Sat outside a tiny coffee house betwixt the two cathedrals, I awaited the arrival of Liverpool legend Edgar Summertyme Jones. The reason for our meeting was to discuss his thirty plus years on the Liverpool scene and his fantastic new album release Reflections of a Soul Dimension. As I chatted to the owner of a Labrador who had just had an impressive stand off with something far bigger and nastier looking, I spotted the recognisable figure of Edgar bouncing down the road. The coffeehouse was a bit busy and the bête-noire of the Labrador hero was still in there, so we decided to scoot down to Bold Street and to the perfect interview venue of Aperitivo. Ensconced in a booth we settled to chat, but Edgar has done so much in his music career it was hard to know where to start with him, so I chose the absolute beginning and asked where his formative years were spent.
I grew up in Childwall on the edge of Belle Vale for the first five years of me life then moved into the Childwall/Rocky Lane area as me parents moved up in the world. I was the youngest of four, there’s more than ten years between me and my two sisters. It was a big move for the family, get us in better schools and all that kind of shit y’know, and I was there until I left home.
Were you introduced to music by your parents?
Me parents didn’t really expose me to much music, me Mum would play one song to death, Sugar Sugar by The Archies for one, which introduced me to that thing that I’m into that a lot of other musicians aren’t, well they are but I heavily go for writers. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a band for me or a guitarist that I like. I’m a bit less all about the guitars than a lot of people in Liverpool, it’s the whole thing, the music, especially the rhythm section because, y’know, that’s what I do. I think that’s why I end up sounding a bit different – because with a lot of other people it is all about the guitars, but it’s a lovely instrument, you can’t blame them! I’m always happier with a great chord progression and a melody than with the greatest riff in the world, although it’s nice if you can put that in too…between the chorus and the start of the next verse!
Where was Liverpool ‘at’ as you hit your teens?
I kind of missed out on the Eric’s scene, I was born in 1970 so I was a latecomer like, I had the advantage of having a teenage brother who was 14, 15, 16 when punk was going on so I had an awareness of that around the house so I got to hear a bit of that. Me sister was more of a Prog head so I heard Genesis – Lamb Lies Down coming down from her bedroom. Y’know, all those arpeggios and even small me was interested in all that because Tony Banks is the arpeggio king on that album. Love it or hate it, you’ve still got to crown Tony Banks as the arpeggio king, but it was punk I went for myself and so the first record I bought was a Buzzcocks single. It was the one after Ever Fallen in Love with Someone because I liked that one, but me brother already had that so when the next single came out he said “Why don’t you get that?” and there was a few things like that which didn’t end up in my collection because I was basically buying them for me brother. They lie big brothers y’know la’, what’s yours is theirs! When I was starting to become more aware of music there were local bands like Frankie Goes to Hollywood who I liked and a lot of the other Liverpool groups who I also liked were developed by then. My first gig was Echo and the Bunnymen when they did the tour for the Back of Love single at the Royal Court. Well that was my first ‘pay for a ticket’…I’d been to a few Radio Merseyside ‘get a free ticket’ gigs like Icicle Works and China Crisis and y’know, I was loving what was going on locally. I’d yet to discover my own direction so I was just taking it all in and loving it.
So what was it that made you find your own direction?
I blame it on different things at different times, but today I’ll blame it on Karen O’Leary who was a friend of mine around the age of fourteen and she bought me a double Monkees LP. Even from the very first I’d been an avid sleeve reader and I realised the whole thing, that songwriter thing and the twangy riffs, y’know, if you listen to my early writing things like Mary Joanna, Weed Bus – they’ve all got those twangy riffs and it was The Monkees that sent me down on that path and towards a catchy song. It was later on that the songwriter thing really developed but I became aware of it there; that the face on the record isn’t always the whole story.
So when did you first decide to plough your own furrow in music?
