs, in a deeply idiosyncratic, adjective heavy style: tracks could be 'jittery' or 'jogging' , a 'jiggly smacker', a 'solid clomper' or – a personal favourite – 'gallopingly exerting'. The first of two collections of Hamilton's writing, James Hamilton's Disco Pages 1975-1982, has just been published: it's edited by Mike Atkinson, a writer and podcaster whose stepmother married Hamilton in 1994. His writing 'was like an actual different lexicon, that you'd eventually understand,' says broadcaster and DJ Gilles Peterson, who describes seeing his name mentioned in print by Hamilton for the first time as 'the highlight of my life up to that point'. Hamilton also dished out news, gossip and tips from across Britain, encouraging DJs to send in lists of their biggest records that he compiled into the first ever UK dance chart: in an era when, as Cook puts it, DJs 'very rarely played outside their own local catchment area', it was as if he was trying to singlehandedly forge a country-wide dance scene. 'I mean, it's impossible for kids with the internet to believe, but there were all these little scenes going on in different places, and unless you went to visit a mate for a weekend, you'd never know what was going on in the next town, there was no cross-pollination between different cities – if you lived in Brighton, you would have no idea what the Wild Bunch were playing in Bristol,' says Cook. 'James Hamilton was the conduit for everything.' Perhaps most importantly of all, after a visit to New York where he visited the Paradise Garage and heard the legendary DJ Larry Levan, Hamilton relentlessly promoted the idea of matching the tempos of different records and seamlessly mixing them together: a hitherto-unknown concept in late 70s Britain, where club DJs tended to get on the microphone and talk between records. It's hard to imagine in a world where mixing records is what club DJs do as a matter of course, but Hamilton's idea met with a combination of indifference and outright hostility. Pete Tong believes it was 'down to resistance of the unknown, like 'I don't really understand how to do this',' but DJ and producer Greg Wilson – an early adopter of mixing, who ended up demonstrating his turntable skills to a visibly baffled Jools Holland on The Tube in early 1983, and who is publishing the new collection – thinks it had more to do with the possibility that it might frustrate their aspirations to become broadcasters. 'DJs didn't travel all over the country, they weren't stars in the same way they are now, so their ambition was usually to get on the radio. So the idea of putting the microphone down in order to mix records … they were absolutely dead set against that.' But Hamilton persisted, taking British DJs with him when he returned to the Paradise Garage. Most of them seem to have been distinctly nonplussed, but one, Steven 'Froggy' Howlett had what Wilson calls 'a Damascene conversion' and apparently imported the UK's first set of Technics decks on his return. He started peppering his writing with suggestions about other tracks you could mix into the one he was reviewing, and started counting records' speeds – their beats per minute – with the aid of a stopwatch and adding that information to reviews too: whenever you see a BPM measurement attached to a dance track, that's basically down to James Hamilton. Hamilton was a fascinating figure. Quite aside from his writing career and the various innovations it spawned, he'd spent the 60s alternately working with the Beatles in America, and DJing at legendary London mod nightclub the Scene under the name Doctor Soul; he then built Britain's first custom-made mobile DJ console, and took to playing at aristocratic country house balls, where requests tended more to the Blue Danube and Scottish jigs and reels than the latest US imports. And yet, 29 years after his death from cancer, Hamilton remains an almost entirely forgotten figure. 'No one under the age of 50 knows who he is,' laments Wilson. The new collection offers an endlessly intriguing glimpse into a forgotten world of 70s and 80s nightlife, filled with unexpected details – the sudden surge of interest in 40s swing music among soul fans in the mid-70s, which led to not one, but two versions of Glen Miller's In the Mood making the Top 40; the fact that the first mixed DJ set in Britain was played not in a hip nightclub, but at a roller-skating event at glamorous-sounding Pickett's Lock Sports Centre in Edmonton – the writing testament to Hamilton's surprisingly catholic tastes. He was quick to pick up on the importance of gay clubs in the development of dance music, running charts from their DJs from the mid-70s onwards and was, a little surprisingly, a huge fan of punk, approvingly – and characteristically – referring to the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK as a 'noisy bubblegum chugger'. 'In the mod days he saw the Who as a rock band followed by mods who spent most of their time dancing to soul music at the Scene,' says Atkinson. 'Then he saw people at the Lacy Lady in Ilford dressing in punk gear' – 'festooned with chains, safety pins dancing to soul, funk and disco, and made the connection between the Sex Pistols and the Who.' He was also impressed by the burgeoning new romantic movement, talking up the Blitz club's DJ Rusty Egan and coining a weirdly familiar term for the music he played: electronic dance music or EDM. This, however, proved a step too far for the purists. 'There was a record shop and label that really took umbrage at him covering this white, electronic music, and threatened to withdraw their advertising from Record Mirror, so he had to stop,' says Wilson. 'The irony is that in the US, Gary Numan and the Human League were being played at Black block parties in the Bronx, and that's how you ended up with records like Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa.' His influence finally began to wane with the arrival of acid house in the UK. Hamilton liked the music, but was wary of the accompanying drug culture (invited by Paul Oakenfold to his acid house night Spectrum, Hamilton famously surveyed the club, then turned to Oakenfold and said 'I've heard the crunch of amphetamines on the dancefloor before, you know'). And, as Peterson points out, acid house was 'sort of creating a new movement that didn't want to be associated with the past'. 'It was our punk rock moment, it was year zero,' agrees Tong. 'It was almost like everything that came before was forbidden. Things like the Boy's Own fanzine were really influential and they were a bit 'fuck off, soul boys'. It's how the phrase 'it's all gone Pete Tong' came about – I was accepted, but in print, they took the piss out of me because I was connected to the past.' Moreover, acid house was too big a scene for one writer to oversee (Record Mirror folded in 1991 and specialist dance titles including Mixmag and DJ sprang up, although Hamilton kept reviewing for the latter until his death). And its impact on British culture was so vast it tends to overshadow everything that came before, no matter how impactful and influential it was. 'People forgot about the world before the rave scene,' says Wilson. 'So these very important characters like James got forgotten. We're in a weird position today, where people in Britain can tell you all sorts about what was happening in New York clubs in the 70s, they know about the Loft or everything Larry Levan was playing, but they're at a loss when it comes to the UK. That's one of the important aspects of doing a book, to bring history into play, so that people understand that there was a scene here, with a different approach, its own character, its own background, and James was a part of that – he pushed things forward.' James Hamilton's Disco Pages 1975-1982, edited by Mike Atkinson, is out now, published by Super Weird Substance, £30
