Tag Archives: Manchester

Work in progress

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Snapped at the designer’s (1960s Ercol) worktop a few weeks ago: “I often use a split screen set-up for the design and layout but here preferred to work on the laptop; on a final run through like this any changes are likely to be very minimal, most of the heavy work has – hopefully – been done..!” Each page of the Boom Boom Blues Photo Book is here being signed off via a monochrome laser print prior to preparing the PDF for the printer. The page on screen shows Buddy Guy in action at The Twisted Wheel Club, one of a series of terrific live shots Brian got on the night. Amazingly Buddy’s backing band for the first show were delayed getting there, and a local Manchester group were called in with zero rehearsal time. Buddy almost brought the house down, smashing his guitar into the Wheel club ceiling at the end! We did try a few times to get Buddy to write us a few words for the book but his useless manager rudely ignored all our emails.

Spencer Davis Group

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Another of Brian Smith’s great images. This is an early appearance of Spencer Davis on the stage of The Twisted Wheel in 1965, with Stevie Winwood on the right. It has been used for the sleeve of a new collection of Spencer Davis BBC archive sessions by the 1960s Records lab and works quite well we think. They have used other shots from Brian in the past. The original shot is shown in the Brain Smith Blues Photo Book.

Little Richard

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Little Richard Oasis Club 014 copy.jpg

Just a few days on from bemoaning the death of Millie, a proper pop star, than another of the acts Brian Smith photographed in the Sixties passes away, this time a proper rock and roll trailblazer, Little Richard.  Brian was lucky enough to catch a performance at one of Manchester’s most famous venues of the time, The Oasis Club, in 1964.  Just seeing his pictures makes you jealous, as Richard seems in amazing form while the crowd are in awe judging by some of their expressions. Local group The Dakotas got to back him, all under the shadow of a huge Beatles mural decorating the back of the stage.  Which is a tad ironic given how much they owed to Richard amongst others!  Brian also caught the filming of Little Richard by Granada TV for one of their highly regarded pop specials of the time.

This great shot from the Oasis shows Little Richard working the crowd at the height of his set, and would have made the final selection for the book of Brian’s pics we’re wrapping up – except some of the others are even better!

Richard leaves a musical legacy only a few could equal even back in the Sixties, but his contributions to rock music’s development are unlikely ever to be surpassed in the future.

Millie at the Twisted Wheel

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Millie in Twisted Wheel office 1964.jpg

Our designer was working on the Millie Small photographs for the Boom Boom Blues Photo book the other day (and researching her backing group). As he has a home office anyway, the self isolating issue has not been too hard a chore so far. “I love little more than digging through old photographs, who needs the real world! These are some of my favourites from Brian Smith’s book. Millie was a real natural anyway but seems to have hit it off with Brian, who was taking the photos up in the legendary Twisted Wheel club offices. He and Roger Eagle, who was the resident DJ there, were given the rather nice job of looking after Millie for the afternoon. It was probably a bit risky trying to walk around Manchester given that her hit single was so massive, so they passed away the time until the show just taking a few pictures and chatting. I bet a few of us would love to rifle through all the paper ephemera on the shelves too, there looks to be piles of tickets for future gigs in one corner.
During the show itself Brian tried to take a few more shots, but the teenage crowd were just going mad, you can hardly see Millie’s band and she was signing album covers during the set itself!
All the photos have a certain amount of dust and marks on them after 56 years but they have cleaned up nicely for the book. As this one isn’t in, it has not had any treatment!”
We’ve got the best of the photos in the forthcoming book which we’re pushing on with, but thought we’d show this one which hasn’t made the final edit as it is so full of life. You can read more about the book on the site.  There is a post about the book’s cover below.
Obviously the current health crisis has thrown all our plans in the air as it has everybody, so we aim to crack on with projects where we can do so safely and then hopefully pick up the pieces later.

Bo Diddley…

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Again our apologies for a rather quiet spell at Easy On The Eye Books, with yet more illness affecting senior staff. I guess the clue is in the word senior!  As a result we’ve rejigged plans a little, and our next planned release now we’re running with the baton again will be the fabulous blues photograph book.  This is not far from final proofing, but got held up again when photographer Brian Smith found yet more negatives while clearing out his garage a while ago.  We have now scanned and cleaned this new batch of material and are sorting through, as some of the photographs deserve to go in the book. Brian had a few old prints of some of these but naturally we’ll be able to get much better reproduction from the negatives.  Here is one of the new found frames (BEFORE being cleaned!), which was actually taken by one of Brian’s friends, and shows him with Bo Diddley backstage at (I think) the Twisted Wheel Club in Manchester.  Bo is holding his trademark Gretsch ‘Jupiter Thunderbird’.