It was when I joined the YTS (Youth Training Scheme) and through that I met Ged (Lynn of the The Stairs) because he’d been there previously and then Paul (Maguire) joined about a year after that. You were meant to get two hours of music lessons a week but some people were ridiculously not interested in it, so me and Paul would sneak in there whenever we could and there was a recording studio there which was the main reason I was interested. It happened to be the place where Lee Mavers recorded the demos for The La’s that he always talks about that he was happy with. So I did me two months in there and just recorded meself. That psych comp that Cherry Red bought out recently (Losing Touch With My Mind – Psychedelia In Britain 1986-1990) with I Remember A Day, that was me on my YTS learning how to record. One of the Mary Joanna B-Sides, Mad Song, was recorded at the same time too. Then, eventually the La’s came in to record and because I was someone who was arsed about what went on in the studio I was asked to come in and help with the engineering for them. So I got to meet them there and I learnt years later that there nickname for me, because I had my own patter and hair everywhere, was SuckaBanger as in (imitates bong partaking), y’know…like a Wile E Coyote type thing!
Around this time The Stairs were starting to be an entity. We had no money but we were allowed to use me brother’s shared practise room on a Sunday so we’d go in and get some things together and it is the old classic story; the mate on the bass who can’t really play. Originally it was me and Ged on two guitars, a friend playing bass and Paul on drums but then I got that first McCulloch tour playing bass, and again the McCulloch band wasn’t rehearsing on a Saturday so Ian, bless his cotton socks, let us have the room for the day. I was like “Wow” because the other place was a bit of a dump but the Ministry had been done up by then with just three rooms and they were quite plush and I thought, well, I’ve been playing bass on the road, why don’t we have a crack at being a three piece and that’s how it was. (Jason) Otty came along a bit later and kind of, he was a great vibe some of the time but y’know he’d squash the vibe at other times, know what I mean? He wasn’t really a musician so…I dunno.
When I first switched to bass I found singing difficult at first but I got over it, it was just practice, practice, practice, spending a lot of time on me own because I couldn’t always do the microphone and amplifier thing but I found if you can hum in time its as good as singing it, less projective, y’know but O.K.. When people ask me about it, y’know, how’d you do that, you have to find the common denominator in your body if you know what I mean? People notice I move a certain way when I’m playing and singing, the body movement causes an equilibrium that allows you to do it.
You do have a distinct way of playing.
Well yeah, for one as busy as I am!
It’s unusual for bass players to sing isn’t it?
Well yeah there’s Sting, I hate the guy, well, I’ve never met him but low opinion so far. He’s a great bass player and can do a load of good stuff but the Police stuff is very solid with simple lines over it which makes it easy for himself. There’s lots of bass players I really like; James Jamerson (Motown) Duck Dunn (Booker T and the MGs/Stax), two different styles, again y’know Duck Dunn could go wild but the producers in Stax liked the bass lines nice and solid against the drums so there’s an absolute solidity. Jamerson was a bit more funky, a bit more everywhere.
Larry Graham?
Yeaah…but I don’t so much slap but I love his tight pulling thing y’know, the first three or four Sly Stone albums – I have sat and worked out all those lines at some point in me life. I’ve got guilty pleasures as well…I love Chris Squire especially during his period of playing with Bill Bruford in Yes. Great rhythm section and you get the lines of McCartney with a John Entwistle-y sound, it’s probably something I’ll never use but its fun every now and then to play along with it but it’s probably a direction my music will never go.
I assume your music will also never go in the direction of Mark King either?
Once I had the pleasure… (U:Mark King?)…no not him…of being with John Entwistle so for a laugh we asked him what he thought of Mark King and he said in his low tone voice “I went to see him play once, all I could hear was bloody clicking!” but apparently he’s an ex drummer and a rather good one apparently, so horses for courses but not my sound even though we (The Stairs at their recent Future Yard residency) did do a little cover of The Chinese Way. Well our appropriation of it, how we hear it and the crowd loved it! It was a bit like a Mulligan and O’Hare (folk legends kids, look ’em up) cover version rather than an accurate rendition.
