There’s a story in Ken Garner’s history of Radio 1 sessions (In Session Tonight) about when up and coming band, Free, had finished a recording for a John Peel programme in April 1970, a member of the group casually asked one of the engineers present what they thought of one the songs as a potential single.
Island, their record company, didn’t rate it too highly. The band wanted a second opinion. The engineer, the story goes, rang label boss, Muff Winwood to tell them they should release the track immediately. This was just a few months before the release of Fire and Water and the song under discussion was “All Right Now”.
Whether true or not, it illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the BBC and the bands of the day striding into studios with quaintly mythic names such as Aeolian Hall 1 and Maida Vale 5, in the hope of getting a leg-up the career ladder.
The first of these sessions (of which only one track now survives) was recorded just months after they’d formed, and only days after the 16th birthday of the bass player Andy Fraser, who even at such a tender age was already able to put ex-John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers on his fledgling CV.
Free were frequent visitors to the BBC as they slogged around the clubs and halls hewing a solid live reputation as something of a good-time band. With Paul Kossoff’s swaggering, attitude-laden guitar breaks, and the “lick-my-love-pump” innuendo from Paul Rodgers, the patron saint of the leather trouser industry, it’s easy to why Free have been dismissed in some quarters as a bunch of cocky blues-rock bruisers looking to get their collective lemons squeezed.
The problem with this approach in concert was that some of the subtlety that infused Free’s studio albums was set aside for Olympic-standard mike-stand twirling, brow-furrows and other crowd-pleasing tactics.
Article comments
1 - Vern Halen
Very cool - I'll watch for it's release. They were one of my faves when I was younger.
2 - Brian
Quite simply, no, the tale of the BBC engineer is not true. Free wrote "ARN" specifically as a single and a get-the-crowd-up-on-its-feet number, and Chris Blackwell immediately knew he had a great single with a small edit to gain A&M radio play. Full details on the birth of this song can be found in the book, "HEAVY LOAD", by Todd K. Smith and David Clayton (head of the Free Appreciation Society.) The BBC cd is great, by the way.
3 - Sid Smith
Hi there Brian,
thanks for the confirmation on the BBC tale. It's one of those situations where "success has many parents" etc. And it is a great CD - it's not been off the player for quite a few days.