Apathy for the Devil Read Online Free Page B

room whilst a jet-aircraft engine was set into motion. ‘Tumultuous’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. I couldn’t hear properly for a week afterwards.
    In 1967, another epiphany: I attended a special ‘psychedelic’ package tour - once again at Sophia Gardens - that featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the mighty Move from the Black Country and prog-rock pioneers the Nice. Best bill I’ve ever witnessed. Four mind-boggling performances. Seeing Syd that night ignited something within me that I’ve been obsessed with all my adult life. The sense of mystery he projected from that stage was something I felt an overwhelming compulsion to solve. His story - however it developed - was mine to tell.
    He was also the second person I’d ever witnessed who was clearly in a chemically altered state. He was so out of it he couldn’t sing or even play his guitar coherently. Jimi Hendrix - who followed the Floyd ten minutes later - was the third. But Hendrix was a pro. Being on acid didn’t prevent him from pulling out all the stops in his voluminous trick-bag of guitar wild man theatrics - it only emboldened him to take the whole shtick further until he’d incited mass hysteria in the house. There was a sexual bravado about Hendrix live that night that was so palpable it made my jaw drop. I was even more thunderstruck when I witnessed several young girls surrounding him at the lip of the stage who had become so aroused they were trying to fondle his
genitalia whilst he played. I’d seen these same girls week after week timidly accompanying their parents to Llandaff Cathedral throughout my early teens.
    In 1968, glad tidings. Harlech’s contract with ITV expired and my dad moved us back to the South of England, close to London. I left Wales that summer with a spring in my step and nine O levels under my belt. My folks were well chuffed. And I was happy to be closer to the heart of the counter-cultural revolution. London was abuzz with magical concerts, many of them held for free in Hyde Park. I saw Traffic, Fleetwood Mac, the Pretty Things and the Move give great shows in an idyllic setting.
    And then in August I got to go to my first extended gathering of the rock tribes - the Reading Jazz and Blues Festival, a three-day slog that I misguidedly chose to attend without bringing along a canvas tent. I spent the first night there sleeping on the side of the road. It was a fitful slumber. My big recollection of the audience was the preponderance of youths in greatcoats with ‘Did J. P. Lenoir Die For Nothing?’ stencilled on the back. It was a slogan that had been featured prominently on the cover of a John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers album called Crusade . Lenoir had been a hard-done-by black blues singer that Mayall was currently championing and so he was suddenly the new de rigueur totem of authenticity for the white middle-class blues-rock poseur.
    Blues-rock was the sound of ’68 and this festival became a kind of designated showdown for all the white guitar-slingers infiltrating the genre. Alvin Lee and Ritchie Blackmore made their fingers bleed to keep the crowd baying for more. Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac told dirty jokes and made a raucous fist of relocating Elmore James’s Delta blues to the more sedate English suburbs. Jeff Beck
dazzled everyone with his string-bending showmanship but his singer Rod Stewart was so shy he spent half the group’s performance vocalising from behind a large amplifier.
    At the climax of one evening, an unannounced Eric Clapton suddenly appeared - ‘God’ himself looking suitably messianic in a white suit and hair well past his shoulders - and plugged in to add fiery solo guitar accompaniment to a frantic drum battle being waged on the stage between his Cream acolyte Ginger Baker and Baker’s drug buddy, the infamous junkie jazzer Phil Seaman. The hands-down winner though was Richard Thompson. His band Fairport Convention did a version of Richard