So did your work with Mac run concurrently with The Stairs emerging?
Yeah, I played on Mysterio but I hadn’t played on Candleland but I was brought in for the tour, but then it looked like The Stairs were going to take off so I left. The tour was a great starter for ten for me because I’d never been on the stage before.
Was that nerve wracking?
I don’t know I was (pause) errr…(trying to recollect)
Were you stoned?
No I wasn’t stoned, I was high as a kite! Speed was the thing so it was probably a year before I did a gig straight but the punters seemed to like it, and I’ve no idea to this day what I actually sounded like!
Weren’t you also in (one of the many incarnations of) The La’s?
Yeah, I was in them but we never saw the light of day unfortunately, we were always in the rehearsal studios but it was in one of the brown sorcery periods unfortunately. A lot of arguments were being had and the arguments would last for days y’know. It was about two years after the album had come out. John Power had left and Andy McDonald probably thought I’d be a good influence because y’know, I wasn’t…Lee. But after a year the whole thing folded. I was the last man standing, people were leaving one by one. I remember I got a train home close to Christmas and thinking “I don’t really want to get the train back”.
That reminds me of something Iain Templeton (R.I.P. – I still can’t believe he’s gone) told me. He said that he bumped into some journalists outside the Adelphi waiting to do an interview with Lee and when they saw the then drummer of that version of The La’s, they told him they’d been waiting ages for Lee and Tempo’s response was “Do us a favour, when you see him, tell him I’ve left the band”.
(Laughs) Yeah, it was a shame because he did have the bits and pieces together for a second album but rehearsals were a cacophony of arguments and songs not being honed but it was still fun playing great songs like Minefield, Raindance…they’ve all come out on demos but you get the picture. It was frustrating because you really wanted to work on this exciting music but the work ethic was just…not there. He’s the best songwriter in town…deffo, best singer as well. There were times when it felt like I was in the best band in the world but…
So back to The Stairs. After Mexican RnB which is a great and rightly revered album, there was a second album that didn’t seem to get pushed. Is that right?
Yeah, I’m finally at home with Mexican RnB. For years it was hard because it was such a labour of love that I was always nervous that it sounded right, I was always like, should I have played that slightly different there? Now it seems perfect to me and I wouldn’t want it any other way but for years I was so wrapped up in it I’d be like “Is it right? It’s not right”, but it’s alright y’know…but a little voice in me head always doubted it. We had a great time touring Mexican RnB and just being silly teenagers but we were making music also. Having said that, we had a better work ethic than The La’s! I say that but I think John Power was the work ethic in The La’s, and you can see that in the body of work he put out afterwards so maybe they did have a work ethic but it was John that was pushing it.
But yeah, I still enjoy playing with The Stairs. I love playing with Paul…he hits them like no-one else. The way he hits the tom…his hand comes down on it arr…its so good! For the second album we were recording demos for quite a long time and the record company weren’t liking them so we did the auld get out clause, the company paid for us to leave the label. So we decided to spend the money recording the album ourselves but we kind of ran out of money at a certain point and so they were unmixed for about a year and we were waiting around which is never good for a band. We did do some gigs in that time but Ged had gone and Carl Cook had joined and he was all about Clapton and Hendrix, and me and Paul were like “Yeah, O.K. we’ll give it a go” so it was a very different animal, but it was just a shame nothing came of it. We had a manager who was pushing it around but he was getting frustrated because he was absolutely in love with what we had done but in the end we decided to call it a day.
And then within a year, the zeitgeist had changed and Britpop happened which was surely something The Stairs would have fitted in with.
