‘I’m realising that my biggest problem, now as then,’ says Andy Roberts, ‘is that I get so bored in the studio. I just want to bang it down and get on with something else. In the ‘70s I was so busy rushing around from one gig to another, one session to another, one collaboration to another, that I couldn’t be bothered to polish anything in the way that other artists did. There wasn’t enough time.
Andy’s ’failing’, though, has been responsible for an extraordinarily rich and, up till now, largely untapped (on CD) seam of music from the glory days of rock – intriguingly crafted, beautifully played, often luxuriantly produced (at odds with that ‘bang-it-down’ remembrance), and, taken as a body of work, the product of a man who deserves to be written back into the history which so curiously seems to have airbrushed him out or, at best, demoted his name to that of a Zelig-like footnote in the sories of other people.
Andy Roberts is an enigma: a man whose story involves playing on hit singles while studying for (and achieving) a law degree in the ’60s; playing on an album produced by Jimi Hendrix; hanging out at Paul McCartney’s place during the Beatles’ studio years; playing the Albert Hall and touring America with Led Zeppelin in 1969; playing both 1969 and 1970 Isle of Wight Festivals.
And yet who but a handful of connoisseurs and train-spotters on the mighty railway of rock have even heard of the fellow? Andy Roberts didn’t disappear from the limelight – he simply moved sideways, out of its glare. Simultaneously (in a combination that is rare) both as an artist and a journeyman musician, he decided to stop making records with his name on the cover after the dismal luck which all-but buried the 1973 album he regards as his best, Andy Roberts & The Great Stampede. He has remained a comfortably successful working musician ever since. [ taken from sleeve notes of Just for the Record... ] |