Buying the albums sampled on “You Can All Join In”.
Today we start on Billie Ritchie’s notes in the CD insert, written some 20 years ago in 1996. It will be recalled that he was the organist.
“It was only a brief moment in time, the sixties, a creative high, the last thus far. In droves, we migrated to London to find our fate, and it wasn’t often what we expected. What was Clouds’ contribution? We were catalysts. We took chances, upset dances, sent our successors back to the drawing board, with varying results. Some of my best memories are of our early days in Scotland, even though my brother George (a great bass player, by the way) was almost our only fan. There was a night at Larbert, a Radio Scotland “beat” competition. The man from Radio Scotland, wearing an Afghan coat, was slouching in the balcony, feet dangling over the edge, exuding “cool”. As we began to play, the audience became restless and hostile, but the man in the Afghan coat nearly fell off the balcony, and the other musicians were delirious, some were even in tears, their enthusiasm spreading like wildfire, turning the audience around. It was one of those nights. Over the following years, there were other nights like that, from Stoke-on-Trent to Chicago, from the Marquee to the Fillmore, then, like the sixties themselves, Clouds was gone in a flash of light.”
We conclude these notes next time.
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