Giles Hedley and the Aviators
   

Interview

(Date of interview: 2002)

How did you first get into blues?

My big brother was into New Orleans jazz in the 50s and used to bring home 78s of the classic blues singers. I used to enjoy Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Ottilie Patterson – Chris Barber’s singer - especially. Before my voice broke I used to sing her songs. It’s just as well I couldn’t understand much of the lyrics. Then one day my bro brought home Elvis Presley’s first LP and I adored the Arthur Crudup covers like "That's Alright, Mama".

I found out that this funky, wild music was called blues and I went looking for more. When I was a bit older the first blues compilation albums were beginning to hit the shops.  

When did you get into harmonica playing?

My brother gave me my first harmonica when I was about 9. I'd never heard blues harp playing and didn’t understand how to play ‘crossed’, but I taught myself to play the simpler New Orleans tunes – things like Whistling Rufus.  It’s funny how things stick with you – there are still faint echoes of Armstrong in my harp playing. Most harp players phrase more like a sax but I phrase a bit like a cornet.

I just played all the time - in the back of the car, during break at school. But I still hadn't heard other blues players, until the big breakthrough: a schoolfriend, guitarist Oliver Whitehead, explained how you play crossed harp, and introduced me to recordings by Sonny Terry, Hammie Nixon and the first Sonny Boy.

What was your first experience of playing blues?

Back in the sixties my interests in country and city blues were already running in parallel. Oliver and I used to play together; he was a brilliant ragtime and country blues guitarist - Julian Bream was a friend of his family and he’d picked up some really good technique. I often wonder what happened to him - he got better and better at the guitar and eventually, I think, just got bored with it. He went to live in the States and I lost touch but the last time I heard him play – must have been in the late sixties – he was doing the most extraordinary stuff on classical guitar: simultaneously improvising three or four lines contrapuntally, so that each note was doing two or three jobs.

At school my band tried to copy the simpler songs by Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, the second Sonny Boy Williamson. We had trouble practising because, unlike pop "Mersey sound" bands, blues bands were not allowed to practice on school premises. We had to hire somewhere and seldom had cash.

Jimmy Walker, my lead guitarist, made a pre-amp, years before they were standard. He got a dirty sound by running the guitar into an amp and then just feeding its output, turned right down, into an old bow-fronted Watkins amp. One day someone came along and turned up the first amp: the poor Watkins just dissolved in smoke.

I used to get so nervous I couldn’t eat lunch if I was playing that evening. I still get pretty keyed up - if I didn’t it would be a sign that something was wrong - that I didn't care any more. I remember when we played support to Marianne Faithfull once she was really nice to me when I was almost dead from nerves: she was the big start but she left all the people who were making a fuss of her and came over to cheer me up.

I played a bit of chromatic harp at that stage - another friend, Mike Runge, played jazz piano and we used to play together for fun. Not a lot came of it, but Mike was really good for my ears.  He made me make an effort - to listen to music in a focused way.

Mike took me to Ronnie Scott’s to hear Jimmy Witherspoon- revelation! Spoon is, without the least theatricality, one of the most emotionally naked singers. I had the feeling "why is this guy being so intimate when I don’t even know him?" To me - your average, uptight Brit - it was embarrassing but liberating. Over twenty years later when I formed Really the Blues most of the songs I had heard that night went straight into our repertoire.

What got you into bottleneck playing?

As a harp player, I got fed up with always looking out for a guitarist to play with. So I asked my parents for a Harmony Sovereign for my twenty-first birthday; in those days that was the guitar to have if you couldn’t afford a Gibson. It needed heavy strings and a good clouting, but played hard it sang like a bird.

At the time I was playing harp with a guitarist who was into Sleepy John Estes – little known in the mid-sixties – and the delta players like Son House, Bukka White and of course Robert Johnson. He taught me lot. The funny thing was he had a complete mental block about bar lines – he moved through the blues sequence pretty much at random. Thirty years later I met him again and he was just the same. Oddly, the only other person I’ve met like that was Juke Boy Bonner. I played support to him in the seventies. He was brilliant, but you never knew when he was going to make his changes.

I made a choice that I'm still not sure about: although I’m left-handed, I decided to play right-handed. The acoustic guitarists in the clubs like Renbourn and Co, were very deft and clean. I thought I'd have an advantage on the fretboard but I never managed to pick like them. But the delta bottleneck style was rhythmically complex and exciting and somehow suited my right hand and the feeling comes from how you use the slide – ie from the left hand. I got hooked.

Shortly after, I bought an old Dobro guitar for £75 and that became my baby. I found out later it was one of the first 75 the Dopyera brothers made – you can tell by a little heart inlaid into the heel of the neck. It sounded wonderful: I used really heavy strings, a zither-player’s spring steel thumbpick which hurt but sounded nice, and the bottleneck from a cider bottle that I still use today.

In the early eighties when I was seriously broke and no-one wanted to hear blues I sold that and two other Dobros, a Gibson Kalamazoo, and lots of other instruments. I don’t miss the others too much but that first Dobro still really haunts me.

