CHRIS SPEDDING
One of Britain’s most versatile session guitarists, Chris Spedding had a long career on two continents that saw him tackle nearly every style of rock & roll to come down the pike, as well as sporadically attempting a solo career. The fact that he never quite broken through to stardom, except in his native England and parts of Europe, and in professional music circles, is more a result of bad timing and worse luck than any lack of talent or commitment on his part. Spedding was born in Sheffield, England, in 1944. His family moved to Birmingham in the mid-’50s, by which time he had already taken up music, playing the violin in his school orchestra. That all changed when he discovered rock & roll, initially with Bill Haley & His Comets and later Elvis Presley. According to Chris Welch in a 2004 article, Spedding began to strum his violin like a guitar, and the Rubicon had been crossed. He was proficient on several instruments, including the piano (and could also sight-read) thanks to his music lessons, which put him several cuts above the typical aspiring rock & roller of the time, who might not have known three chords. Like Ellis McDaniel (aka Bo Diddley) before him, who’d traded in the violin for a six-string, the guitar was the vehicle through which Spedding chose to express himself. He organized his first band, the Hot Spurs, while still attending school. And not too long after that Spedding, still in his mid-teens, headed for London and joined a beat group called the Vulcans, and from there supported cabaret acts on a cruise ship and several touring country bands. During the second half of the 1960s, Spedding backed both Alan Price and Paul Jones, part of their respective bands on their early solo forays, this at a time when both were among the top-ranked solo artists in England. He also made a considerable part of his living playing with the Nat Temple Orchestra, doing weddings and bar mitzvahs, among other events. It was tenor saxman George Khan (aka Nisar Ahmed Khan), who had lately joined a band-in-the-making coalescing around poet/lyricist Pete Brown — best known for his work writing for Cream — who cleared the path for Spedding to his first major music opportunity. Brown was assembling a group and, at Khan’s suggestion, he approached Spedding about playing with the group that became the Battered Ornaments.