Who Steve Winwood played with as a young teenager

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I've heard stories about Steve Winwood, as a young teenager, had played with the some of the American blues greats when they visited the UK.

Now I've found some detailed information in an interview with him from 1982 - it's on his own website.

In the first extract here he talks about his involvement in those years with Jamaican musicians in Birmingham

As for Chris [Blackwell], I met him in 1964 at Digbeth Civic Hall in Birmingham, which has always been a big center for Jamaicans in England; they used to hold their dances there, and naturally Chris was in on the ground floor in terms of Jamaican ska and rocksteady. Business-wise, he and Island were the ground floor.

Anyhow, I'd been playing at Digbeth since I was 14 with the Muff Woody Jazz Band, my brother's group. And that was where I met Spencer Davis, too. But my own Jamaican connection goes back to Digbeth Hall in 1961, when I jammed there with Rico, the trombonist who had worked with the Skatalites and all the other great early Jamaican acts. 

I was just 13 but I used to go there and play with Owen Grey, Tony Washington, and Wilfred 'Jackie' Edwards. Jackie, you'll recall, wrote the Spencer Davis Group's first number 1 hit in England, Keep on Running, and a followup, Somebody Help Me. I wrote When I Come Home with him for the group.

And the second, on American musicians starts with the interviewer:

There must have been some unheralded live backup work in the early days, when the Spencer Davis Group and the early Yardbirds were doing gigs at haunts like the legendary Crawdaddy in Richmond, Surrey.

Sure! I did backups for Sonny Boy Williamson - as everybody did - but also for T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim. John Hammond, too. 

I met John on a train, while going down from Birmingham to London; this would have been about 1963 and I was 15. He told me he had a gig in Birmingham the next week at the College of Advanced Technology and I showed up and played piano behind him. 

Those kinds of spontaneous musical meetings were special back then, and definitely helped shape my growth.

The Winwood brothers before The Spencer Davis Group

Before Steve Winwood was in The Spencer Davis Group, he played in his big brother's jazz band. Here's an advertisement for them from the Walsall Observer of 14 June 1963.

All the books say that band was called the Muff Woody Jazz Band, but this suggests they are wrong.

Muff Winwood, incidentally, was christened Mervyn, but nicknamed Muff at school after the popular mule of the period.

Steve Winwood had just turned 15 at the time of this concert. In an interview with Mojo from 1997, Muff described his kid brother's first appearance with him in a jazz band:

Muff soon found his way into a real trad jazz band. "We needed a piano player so I brought Steve along. He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. 

"Because he was under-age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know."

Steve Winwood, Sheila E. and Orianthi: Everybody's Everything

This week's music video reminds us of a better world: an American President and First Lady honouring a Mexican immigrant.

Each year Kennedy Center Honors are awarded to prominent figures in the performing arts for their lifetime of contributions to American culture. And in 2013 the recipients were the opera singer Martina Arroyo, Herbie Hancock, Billy Joel, Shirley MacLaine, and Carlos Santana.

Here is part of the segment of the awards ceremony that honoured Santana, with Barack and Michelle Obama in the audience.

Because this is Liberal England, yes, that is Steve Winwood in the Cotswold landowner sideburns that he affected for a while. Winwood has played and recorded with Santana.

With him is the percussionist Sheila E., who collaborated with Prince for many years and is the daughter of one of the members of Santana's original band. 

And on guitar is Orianthi, an Australian singer and songwriter who has played with Alice Cooper.

The Joy of Six 1310

Helen Coffey argues that The Traitors, where intelligence is a hindrance that should be hidden at all costs, is a metaphor for society's increasing suspicion towards, and rejection of, intellect, especially when it comes to those in charge.

"It’s really nice when we get people through the yard – the positives far outweigh the negatives ... Farms are very isolated places. It used to be tens of people working on this farm and now it’s just me and my husband." Patrick Barkham meets some of the growing number of farmers who are joining forces with right-to-roam campaigners to boost public access to the countryside.

Harriett Baldwin, a former chair of the treasury select committee, argues that the power afforded to 11 Downing Street can have unintended and negative consequences for democracy.

"For some, school meals evoke memories of austerity and control, as in Daniel’s recollections of being forced to eat everything on his plate. For others, they represent moments of community and care, as Julia’s experience of encouraging her children to embrace school dinners illustrates." Heather Ellis and Isabelle Carter introduce their oral history project on school meals.