At first I played Mississippi Fred McDowell tunes. In fact, it was very embarrassing in 1970 when I opened for him, churning out second-rate versions of his repertoire. Luckily I don’t think he recognised them! He seemed a very quiet, gentle man. For some reason he played a new semi-acoustic guitar that he couldn't get along with - he handed it to his manager to set the controls.

My proudest moment was supporting Son House during what must have been his last tour, in’71 or so. I remember feeling really angry on his behalf when he came onstage, he looked old and shaky and I thought: ‘this man taught Robert Johnson, for Christ’s sake! If he were a white musician of comparable stature he’d be comfortably retired by now, not schlepping round Europe". But he played with such fire and delight and clearly still relished an audience. He told how his wife made him go and get his hair dyed when news of the European tour came through, because "those kids in Europe won't want to see no white-haired old man!"

He changed my style for good, because the thing about the delta style is you have to see it played. It’s a bit like flamenco: you don’t get all the percussive cross-rhythms by ultra-precise picking: your right hand must be incredibly relaxed and slap about - it all springs from your thumb.

What have you recorded?

First, I recorded an LP in Holland for VPRO Radio in the early 70s.  VPRO was a sort of semi-underground radio station that played all sorts of weird music. They made a good LP out of my stuff, which included things like two Dobros overdubbed – bottleneck and lap steel - and my first song using two harps, a bass C Marine Band and a normal C (although I was not yet playing the treble one with my nose). The album was called something like Zeltsaam & Zonderling; I never did find out what this means. The album sold out and was reissued, but I never saw anything from it because when you record for radio they have the rights to the material.

Years later I was on a train in Hampshire, chatting to two Dutch campers. It turned out one of them had the album – the only purchaser I’ve ever met!

I was playing in Holland a lot – sleeping on floors and playing a bar one night and a concert the next. In one  bar I used to play 20 minutes on, 20 off, from 8.30 until 4.30 am - good training! I used to eat breakfast at dawn, in a seedy café full of twitchy Vietnam draft-dodgers and dope dealers, and walk home over the canals. Great times...

In the early 80s, blues was seriously unfashionable so I sold my guitars in despair. Then in 1983 I was asked to put a band together and formed Really the Blues with Bob Morgan, an old friend who is a remarkable composer and multi-instrumentalist - among many other things a pioneer reggae arranger. I liked the idea of putting his strengths opposite my ‘roots’ approach and seeing what happened. He introduced me to Clive McKenzie-Joseph, a drummer with a soul/r’nb background and I found a bass player working on a farm in a nearby village.  Twenty-odd years later Richard Sadler is better known in the jazz world - his CDs top Jazz polls, but I’m happy to say that he still plays bass with me!

Clive left, the great Sam Kelly joined on drums and we recorded a CD, Aviator, in France, where I have musician and sound engineer friends. It was a manic business: Bob and Richard wrote the brass arrangements on the ferry going over; half the horn section spoke only English and the other half only French; I recorded the solo tracks in a goods lift because my sound engineer had fallen in love with its acoustics. We slept in corners of the studio and finished the whole job in ten days.

The CD ranged from Jimmy Witherspoon-style jazz arrangements to country blues, with unexpected combinations like clarinet and lap steel and harmonica and brass. It was well received - Paul Jones in particular gave it good airtime.

By the mid 90s Really the Blues became The Aviators.  Bob had to quit with incipient tinnitus; I had planned to replace him but I became so excited by the kind of loose, rhythmically adventurous blues that Sam, Richard and I played as a trio that I left things as they were. Time has shown this to be the right decision!

All this time I was also still playing a lot of country blues, with a weekly residency at blues bar Ain’t Nothin’ But in London. I wanted to put out a CD of all the early, acoustic blues that I had been playing in some cases for thirty years. No Lizards was the result. I recorded every acoustic blues song I knew and dithered for an agonising 11 months about which, of over five hours of material, were the best tracks. The sound is uncannily good and the feel is nice so I’m chuffed with it. The first pressing sold out so I reissued it.

Then in 1999 The Aviators recorded a live CD in France, Low Flying, with ace guitarist Christophe Pélissié guesting. He’s one of the most exciting blues guitar players I have ever heard because he doesn’t just have bags of technique – thousands of guitarists have that, these days - but he responds first and foremost to the feeling of the song and phrases beautifully.  He also takes huge musical risks - essential for an 'Aviator'.

What now for The Aviators?

If I had to sum up what The Aviators are about it would be "authenticity, bags of feeling and huge musical risks". Because our songs are rooted in Delta blues, rather than boogie, shuffle or rock, they are often rhythmically more complex – closer to funk, Jamaican and African music. Richard’s and Sam’s influences are all over our sound - I just give them their head and ask them to surprise me. There is an interesting blues/Jamaican crossover thing going on at the moment in the UK and with Taj Mahal, Eric Bibb & co in the US. The Aviators have always operated instinctively in that territory.

I'm keeping busy on the blues scene. People tell me my singing and playing are still getting better and as long as there are people who want to hear blues I’ll keep playing. I’ve seen Muddy Waters in his sixties; Mississippi Fred McDowell in his seventies and Son House well in his eighties so I know this music keeps you young!