Yeah, I know la’, it’s always the way. We were just a teensy weensy bit ahead of the time. Carl then went off to work with Paul. He was really talented and was writing some amazing stuff that was really contemporary. He was getting into a lot of the modern American stuff but y’know, I didn’t like a lot of the Smashing Pumpkins type of stuff but Carl was seeing things I didn’t and I really liked what he was doing there. His band was called Manna and I was actually called in to play bass. When that was first going on I’d joined The La’s so it was after I got back. They weren’t happy with what the bass player was doing and wanted a few extra notes and they saw me as the man to provide them.
I then spent about a year, two years doing the Big Kids and Isrites projects – demos, gigs etc but then the Isrites all left me to join the La’s and the Big Kids was around the time The Zutons were happening and Howie went off and did his The Stands thing… and then I got the Weller job, so it was all happy days.
Was Weller before or after Saint Etienne?
Yeah, I was also working with Saint Etienne, great band, weird set up! Two guys (Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs) with great record collections and Sarah (Cracknell) basically. Then there was also a musician-svengali like geezer working with them so they’d bring in two records and go “we want the verse like this, we want the chorus like this” and then Sarah would come with some lyrics and a melody…that’s kind of, not exactly how they work, but kind of, it’s a simple way of explaining how they work. I was always being asked to appropriate these great bass lines and maybe change them to a minor key so it was fun for me. On the album Good Humor they had an amazing Swedish bass player so I was like a pig in muck playing his bass lines la’. He was the producer of the album and he’d say (adopts Swedish/Icelandic/Norwegian approximation) “I’ll play this for you” and they were some of the best bass lines I’ve ever heard! It’s a very under-rated album Good Humor, there’s a lot going on in it and is probably their most musical album. You had that hotbed in Sweden of all the, (chuckles), the bastard sons and daughters of the 60s and 70s touring musicians in music schools, and the session musician scene out there in the 90s was like, incredible. Probably the best musicians on the planet were in Sweden at that point. It’s probably not totally true that, but there may be something in that sociological cause! I played some bits on their next album and y’know, they like to steer courses into a big change with their albums so the next one was with some kind of electronic Berlin minimalist sound called To Rococo Rot who I wasn’t aware of. There was one long song where they wanted some kind of rotary connection, double bass, funky outro on it so I played on that and maybe a few other bits where they needed some real bass here and there, but not a full session if you know what I mean. Not like the full LP session with Cherry Ghost where I really got my teeth into it and basically joined the band for two months.
Tell me more about Cherry Ghost.
I loved all that was going on there as well. Simon (Aldred)’s material is just..dunno…just his sense of a chord progression on that first album is impeccable and gave me so much to get my teeth into as a bass player. It’s that kind of structure where you can hang your bass around the melody, or answer his melody, it…ahh I just loved it!
And your time with Paul Weller?
Yeah, he was dead mellow but it kind of ended around the time of the Days of Speed malarkey. It was meant to be four dates and then we were meant to be starting the next thing but it went so well we took it on the road for about a year and a half.
As well as working with an array of talented people, your musical influences are wide and varied too. Sometimes, if I just fancy a blast of good music I’ll go on to your Facebook and see what you’ve been playing lately and it seems much of that has seeped into what sounds like a fantastic new soul album.
Well, at the moment I’m doing a song writing course at the Spider Project a rehabilitation and recovery place, fantastic place. I love going there, every time I go there it just lifts me heart because they’ve got such a good format and the way they are with people and the way they encourage people to be… and its just a lovely place to be. Sometimes I don’t think the people that run it realise how lovely it is to be an outsider and go in there and see what they’ve done. It’s fantastic. I often say to them, which is getting to the point I’m making, is that you are what you eat with music. If you want to make the best of yourself, you’ve got to make the best of what’s been done already. It’s all there to be learnt from. It’s a lineage. Y’know, even if you’re using exactly the same chords as someone has used before there’s still something new that you can bring to the table…and its you that you are bringing to the table.
When you played that fantastic Round The Corner gig recently you debuted loads of new songs, many of which aren’t on this new album.