"What 1969-70 means is loads of background (and foreground) material beginning with Steve Winwood’s involvement in Blind Faith and ending with King Crimson’s third album, Lizard. Among those featuring heavily are Spooky Tooth, Free and Mott the Hoople, three classic early Island rock bands whose largely student and mostly male following tended to sport ex-army greatcoats, along with plimsolls, loon pants and cheesecloth shirts." Richard Williams reviews the second volume of Neil Storey’s The Island Book of Records.

Casmilus watches the 1971 film Unman, Wittering and Zigo, which stars David Hemmings and is set in a minor public school: "Like all films set in such locations, it gives an insight into the early character formation of the men who play a large role in running Britain for the next 50 years."

Lou Donaldson: Good Gracious!

I've chosen this not so much for Lou Donaldson saxophone as for John Patton's Hammond organ.

Good Gracious! is the title track from a 1963 Donaldson album, and Patton's playing is just the sort of Hammond work that must have inspired the young Steve Winwood.

It is worth emphasising, though, that Winwood was a guitarist and jazz pianist before be became known for playing the organ.

It is said that when Keep On Running topped the charts at the start of 1966, Spencer Davis bought a house and Steve Winwood bought a Hammond.

First newspaper listing for what became the Spencer Davis Group?

It's not much to look at, but this notice from the Birmingham Mail for 23 October 1963 sets a new record for the earliest press mention of Steve Winwood I can find.

The previous record was 3 December 1963, and because new titles are being added to the British Newspaper Archive all the time, it's possible that this one will be broken too.

Here again, though he was only 15, Steve Winwood shares top billing with Spencer Davis. The band has not yet become the Spencer Davis Group.

This notice is on page 2 of the newspaper. Stories on page 1 include:

• Final moves made to allow prime minister Alec Douglas Home to renounce his peerage;
• All seven aboard a test flight of the BAC III die when it crashes in Wiltshire;
• Michael Foot continues to recover from a serious car accident.

Spencer Davis is in the Manchester Evening News for 18 October 1963, but it looks as though he was sitting in with the Graham Bond Organisation the following evening rather than playing with the rest of the SDG.

Lib Dems hold cottage where Traffic got it together in the country

The Liberal Democrats held the Cholsey ward of South Oxfordshire DC last night, polling 949 votes to the second-placed Conservative's 362. You can see the result expressed in percentages at the bottom of this post.

I take particular pleasure in this victory because Cholsey ward takes in Aston Tirrold - and near that village is the cottage where Traffic famously "got it together in the country" in 1967.

Until 1974, Aston Tirrold and the cottage were in Berkshire, which explains the title of this Traffic song from their first album, Mr Fantasy. If the backing singers sound familiar, they're Steve Marriott and the rest of the Small Faces.

And as everyone is talking about The Box of Delights at the moment, I had better mention that John Masefield also lived at Aston Tirrold for a while.

Cholsey (South Oxfordshire) Council By-Election Result: 🔶 LDM: 62.2% (+16.1) 🌳 CON: 23.7% (+0.9) 🔴 SDP: 7.6% (+2.3) 🌹 LAB: 4.7% (New) 🙋 IND: 1.8% (New) No IND (-25.7) as previous. Liberal Democrat HOLD. Chnages w/ 2023.

— Election Maps UK (@electionmaps.uk) December 6, 2024 at 12:11 AM

Why isn't Steve Winwood more celebrated in Birmingham?

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Jon Neale pays tribute to this blog hero Steve Winwood in the Birmingham newsletter The Dispatch...

Sometime in the mid-1960s, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell was staying overnight in Birmingham. He’d managed to turn teenage Jamaican singer Millie Small into a star with the single ‘My Boy Lollipop’ — the first ska track to go mainstream. She was filming for Thank Your Lucky Stars, the teatime pop show that preceded Top of The Pops, at the Alpha Studios in Aston.

Later that night, Blackwell was taken to see an early version of the band The Move, called Carl Wayne & the Vikings. Unimpressed with the group’s sharp suits, and polished, ‘showbiz’ performance, Blackwell headed to another venue: the Golden Eagle pub on Hill Street. He was warned that the band playing might not be to his taste, that they might be “a bit different.” This would be Blackwell’s introduction to a remarkable teenage prodigy, perhaps the greatest musical talent Birmingham has ever produced. It would be an encounter that would shape Britain’s music scene for the following decade.

