Uli's Page
Pete Haycock's True Blues:
"Smile if you had 'em last night"
No, really, there was a button in the mid-Seventies: "Smile if you had it last night!: Needless to say, it was about sex. And many a Blues is often about lost sex, lost love even: "I woke up this morning, my baby was gone." But not with Pete! When I saw him perform for the first time in September 1975 - around the time of that button - fronting the Climax Blues Band at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse in London, Pete's smile was so big, he didn't even need that button. Young Haycock gave you the feeling that here was a boy who had just arrived at his dream ticket. Soon, I learnt that he'd been riding on this ticket for a full decade already.
Mind you, he could sing a sad song just the same. When he delivered "So Many Roads" on his many roads through the United States, he could let his clear voice be tough or tender at will - or just let his slide guitar do the talking. Wonderful. That's how I remember many fantastic performances over the years.
Climax Blues Band, again and again. Pete Haycock's Climax. The Pete Haycock Band. Night Of The Guitars. The Rockets, ELO part two. And then suddenly, it was "only" at the movies you could hear his guitar do the talking. "Only" as in Thelma & Louise or K2, great and accomplished soundtracks, acknowledged world wide. But wasn't he missing something? I know I did, and I guess many did, because some serious telepathy got beaming.
And then Pete felt the itch, and in late summer 2006, he went out to get some ciggies. Now, going out to get some ciggies, as you know, can sometimes imply leaving your wife. But Pete actually grabbed his lady, Alex, to go and buy the ciggies together - and in that very Frankfurt precinct round the corner from their home, he met Glen Turner, playing the Blues soooooo much like he liked it that he just had to join him then and there. The rest, well, the rest isn't history yet, but with the help of this first helping, a live document of their serious fun together, it soon will be.
The way Glen Turner, Paul Harriman, yet another Brit-German expatriate, and German drummer Matti Ladewig play Rhythym & Blues, classics and favourites, makes you want to wear that Mid-Seventies button all over again:
"Smile if you had 'em last night!"
Uli Twelker
(By the way I'm proud to say that, ironically, we no longer smoke.....P.H.) :-)