Brian Smith and Bo Diddley.jpg

Mastermind

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We were very lucky to arrange an interview with bassist Roger Glover to pick his brains for our upcoming book on Deep Purple’s Machine Head album recently (Fire In The Sky.)  The band played a handful of British concerts during November, so me and Stephen Clare spoke to Roger at length at his hotel in Manchester (once we’d got past security – which was not for the group, but Manchester United, who use it as a staging post to collect players together prior to matches apparently!).

We did warn Roger that this was likely to be a fairly tightly focused chat, and for two hours he did his best to recall tiny details of the albums sessions for us under a John Humphrey style questioning.  This has given us a lot of new information and will help add extra details to the narrative.

I took along a little digital voice recorder which seemed to work fine, but when I opened the audio files on my computer was horrified to see they were all dated 2009, and assumed the worst.  Then I realised I didn’t have the recorder in 2009,  and had just neglected to set the machine’s auto file dating option!  The interview had come out OK, and while it won’t win any Sony Radio awards, is perfectly fine for what we need. We are working for a publication date in early 2018.

In the usual tradition of such meetings, I would post at least one photo of the interview, but were so wrapped up in it we neglected to take any, so I’ll add a shot of Roger during the show instead, courtesy of Vince Chong (the background is from the back projections used during the evening.) We did remember to get Roger to sign our copies of the previous Deep Purple book…

Roger Glover, Deep Purple, Manchester 2017.

Boom Boom update

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The book of Brian Smith’s fabulous Sixties Blues photographs – Boom Boom Boom Boom – is pushing along nicely, albeit a little behind schedule! But we’re pleased to be able to show the first page visuals at last.  Brian has also had some of his photographs selected for a really interesting new documentary on some of the Blues sidemen who perhaps never got the recognition of some of their peers.  Titled Sidemen : The Long Road To Glory, you can see an exclusive trailer for the project at the producer’s official Vimeo site. Universal have also requested a dozen of his images for an upcoming Chess blues box set. If you haven’t yet checked the book out, you can read the full details on the site.

montage

 

all scanned out

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Willie Dixon, Free Trade Hall, Manchester. Jazz Unlimited show.

Happy to say the job of scanning Brian Smith’s negatives for the Boom Boom Blues photo book is at last complete.  Brian has had most of his images scanned in the past but generally by high-street operators who didn’t really appreciate what they were doing.  During work on the book, Brian collected together ALL his surviving negatives. We decided rather than just scan those earmarked for the book, we would do the LOT, and then they would be saved for posterity.  The job was done in-house using a high-end Nikon negative scanner.  Amazingly Nikon stopped making this expensive bit of kit a few years ago (apparently all the professionals who needed one had bought it, and sales stalled after that. We were lucky to get ours off a studio who had finished doing their own archives), and had stopped supporting the software for it even before that.  For this reason the machine has to be hooked up to a vintage Macintosh which can still run this old software and is now being kept largely just for this task.  Normally you pop in a strip of negatives, and leave it to work away.  But Brian’s negatives were all done individually because of the poor light levels he had to work with back in the early Sixties which left some real underexposure problems on some.  In a couple of cases really difficult negatives have been scanned twice at differing settings so we can combine elements.  All this has taken a lot longer than anticipated and delayed the launch, but we can now crack on and finish the layout.  And return the precious originals to Brian of course!

You can read more about the book, and sign up for newsletters, on the site. The really atmospheric photo above was taken by Brian of Willie Dixon during a show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester.  The bit of kit on the left is the hulking great ABC TV camera.  Copyright Brian Smith / Easy On The Eye Books

Blues Boom

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An early heads up on a work in progress, this visually fascinating collection of rare blues photographs taken in Manchester and area in the early sixties, capturing many visiting American Blues giants on stage and in more candid moments. Boom Boom Boom Boom is due later in 2014, and you can read more on the site.

Brian Smith American Blues photographs 1960sBo Diddley Manchester Boom Boom Easy On The Eye Books