As Blackwell climbed the Golden Eagle’s stairs, he heard a voice which could only be described as “Ray Charles on helium”. He was immediately absorbed by the “incredible” musicianship on display. “On this stage was this skinny white kid with floppy hair, about 16, the same age as Millie Small, playing guitar and sometimes amazing keyboards as well, like it was second nature… I’d never heard anything like it — white boys playing the blues like it meant the world to them,” he would later recall.

The skinny white kid in question was Stephen (Steve) Lawrence Winwood, of Atlantic Road, Kingstanding. He became one of the most celebrated musicians of the 1960s and 1970s: moving between the worlds of R&B, blues, psychedelia, jazz and folk — playing on albums such as Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and Lou Reed’s Berlin. Winwood topped the charts with the Spencer Davis Group and defined the shape of the 1970s rock album with his band Traffic, before reinventing himself as a very different sort of pop star in the 1980s.

YouTube is a good place to appreciate how startling seeing the teenage Winwood must have been, in particular the clip of the Spencer Davis Group performing the song ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ It seems almost impossible that an 18-year-old is making that sound, especially while executing a virtuoso Hammond organ performance.  

...and then asks why he isn't more celebrated in is home city.

But what is equally remarkable, aside from his precocious musical talents, is how little Birmingham, his native city, remembers him. There is no Steve Winwood bridge or Traffic-related sculpture in Victoria Square. Asked in the street, older Brummies would probably mention a few other artists before getting to him. 

This indifference from Brummies might be understandable if Winwood had left early on to pursue fame in London. But his musical roots are entirely in the city, from Perry Barr choirboy to stoned hippie performing at Erdington’s legendary Mothers. Both his major bands were formed, and had their debut gigs, locally: featuring either Birmingham natives or those long-immersed in the city’s vibrant scene. And it’s not as if he is forgotten globally either: ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’ was heard by millions a few years ago at the start of the film Avengers Endgame.

One reason he comes up with is that heavy metal has come to be seen as the musical genre that defines Birmingham:

There’s something about Heavy Metal and Black Sabbath in particular — its working-class associations, its unsubtle sound, its honesty and directness and the disdain it used to generate among the cognoscenti — that appeals to a working-class, industrial city that always wants to make itself out to be rougher and tougher than it is, or was (see the TV shows Peaky Blinders and This Town). 

But Winwood represents another, underacknowledged and awkward, Birmingham: one that is softly spoken, self-effacing and self-deprecating, one that ploughs its furrow regardless of what the world thinks, constantly reinventing itself, with sometimes questionable results. In some ways, that’s a more honest identity. It’s time to celebrate that legacy and reclaim one of Britain’s finest musicians as our own.

The Joy of Six 1278

Christine Jardine believes that dying people should be able to make their own choice about whether they want palliative care or to end their life: "I would want that choice to be mine. More importantly perhaps I feel I don’t have the right to deny that choice to others. I believe the law as it stands does not offer those facing such circumstances the compassionate and humane options they deserve."

Berna León reviews a study of how Britain’s elite continues to reproduce itself through entrenched structures of privilege, despite the appearance of increased meritocracy and diversity.

"It would introduce a legal requirement for local authorities and the Department of Education to collect and publish data about the extent to which they are finding local placements for children in care ... Local authorities would also have to develop and publish sufficiency plans, setting out what steps they are taking to meet their requirements to find local homes for children in care, under the Children Act 1989." Jake Richards introduces his private member's bill.

"Rural voters stopped caring about the Democrats because the Democrats stopped caring about them." Tom Zoellner searches for solutions to the Democratic Party's "rural problem".

Mary Colwell remembers her early encounters with curlews: "I saw a large group in a field in northern Scotland as I waited for a ferry. It was autumn and they must have been migrating. I remember thinking how elegant and strange they looked with their long bills and legs, and I watched them for ages. When I reached Orkney, one flew over a loch, crying an unearthly, evocative call. It fitted the landscape and the mood of the day perfectly They were with me from then on."

