To continue the theme of rampant egotism and self promotion that I’ve been working on for the rest of this website I thought it might be fun to post a few YouTube clip that show me in a variety of guitar-playing guises. Enjoy.

Here are the Chicago Blues Brothers Band (John ‘Squirrel’ Sorrell on bass, Ian Gibbons on keyboards, John Skelton on drums and your humble narrator on the electric guitar) at The Theatre Royal in Windsor back in September 2007 turning the Booker T. And The MG’s anthem ‘Green Onions’ from a soul classic into a heavy metal blitzkrieg workout. Good fun. Well, we enjoyed it...

And now The Flying Squad performing two of my very favourite songs - ‘Police Car’ by Larry Wallis and the Dr. Feelgood classic ‘Roxette’.

The idea for playing ‘Police Car’ came one (very) early morning on the way home from a Chicago Blues Brothers gig. I was talking to Brian the van driver when this song came on the CD player - neither of us had heard it for years, and by the time it had finished we’d both agreed that somebody should do a ‘new’ version of it. I suggested it to The Flying Squad immediately!

I once asked Wilko Johnson how he played ‘Roxette’, and he very kindly sat down with his guitar and showed me. As he got to the double-time section at the end he said something like ‘it’s just scratching really’. But for me this song isn’t ‘just’ anything - the riff is the nearest thing to musical perpetual motion that you or I are ever likely to encounter, and the Feelgoods’s recording is one of the greatest records ever made.

This is myself and the mighty T.V. Smith at the 2012 Rebellion Festival (Friday 3rd August in case you were wondering) in Blackpool. We were due to be playing on the Saturday evening but T.V.’s band The Valentines were late arriving so we took to the stage in The Empress Ballroom facing thousands of punk rockers expecting a loud electric band. It all went very well for us in the end (I wouldn’t be telling you about it here if it hadn’t!) but it was a bit nerve-racking. Anyway this is a song originally recorded by Cheap - see if you can spot the bit where I go to the wrong chord... (if you can’t, it’s 46-ish seconds in - the look on my face afterwards says it all!)

Talking of guitar mistakes there’s a cracker here at around I minute and 18 seconds. I wonder if there are any clips of me playing where I don’t make a mess of things? This is The Upper Cut at The Load Of Hay in Uxbridge bludgeoning their way through Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ on the day after my 49th birthday. Perhaps I can blame the error on the number of drinks people were buying for me. Well, maybe. Probably better to blame it on the boogie...

More from The Chicago Blues Brothers - here is our set from the BBC Proms In the Park 2012 in Hyde Park. It’s unedited footage so nothing much happens until around 3 minutes in - you’ll see us walk out as Tony Blackburn introduces us (now that’s something I never thought that I’d ever type!) and we play for about 25 minutes in front of (gulp!) 50,000 people. Great stuff. This turned out to be my final public performance with the band - I don’t know what the show is like now, but it was pretty good back then...

And here is the whole Ruts D.C. show from The Georgian Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees on Saturday 16th March 2013. This was the second gig in a run of four (we were in Leeds the previous evening, Dundee the next night and Liverpool the night after that) and while there are clips from all of those on YouTube I thought I’d post this one here as it’s the complete show. It’s 80 minutes long so get yourself a comfy chair, pull up some food (as John Lennon apparently used to say) and see what you think...