Yeah, well with me live set I play what I am most comfortable with and I’m on me best, least nervous if I’m comfortable with what I am doing, but it’s nice to put some brand new fresh stuff in there as well, one, to road test it and two, its just nice to have some in there. I’m not complaining because I do really like starting the set with More Than You’ll Ever Have because it’s really comfortable for me. I can get up and I know I’ve got this song that everyone’s gonna love and I can totally rely on, blast it out and it kind of warms up the rest of the night. They’ve all got their uses, even the tried and tested ones.
Whilst we’re on the subject of tried and tested songs, as a big reggae/Ska head I love Mellow Down Pussycat. What is your go-to era for that genre?
Late 60s Ska mainly, but I do like some of the early 70s stuff. I love John Holt’s Time is the Master LP, love that LP… especially the main track because it’s weirdly like a back to front Northern Soul song because you’ve got all the arrangements and the horns and the rhythm, it’s not really a reggae rhythm, its slightly bangarang and much more elegant. As far as the sixties go: Toots, Dandy Livingstone, Baba Brooks…I love those dark, minor chord ska instrumentals. I could listen to that all day. One Step Beyond, Prince Buster the original.
How did you make Mellow Down Pussycat sound so 60s?
It was done on the Tascam eight track machine that I have but it was mixed through, we took outputs from that machine and put it through a Helios desk so everything sounds schhhhhhh. Ahh Helios is the best man, it’s what the Who and Zep and the Stones recorded on in the late 60s and early 70s. You can even get dead pristine sounds on them. 10CC had a wraparound Helios in the Strawberry Studios, so you can get totally raw Stones/Zep on it or you can go 10CC on it. There’s one on the cover of Clear Spot, you know the weird looking thing? That’s a Helios wraparound.
On the subject of Captain Beefheart, have you ever been tempted to do a full gig of Beefheart covers? That brilliant version of Electricity on New Brighton promenade has had rave reviews.
Oh yeah? Erm, nah…I’d have to take a year off to recover from the vocals, its bad enough doing The Stairs thing! The Stairs thing is great really but the lighting guy…you know…if you’re near the stage you’re going to go heavy with the smoke machine aren’t ya, so its always vocal death by smoke machine.
We have touched on the solo career, so when did you decide to take the plunge as a solo artist.
Well it started with The Joneses thing. Big Kids was during Weller but when you’re on the road, things at home aren’t going to stay the same so that folded things up there. It started really with recording Candie (Payne) and the idea was for me to take a back seat and just have more of me as a writer. Then it just naturally happened with me nephew being up in Liverpool for the first time and looking for something to do, then I bumped into Mick Marshall and thought that he was an impeccable talent that needed honing so I got him in the band and yeah, Chris Healey who is a friend and a 60s record enthusiast, and it was just a lovely little time. We spent three months knocking around my songs and it was a good time for me because I had to write solo songs for Chris, Candie and myself and I had to write duets for them and write songs for the band. It was three lovely months but it was when we started going out on tour and gigging that it began to fall apart, when the reality of it wasn’t as solid as we’d hoped maybe, I don’t know. I think some of it was down to meself being a bit too serious and wanting too much from people too soon. I guess I’d hit 30 and I started to panic that things needed to be done and actually it’s one of my regrets that that line up of the Joneses didn’t stick with it and that maybe I was a bit fussy.
A lot of the material on Soothing Music For Stray Cats was from that period; Gonna Miss You When You’re Gone, Do Doh Dontcha Doh, More than You’ve Ever Had…I wrote that because there was more Candie than Chris songs, so one had to be written quick and it was literally written, in like 10 minutes, so that Chris had a new song.
If you had to nail one song that you’ve written and say that is the best, could you do it?
(Big pause) Nah, it’d always be the one I was working on last night.
What about best album?
Hmmm, I guess the one everyone goes on about, Soothing probably is, or it will be until April 24th (the release date for Reflections of a Soul Dimension).