"Rod Argent was the engine room of the Zombies. He wrote She’s Not There and his playing takes it to another level. It’s very English-sounding, very reserved and melancholy, then out of nowhere he plays this incredible solo that’s soulful but slightly classically influenced. It both fits the song perfectly and takes it somewhere else." Elton John on the piano and organ players who inspired him.

Traffic Babylon

Paul Rees tells the story of Steve Winwood's second band, with more of an emphasis on its darker side than you normally see:

With the extravagant Capaldi cheerleading, and fragile, mystical Wood bringing with him a traditional English folk tune called John Barleycorn – which he’d heard on Frost And Fire, a 1965 album by Hull folkies The Watersons – the stage was set for Traffic to at last become the band Winwood had wanted all along: one capable of harnessing a dizzying array of musical styles and then make them over into a fresh, original form that ebbed, flowed and soared. 

The John Barleycorn Must Die album was the first, giant step along that path. From there they conjured three more records that marked them out as prodigious explorers and rare virtuosos. Yet it also extracted a heavy price from the three principals – it could be said that not one of them was ever the same again.

Tommy Tucker: Hi-Heel Sneakers

Released in 1964, Hi-Heel Sneakers was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. It reached 11 in the US singles chart and 23 in the UK.

I was led to it by a 2003 interview with Steve Winwood:

The Hammond organ was the invention of Lawrence Hammond, a clock maker and amateur home organist who wanted an instrument to replace the church organ. The Hammond was used by black churches in America, and it was there that jazz and R&B musicians first heard the possibilities that the instrument offered. 

Winwood grew up listening to that first generation of Hammond players, including Jimmy Smith, Booker T, Jack McDuff, Charles Earland and Richard "Groove" Holmes.

"A lot of the early R&B was organ-based," says Winwood. "I liked songs like the mod classic Hi-Heel Sneakers by Tommy Tucker, which had a particular sound that intrigued me."

Steve Winwood on working with Viv Stanshall

A reader sent me the link to this 2001 radio documentary about the great Viv Stanshall. As was inevitable in that era, it was presented by Stephen Fry.

Imagine my pleasure when Steve Winwood came on to talk about his songwriting collaboration with Stanshall. That's one of this blog's heroes talking about another.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

Dave Mason: Steve Winwood's black-hatted bad fairy

The 2010 BBC profile of Steve Winwood, English Soul, was enlivened by the appearance of his former Traffic bandmate Dave Mason as a black-hatted bad fairy. Winwood, according to Mason's account, was jealous of his success as a songwriter and threw him out of the band as a result.

Fourteen years on, he is no more reconciled to those events. Today's Guardian has a interview with Dave Mason by Jim Farber about his memoirs Only You Know & I Know, and he's still complaining about them. Not just for that reason, he doesn't come over as particularly likeable.

My impression is that the roots of the clash between Winwood and Mason lay in a different approach to songwriting. Winwood wanted to jam with the band and allow songs to emerge, while Mason wanted to write the words, write the music and tell the others how it was to be played.

The problem with the Winwood approach, particularly if you add in the consumption of waccy baccy, is that it wasn't calculated to produce an album's worth of new songs to a deadline. Hence the band's need for Mason's more direct approach.

It also has to be said that Mason really didn't get psychedelia, but was determined to write it. It's a shame that Traffic are best remembered in Britain for Hole in My Shoe, but at least it has better words than Mason's House for Everyone:

My bed is made of candy floss, the house is made of cheese;
It's lit by lots of glow-worms, if I'm wrong correct me please.

I've chosen the video above because it shows Traffic in the days when everyone was talking and because I suspect it's the nearest thing we have to the band jamming at their cottage while they got it together in the country.

A nephew of Ian Fleming wrote the lyrics for two tracks on Steve Winwood's Arc of a Diver

This blog's hero Steve Winwood has never been a great one for talking to journalists, so I was pleased to come across a 10-minute interview from a 2010 edition of Front Row on BBC Sounds.

Winwood discusses his career and casts a little light on the remarkable period when, as a young teenager, he was playing guitar to back some of the blues greats when they toured Britain.

I've also discovered a bit of Winwood trivia. 

There are seven tracks on Arc of Diver, the 1980 album that relaunched his career. The lyrics for four of them are by Will Jennings, the university English lecturer turned top rock lyricist, and those on the title track are by the great Viv Stanshall.

That leaves two - Second-Hand Woman and Dust - and they both have lyrics by someone called George Fleming.

