Dynamic duo

A couple more snazzy pages from our upcoming book of rare Blues photographs. We will be sending another newsletter out to everyone who subscribed for details of this project, you can still do so on the Forthcoming page under The Blues Photographs of Brian Smith. The pages here show Bo Diddley on stage (we use the word stage very loosely!) at the Jigsaw Club in Manchester. Brian got squeezed up against the drum kit but he did get a nice shot of Clifton James as a result. On the other page is Buddy Guy enjoying the vibes from his backing band at The Twisted Wheel. Amazingly they turned up late to replace his regular band (who got lost!), discussed the set list and then went on with NO rehearsal for what Brian calls a storming set. His proper band finally arrived in time to do the second set. This accounts for the intense looks of the band as they keep tabs on Buddy for their cues.

Work in progress

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.

Millie at the Twisted Wheel

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…

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