I was strangely excited at the prospect of seeing Colosseum last November in Southampton. I’ve had a bit of a journey with them, starting with very early days when they played at UEA in Norwich and I was the resident DJ. I was proudly sporting an American import LP of Ten Years After’s live ‘Undead’ album and was blasting it out over the PA, only to be interrupted by Jon Hiseman’s moustachioed face appearing around the curtains and calling out, “Excuse me, young man, would you please turn off that infernal row? We’re trying to have a sound check.”
Although Hiseman was a powerful drummer, he put me off drum solos for life by insisting on doing a 20-minute one every evening. Instead, I became enamoured of his guitarist James Litherland, who wrote their most atmospheric song in the early days, which was called ‘Elegy’. He soon left and formed a brilliant band called Mogul Thrash, featuring a full brass section and a very long version of that very song. I once hitch-hiked from Norwich to Exmouth, just to see them and their concave stomachs, waist-length hair and loon pants.
Litherland was replaced later by Dave Clempson, whom I had also seen at UEA in a sparky Midlands three-piece called Bakerloo. I bought their album which now, according to Discogs, is extremely valuable. Sadly, I left it in Germany when I left there in 1971 because I played it so often that it was scratched to pieces. My old friend Jochen Schmidt kept the record and now in fact replaced it with a mint copy original pressing because a few years later, amazingly, he won the German National Lottery and money was no longer an issue for him. James Litherland, as far as I know, is still alive and kicking. I saw him in a great little group called Bandit whose lead singer was Jim Diamond, later of ‘I Won’t Let You Down’ fame. I’m not sure whether James Litherland is still playing live or not but I do know that he is the father of singer James Blake.
Keyboard player Dave Greenslade, who was with Colosseum from the beginning, is still around but not in the band any more. ‘Clem’ Clempson, of course, had the distinction of going on to replace Peter Frampton in Humble Pie and feature prominently on the fantastic record ‘Smokin’’. He’s now a stalwart of the current line-up of Colosseum, which includes Chris Farlowe, who took over on vocals from Litherland. Farlowe is an odd character, whom I had encountered way back in those Norwich days when he and the Thunderbirds played at the local teacher training college. They didn’t go down too well with the incipient teachers complaining that they couldn’t dance to them. In Norfolk there was no scene like that in the venues of outer London back then. I found it hard to come to terms with Farlowe’s seedy shop in Islington which traded in Nazi memorabilia. For some reason which I can’t remember, I contacted James Litherland many years ago and he sent me a five page handwritten reply in green ink which I still have somewhere in a scrapbook.
So the time came for me to venture down to Southampton to see Colosseum for the first time in over 40 years. It was a chilly night and my poor night vision means that I try to avoid driving even short distances in the dark, so I walked down to Shawford to pick up the number I Bluestar bus. The bus stop is pretty much in a hedge, just a pole by the side of the road with no shelter or light, but sitting on the bench was someone I have come to expect to meet when making number 1 bus journeys. He is the chef in the café at Twyford post office. He’s called Harry and commutes from Southampton every day. He was studying his phone and informed me that the bus I was expecting had not left Winchester and was stuck, along with two other double deckers, in the crowds visiting the Christmas Market. Thus it was that the two of us stood there for 45 minutes, absolutely freezing, as our phones determinedly showed an image of three buses not moving. Eventually I was delighted to notice a hint of movement and finally a bus came round the corner. This was the cue for the two of us to jump up and down waving our torches, the only way to attract the attention of the driver, but of course it sailed straight past. Luckily, of course, there were two more buses directly behind and the first of these stopped.
It was immediately apparent that the driver had some form of Tourettes or similar, as he started shouting at the packed throngs of passengers to move back and make room for me and Harry to get on the bus. It was absolutely rammed but of course no one stood up to offer me a seat, just as well because I would have found that insulting. At the next stop, we in turn had to push down the bus to admit a group of very drunk women emerging from their Christmas do in the village pub in Otterborne. There must have been some health and safety downside to our driver’s insistence on stopping everywhere and packing even more people in, shouting his head off at everybody, sometimes in a friendly and jocular manner but also occasionally quite angrily lambasting other vehicles that he thought were being driven badly.
On reaching Southampton, the bus had to do a detour around yet another Christmas Market before dumping me outside Taco Bell, one of the few fast food outlets that I actually like. There my friend Will was waiting for me and we both indulged in some probably unhealthy but extremely cheap pseudo-Mexican snacks. Two crispy tacos and a bag of chips for around three quid. Where else do you get that?
Southampton isn’t well-endowed with cosy pubs but the Red Lion is a gem. It’s hard to find but very rewarding, an ancient building filled with historical memorabilia such as suits of armour and normally featuring a small group of baffled but highly impressed American cruise passengers in search of a night out. After Will had regaled me with terrifying tales of his recent cataract operation, we pitched up at the charming 1865 venue to find a gaggle of door staff discussing how they were going to get Chris Farlowe onto the stage. “Christ, he’s big”, they gawped.
Now it was finally time to see what the band would be like after all these years, observing from our vantage point on the balcony of this super venue. Well, Dave Clempson is playing probably better than he has in his entire career, and that is really saying something. Sadly his beautiful hair is gone and it’s noticeable that he doesn’t bother to dress up in any stage gear, just wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt. James Litherland, of course, isn’t present but his memory lives on in timeless songs such as ‘Elegy’ and ‘Walking In The Park’. The replacement for Dick Heckstall-Smith is an astonishing virtuoso saxist by the name of Kim Nishikavara. The drummer is a workman-like sessioner, less flashy than Hiseman and also mercifully disinclined to the much-feared 20-minute drum solo. For some reason he abandoned the rest of the band to hang out at the merch table in the interval. On keys, the Greenslade substitute Nick Steed sticks to the original arrangements like glue, meaning that the silken Hammond sounds remain intact. Mark Clarke, long-term replacement for Tony Reeves, is impressively chipper on bass, also doing vocals on a few numbers in a manner not unlike John Wetton, who of course was a member of Mogul Thrash.
Well, the security staff succeeded in getting Farlowe onto the stage. He claimed that he was being hindered by a broken toe, which may well have been true. “Was his voice intact?” is a question I’ve been asked several times and the answer is yes, impressively so. Farlowe is about as mobile as you would expect any overweight 84-year old to be and very sensibly took lengthy breathers on a stool next to the drum kit, where he dozed through the 15-minute ‘Valentyne Suite’ instrumental. I don’t know whether it’s ever been proven that he had any Nazi sympathies, despite his retail history, but it was still a pretty crap way to have made a living and I have felt negatively about him for many years.
When I was researching a book about some other musicians of that era, I heard some pretty hair-raising stories about Farlowe but being on such a nostalgic mission, I had decided in advance that I was only going to concentrate on the music and that was certainly delivered. This sort of jazz-rock was very much of its time with its convoluted time signatures and changes of pace, but there was something rather calming about the fact that these guys were still there, still doing it, still playing the familiar tunes that everybody in the audience recognized and loved in nostalgic reverie. That was very much the feeling that we were experiencing: The end of an era and needing to be there just one more time before it’s too late.
The bus home was pleasingly empty and as I walked back down the lane the heavens opened with a dramatic storm that caused extensive flooding the next day. I had to hang all my sodden clothing on the radiator before I went to bed. Had it been worth it? Emphatically, yes.
Colossus Of Roads