He turns out to be a friend of Winwood's and the son of Richard Fleming, who was a younger brother of Ian Fleming, the inventor of James Bond. Richard Fleming owned an estate near Winwood's own in the Cotswolds.

George Fleming's words for Second-Hand Woman would have been turned down by Spinal Tap as too sexist, but Winwood manages to make those for Dust sound a little mysterious and rather better than they are.

The Mandrakes: No Face, No Name and No Number

This is a note-for-note cover of a song from Traffic's first album by a Scarborough-based band, recorded in 1969.

What's interesting about it is the identity of the lead singer of The Mandrakes. It's a 20-year-old Robert Palmer.

He was to join The Alan Bown! and then Vinegar Joe before enjoying his greatest success as a solo artist in the Eighties. Like Steve Winwood, the original singer of No Face, No Name and No Number, he was signed to Island Records.

The Spencer Davis R&B Quartette: Mean Old Frisco

This is the Spencer Davis Group, before they were called the Spencer Davis Group. They're auditioning for Decca in late 1963 or early 1964. Steve Winwood must be 15 here, and I believe this is his earliest recording.

The instrumentation is interesting too: drums (Peter York), bass guitar (Muff Winwood) and two harmonicas (Spencer Davis and, when he's not singing, Steve Winwood). Nothing else.

Decca wanted to sign the band, but Chris Blackwell persuaded the band to go with his Island Records instead.

And the really good news is that this is the first Sunday music video from a YouTube channel I've found that's devoted to Steve Winwood rarities and cover versions of his songs.

You lucky people.

Steve Winwood: Night Train

It's strange how some music dates and some doesn't. You still hear the Spencer Davis Group singles Gimme Some Lovin' and I'm a Man in television commercials, and they're used to convey modernity rather than nostalgia.

By contrast, Steve Winwood's Eighties records now sound dated. Winwood has said himself that he was still doing what he had done in Traffic - combining folk and rock and blues and jazz - but the production of the day gave those Eighties records a surface gloss that has not aged well.

Arc of a Diver was Winwood's second solo album and the one that established him as a solo star - it sold more in the United States 

The title track has magic for me, because the lyrics are by Viv Stanshall, but Night Train is more representative. What I like about it is that it features Winwood as a guitarist - he played all the instruments on Night Train.

This reminds me of a story I read online recently. An American remembered watching some Eric Clapton's Crossroads guitar festival on television, but missing the name of the brilliant guitarist he'd been listening to.

He found out a few days later that it had been Steve Winwood - that guy all of whose records his Mom had and who he hated.

Paul Weller: Wild Wood

When Paul Weller released his second solo album, Wild Wood, in 1993, two quips did the rounds.

The first was that it had taken Weller 15 years to go from being a mod to being a hippy, when in the Sixties people managed it in 15 months.

The second was that it owed so much to Traffic that it should have been called Winwood.

Never mind. I was pleased Weller was back and connecting with the ruralist strain in English culture. And, more than 30 years on, it still sounds good.

A recent Mojo article describes how Weller and his collaborators got it together in the country, not at a Berkshire cottage, but at Richard Branson's residential studio The Manor at Shipton-on-Cherwell in Oxfordshire.

In it, Weller talks about the influences on the record:

Elsewhere, in The Manor’s living-cum-listening room, records were spun, and cassette mixtapes played into the wee small hours, shaping the contours of the album. Traffic are often cited as the chief source of inspiration for Wild Wood. “Definitely an influence,” Weller nods, “but I mean, people were probably saying that because it had a flute on it!

“From the ’90s onwards, I was listening to so much different music which I’d cut myself off from in the past. I was sort of blinkered when I was younger. To the point of not buying records because someone had long hair or a beard. I dropped any sort of barriers at all and so it was a real learning curve as well.”

Other names on the Wild Wood sessions playlists included CSNY, Nick Drake, Free, Donald Byrd, Shuggie Otis and A Tribe Called Quest, whose Luck Of Lucien from their 1990 debut People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm led Weller, via their sample usage, back to jazz-funk trumpeter Billy Brooks’s 1974 album, Windows Of The Mind.

That's an interesting list, particularly as Nick Drake was not then the ubiquitous figure he has become in the 21st century.

