This Just In From Seattle Music History!!! To write about singer and guitarist Trevor Burton’s life would fill at least one big book, what with his rock ‘n’ roll history, the drugged-up party days, and playing with names such as Jimi Hendrix and Steve Winwood.
Since 1983 he has led the Trevor Burton band up and down the country,
and they will be coming to Hockley’s Touchline live music club next
month.
You might say Trevor was born to play, and it’s what he has stuck to
his entire life, despite at one point several years back, becoming
gravely ill with Legionnaires’ disease.
He took nearly a year to recover from it and be able to sing again, as
his lungs were so damaged, but as soon as he did, he got back down to
business.
“Well, it’s what I know – and I still feel like I’ve got loads more to
do,” he said in his relaxed Brummie tones, when I asked after 50 years
in the business, if he every felt like hanging up his guitar. “I very
rarely feel like stopping, very rarely. What else would I do now anyway?
Become a milkman?”
He was only little, six or seven years old, when he decided playing music was what he must do.
“I heard the early rock ‘n’ roll, white rock ‘n’ roll, people like
Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran. I’d never heard music like it before,”
said Trevor. “It was electrifying!
“I was naturally musical anyway, starting off on the drums and then
progressing onto guitar because I saw people like Cliff and the Shadows
so had to do that.”
He was just 13 years old when he created his first band, the
Everglades, and turned professional at 15, joining Danny King and the
Mayfair Set, before becoming one of the founding members of the Move in
1966.
Trevor only stayed in the band for two-and-a-half years, getting five
top five singles in that time, including the massive hit Flowers in the
Rain and the band’s only number one Blackberry Way.
Then Trevor met Jimi Hendrix, whose musical influence set the teenager onto a new path.
“We did a lot of shows with Cream and Jimi Hendrix,”
said Trevor, who was at that time, 17. “What Jimi was playing was very
heavy, and I started discovering more about that music, about blues and
going down that road. We did a few shows with him and got to know him
very well.
“He was a very gentle guy, very courteous, and always stoned out of
his brains...well, we all were. Jimi was quite shy really. He hated his
own voice and always wanted it buried in the track, but the engineer
would always bring it up again.”
His new influences led him to leaving the Move and jamming with Jimi,
spending a lot of time at Steve Winwood’s country house with the band
Traffic, and playing the blues.
“I suppose the Move were a psychedelic pop band, then they went heavy,
but then started to do pop again and wearing warpaint,” said Trevor,
referring to the makeup the band members started to wear. “Well,
thankfully I left before the warpaint came along.
“But I just got into this other music and playing with the others, and
I felt after that I didn’t want to go back to doing Flowers in the
Rain.
I didn’t want to do pop music anymore.”
He put together a band called Balls with Steve Gibbons of the Ugly’s
and Denny Laine of the Moody Blues. It was managed by the former Moody
Blues/Move manager Tony Secunda.
Record producer Jimmy Miller was hired for the group’s recording
sessions and with Secunda arranging a large cash advance from the record
company, the group started to compose and record new material while
playing gigs. Balls split at the end of 1969.
Their only release was a single that did not come out until September
1971, an antiwar anthem called Fight For My Country, composed and sung
by Burton, and including backing vocals from Gibbons and Laine, who also
played bass guitar on the track.
“I just wanted to do my own thing really,” said Trevor, “so I became a session musician for Island Records.”
It was during this time Trevor enjoyed jamming and recording with
several highprofile musicians, notably his friend Paul Kossoff who had
been in Free.
“Of all the albums I have been on – probably about 15 or 16 albums
with different people – the one I did with Paul called Backstreet
Crawler is my favourite. I played bass on the whole of the B side, which
was all recorded, totally spontaneously, a jam for about 22 minutes, I
think it is.
We just recorded it and Paul said, ‘that’s it’ and that was to be the whole side.
“It was one of the last things I did with Paul before he died. It was special.”
The rock ‘n’ roll and drugsfuelled lifestyle eventually caught up with
Trevor, and it is said his old manager Secunda turned up on his
doorstep with a bag of money and told him to get himself back to his
home in Birmingham before he died.
Trevor took the advice.
His next notable step on his musical journey was to hook back up with
Steve Gibbons, who he ended up playing with as part of the Steve Gibbons
Band the for next eight years, touring the world. A particular
highlight during this time was when they supported the Who, sometimes to
stadiums full of 80,000 people, a time which Trevor describes as “scary
and fun”.
These days may be less wild, but Trevor, now aged 66 and still living in Birmingham, shows no signs of stopping.
“I’m planning to do another album this summer,” he said.
“Usually I only take about three days to record an album, because I
think if you can’t get it within three takes, then forget it. But this
time I want to go into the studio for a month to record it and be a lot
more experimental. I’ve got some ideas buzzing around in my mind, but I
want to try it all out once we are in the studio,” he said.
- The Trevor Burton band (Trevor Burton – guitar, vocals; Bill Jefferson – drums; Pez Connor – bass and Abby Brant – keyboard, vocals) will be at the Touchline Music Club at Hockley Community Centre, Westminster Drive, Hockley, on Friday, April 24, from 8pm until 11.30pm. Tickets are £10 plus £1 booking fee, and are available from wegot tickets.com