Ah yes, the new album. From the teaser that label Stereopar has leaked, there is much to be excited about. Having heard some of the songs at a recent acoustic show I suggested I was hearing all sorts of big sounds in my head and the promise that it has been realised is mouth watering.
There are some things on the new one where I was just working on me 8 track at home and with only the facilities of what I could play meself, or grab a friend to do a guitar solo I couldn’t do. So there is some stuff on there like Sittin’ on the Fence which I saw as a big band piece, and the dissonant bits on the guitar were meant to be the horn section so even with my favourite album I wish I had the facilities and anything a man could want! The only thing we didn’t have was a harpsichord…but I got over it! I think on Searching the World I wanted a kind of clavichord…we’ve got a clavi but a clavi wouldn’t do it…and anyway, who needs a harpsichord when you’ve got Steve Parry (One of the northwest’s finest secrets when it comes to arrangement, production and multi musicianship). A lot of them I can’t play out at the moment which is why I’m doing new material because a lot of the time I tend to write in me head and its kind of a rhythm section in my head and a few augmentations. When I say rhythm section I mean guitar, bass, drums and obviously the melodic idea. Then I have to sit down with a guitar and work it out and I know what the bass is doing but with some of them you just need to have a few more instruments going on my songs for them to come across.
From the bits I have heard, the album sounds very Soul orientated, is that the theme running through it? What will be reflected from the Soul Dimension?
Well it’s kind of similar to Soothing music in that it sounds like a compilation, but rather than being a mad compilation with sort of early Mod pop like the title track, Doo-Wop running into the sixties and Soul and even having a Sly Stone one on it, it’s much more contained. It’s like a 1966 Soul compilation; there’s a Bacharach one, and a couple of big ballads like a Walker Brothers type one on it and a Little Anthony one and there’s a Latin Soul track and there’s some more straight ahead Mowtown and Stax, and there’s some more Dusty kind of things on it…yeah!
If you are going to be influenced, be influenced by the greats! Are you excited about it?
I am, I’m really excited for people to hear it y’know because it’s the real me…finally! The New Cue have really got behind it and there is an album launch party on Wednesday 3 May in London so I’m made up with that too. I think if there is ever going to be a record to push me beyond my loyal core this is the one. There’s going to be a small run of CDs as well as vinyl and digital but I am excited that the vinyl is on DSD format because a WAV file is a depreciation of the sound whereas this is amazing and really is like a 2 inch tape, y’know, even Neil Young’s happy with it. Same with the single and I can’t wait for people to hear the B-side of that either (Lord Give Me The Strength), it’s a corker!
At this juncture we indulged in a conversation about the music industry, vinyl and Spotify that is best left unreported but as I was finding, a conversation with Edgar is always entertaining, eye opening and interesting – he also turned me on to the esoteric YouTube musings of the wonderful Dr Justin Sledge, well worth some of your time if you fancy pondering on matters of a higher plane. But back to Planet Earth and our discussion of the Soul Dimension. I suggested that good art needs a gestation period, not necessarily of a Mavers-istic length and Edgar explained that it was something Reflections of a Soul Dimension had benefitted from.
Yeah, I’ve been lucky y’know because the album project did change. After I’d done the Skeleton Key thing (the splendid The Song of Day and Night) I was ready to go again and was going to do a second one with James (Skelly of The Coral) at the controls in a proper studio but we could never get the rehearsal time. It was very kind of Detroit-y mid 60sish Soul so I’ve been kind of lucky to be able to take my time with this, and as you know I’ve got a lot of material unrecorded, some of it will just get left by the wayside because I’m always writing new ones.
I hope the ones I heard at Round the Corner won’t be left by the wayside. Songs such as What Comes After Love need to be heard.
The producer wanted that on the album but I told him, “Look, I can do something amazing on the bass guitar on that, and I’m not liking what I’m doing at the moment” but I’m pleased to tell you the bass line is now written and I’m so glad I held back.
