But age has never been an issue for blues singers and Mayall is up there with the elder statesmen.
Sometimes you have to suspend your disbelief, when you recall that the man singing was born in 1933. Lyrics cover familiar blues ground, with a freewheeling approach to love and life. Mayall has written six of the ten tracks, Others include Bernard Allison’s 'Chills and Thrills', Bobby Rush’s 'I’m as Good as Gone', Roosevelt Sykes’ 'Driving Wheel' and Tinsley Ellis and Margaret Sampson’s 'A Quitter Never Wins'. The first bars of the first track, 'Hungry and Ready', took me right back to those teenage years. Who knows! But we all knew his Bluesbreakers Band had nurtured some of the best musicians of our generation including Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor. The story was he lived in a treehouse at the bottom of his parents’ garden in Cheadle until Alexis Korner encouraged him to make the move to London. His music was my first introduction to the British Blues scene and I enjoyed his collaborations with American and Chicago blues musicians once he moved to the States in the late 1960s.Īs a teenage fan of Blues and Underground music in Manchester in the mid sixties I was aware that he had been brought up over the border in Cheshire and we thought of him as an honorary Mancunian. It was a great concert and he was out there on the merch stall afterwards signing autographs and chatting to his fans. I got to see him about seven years ago in Buxton. It’s a positive view, "not bad for some old Brit" as he sings.
It’s all about where he is up to, surrounded by good friends, who happen to be talented musicians, living in California, where the sun is shining down. The title track of John Mayall’s latest album, 'The Sun Is Shining Down', gives us an insight into his attitude to life and his remarkable career.
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