The Blues is infinitely varied and the style that eventually took over the British music scene is not really based on most of the original American styles of playing. For whatever reason, British blues has tended to be centred around individual lead guitarists and the music heard over here has lost much of its original feeling, partly due to the subordination of the vocals to the musical accompaniment/lead. Very few bands in Britain play numbers without a major lead from a guitarist in every number and that is not the way most of the original music worked. Much of it is simply too loud. British bands often tend to be mainly R&B/soul/funk orientated but hang on to the word "Blues" for some strange reason.

The Chicago and most Southern blues, excluding the older solo artists, was for a long period a whole band effort centred round the vocalist and the harp and much of it was about entertainment and dancing - a full band, rhythm-orientated approach. Band blues rarely left room for a guitarist to solo in the middle of a number. Superb guitarists were subordinated to a rhythm-lead role. Listen to Earl Hooker and Hubert Sumlin playing behind Howling Wolf or Sonny Boy Williamson II's guitarists and you will get what I mean. It was really T-Bone Walker who started lead playing in the '40s, giving Chuck Berry and other guitarists most of their ideas, but that did not cause a wholesale change to lead guitar-centred blues music among black musicians. Let us not forget that the Blues is black music..

American and European white blues bands took the music as their own in the '60s. It became pop/rock. That is the British blues legacy. Britons are still used to Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Chicken Shack, the Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac, etc, but have forgotten Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner. Lead guitar blues became the norm and even American black musicians moved in that direction, because it was popular and they could strut their stuff. The Buddy Guy "show" at the Festival Hall in London two years ago was a perfect example of how the blues of even American musicians has somehow lost its way. Not one song was sung to completion and the audience simply left with £25 less to spend. Great showman, though!

So what should a British blues band play? The choice is phenomenal, but British audiences are used to hearing a certain kind of thing, so what do you do? Play the same '60s/'70s stuff the British way or go somewhere else? Mike's decision was to reintroduce old style playing to this audience, while keeping his lead guitarist happy. Despite the above comment, Mike loves blues lead guitar when appropriate. As soon as we'd done a few gigs and not been booed off, we realised that there was scope for this approach, and with a willing group of players we have managed to get a substantial repertoire of original-flavoured Blues music together interspersed with blues music that will appeal to a British audience. Also, we play very original style numbers but with the addition of instruments that would not have been on the original recordings. So, for example, our version of "Dust My Broom" includes a lead guitarist and a harmonica doing fills and quick runs (similar to the Sonny Boy Williamson King Biscuit version), whereas the Elmore James versions did not have that. It works very well with the right players. We have them - although unknown, they are outstanding.