What other plans do you have for this year.
There’s a lovely little label run by Adam Cooper called Heavy Soul who’ve done a vinyl compilation of stuff by me, they’re also doing a The Stairs compilation later in the year. They’re licensing it from Cherry Red so they’re putting their hand in their pocket. It’s like a labour of love which is really nice of them. They do a lot of vinyl pressings of local bands and Mod-y kind of stuff and he has also done a post Steve Winwood Spencer Davis Group compilation. I love Winwood but they were a bit weird after he left and he’s done a really nice compilation of them so it’s a nice little home for my stuff to find a home in. The album’s called The Way It Is and there’s a Big Kids track and an Isrites track but it mostly Jones Joneses stuff, everything but the three piece. It was organised nearly two years ago, around about the time I started working on the current album but the Stereopar one went to Finland and dodged the vinyl queues! The test pressing arrived the other day and it’s really refreshing hearing the stuff on vinyl because I hated listening to the WAV file. It’s still the same size file but he’s mastered it nicely you know, the bottom end on it is denser so it’s good to hear them. He consulted me on the choice but I said “Nah, you’re putting the dosh up for this and its a labour of love for you so chef’s choice really”! I’m looking forward to The Stairs one later in the year because it’s got Cabbage Man on it. Whoever’s mastering it for them is doing a great job and I need to pass that on to them after the brief listen I’ve had. I don’t even get time to listen to myself these days!
Edgar is indeed a busy man. The Stairs gigs, solo tours, support slots, DJ nights – he must be clocking up the mileage. As someone who loves the city of Liverpool, I asked Edgar if he’d ever been tempted to move away.
Only abroad like, but I just haven’t got the brains for a move abroad. This city is the best in the land. I love coming back here. I haven’t had as much opportunity as I have in recent years but I used to love coming back here after long tours away, either entering from the M62 or arriving at Lime Street Station, it was always a winner.
Our conversation was coming to an end and eulogising about the city that has given the music world so much including one Edgar Summertyme Jones seemed fitting. Edgar suggested I check out Casino, a Liverpool Soul-y-funky band with a strong singer, who Edgar reckons are going to be amazing, and given his own pedigree and knowledge of music that is high praise indeed. We then chatted about another favourite of the new Liverpool sound, Psycho Comedy. Edgar said he’d seen lead singer Shaun the other day who had said to him “Sorry for being a pain in the arse at the gig the other week” and we both laughed because his pure love for music explains his natural exuberance both on stage and amongst the audience for other bands. Edgar may have played with the Modfather, but he can be rightly considered one of the Godfathers of Liverpool music, always nurturing and encouraging fellow musicians from a place of empathy and understanding.
It had been an absolute pleasure and honour to spend an hour in his company and as we sat outside watching the comings and goings on Bold Street I considered it to be a perfect way to end our chat.
Only it wasn’t quite the end. Edgar and I had another coffee and talked about non-music stuff including some exotic DNA running through his veins, and you know what, you can see the Navaho there somewhere, especially when he is at his shamanic best on stage. We also discussed how music has the power to soundtrack the good times and support you through the bad. After that he took me down to “the best record shop in town”, Pop Boutique, where he availed himself of some rare 45s. After we had mooched for an hour or so and he had paid for his purchases, he passed one to me.
This one’s for you la, you’ve never heard it done this way before.
Sure enough when I got home, I slipped on Blue Moon by Bobby Bland and do you know what? He was right. He’s always right. And in Reflections of a Soul Dimension he has got it right.
Is right.
The single Torture and LP Reflections of a Soul Dimension are available here:
https://steropar.bandcamp.com/merch
Get them before they are gone.
Also available is Edgar’s solo vinyl retrospective The Way It Is – available here:
https://www.heavysoul45s.co.uk/product-page/edgar-jones-the-way-it-is
Prince Far Out
Investigating the ley lines in Mathew Street.