Another Mojo article ranks all of Weller's solo albums and has Wild Wood in first place:

A classic with a capital C, Wild Wood has lost none of its allure and magic over the last thirty years. The aforementioned Sunflower was a more nimble version of future hit The Changingman, Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) could be Traffic themselves, while the title track was a folk standard for a new decade; mystical, soulful and stoned. The formula would be tweaked to more commercial success a couple of years later, but here is Weller truly finding his voice as a solo artist.

 This is the title track.

BOOK REVIEW Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House by Adrian Tinniswood

We think we know the history of the English country house in the 20th century. Their heyday was in the Edwardian era, but death duties and then requisition during the second world war led to mass demolition, until the tide turned when an exhibition - The Destruction of the Country House - staged by the V&A in 1974 alerted people to what was still being lost.

The trouble is that, as Adrian Tinniswood shows in this endlessly entertaining book, every part of this version of events is questionable.

By 1900, the owners of large country houses were already finding it hard to maintain the large staffs necessary to run them. You may recall that Nevill Holt Hall, held by many to be the model for Bonkers Hall, had already been vacated by the Cunard family when Suffragettes tried to burn it down in 1914.

Where it remained possible to continue to operate on the 19th-century model, it was often because an American bride brought a new fortune across the Atlantic with her. There's a 1 in 20 chance that the first Lady Bonkers was American.

Death duties were indeed a heavy burden on country estates, particularly during the first world war when more than one set of them might have to be paid, but then we Liberals brought them in precisely to reduce the economic and social dominance of the landed interest.

But before 1950 the solution most houseowners came up with was to sell off part of the estate and perhaps to demolish unwanted wings of the main house - no doubt to their architectural advantage in many cases.

The worst period for country houses was the 1950s, when many were demolished after failing to find buyers. There's a Malcolm Saville story from 1958, The Secret of the Gorge, which pictures the demolition gangs moving in on a country house. 

The same landscape - the Teme Gorge on the Shropshire and Herefordshire border - features in Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape, as does an attempt to demolish a house. That's because both Sharpe and Saville's eldest son were pupils at Lancing, which was evacuated to Downton Castle during the war. This was another indignity that befell such houses at the time, but Downton Castle is very much still with us. 

Around Market Harborough, both Gumley Hall, which became a training centre for agents to be dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe and was then home to Leonard Cheshire's first community for service veterans, and the Lutyens house Papillon Hall near Lubenham were demolished. But Nevill Holt Hall survived by becoming a prep school, which lasted until it closed following a police raid that included helicopters.

The mood of despair at the future of country houses was captured by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, which was published in 1945. But events moved on, and in his preface to its 1960 edition he wrote that the novel had proved "a panegyric preached over an empty coffin", but who reads prefaces?

They do watch television - or they did in 1981, when the ITV adaptation was screened. I enjoyed it, just as I enjoyed the novel when I went through a Waugh phase at university, but I have never found a more profound message in either than the thought that old money is nicer than new money.

The damage wrought upon a whole generation of Oxford-educated politicians by the TV version, however, is enormous, and the damage they have wrought upon the country as a result probably incalculable.

Yet even in the Fifties new country houses were being built, and their precursors were about to experience a revival thanks to a new phenomenon of the Sixties: the rock god. The Beatles did not live together in four knocked-through terraced houses: they had a country house each. So did several members of the Stones and the Who.

In his own quiet way, Steve Winwood is worth notice here too. He bought a Cotswold house when he was 20, in an area where only rock stars and royalty can afford to live. The result was that one of his daughters married the nephew of Camilla Parker Bowles and his grandson was one of the Queen's pages at the Coronation.

And that exhibition at the V&A? Tinniswood paints it as, in large part, an attempt to ward off Denis Healey's plans for a wealth tax. But then it's often been hard to distinguish where calls for the maintenance of the country house end and calls for the maintenance of their owners begin. 

The current controversy over the National Trust, for instance, must surely be born of impatience with those of us who insist on asking awkward question about where all this affluence came from. Why can't we do the house and gardens, have a scone in the café, buy some out-of-the-way chutney in the gift shop and then leave them in peace?

With so many memoirs and diaries of upper-class eccentrics, Tinniswood had loads of enticing material and made good use of it. What I want to do now is read The Last of Uptake, a 1942 satire by Simon Harcourt-Smith that he draws on. It ends with Titmarsh the gardener burning the old pile down.