CHRIS SPEDDING - Chris Spedding

CHRIS SPEDDING Chris Spedding cd 1975/76 Rak records 320 kbps

New girl in the neighborhood / School days / Sweet disposition / Bedsit girl / Guitar jamboree / Jump in my car / Hungry man / Motor bikin'° / Catch that train / Nervous / Boogie city / Working for the union* / Running round* / Truck drivin' man* (*bonus tracks) .

Produced by Mickie Most.

Chris Spedding : guitar & vocals / Les Hurdle : bass / Brian Bennett : drums / Tony Carr : drums / Tony Burrows, Chas Mills & Neil Lancaster : backing vocals .

except ° : Dave Cochran: bass / Barry Morgan : drums / Sue & Sunny : backing vocals.

One of Britain's top session guitarists of the '70s (even participating in records by the furry Wombles!), Chris Spedding has had a truly aberrant solo career. A veteran of numerous outfits starting in the '60s, Spedding made several LPs under his own name before joining Andy Fraser's post-Free band, Sharks, who made two hard-rocking LPs in 1973 and '74. (Spedding also played on one of Sharks vocalist Snips' subsequent solo outings.) After that band split, Spedding released a succession of LPs that combine exquisite rock guitar with lackluster vocals and songs so vapid as to be virtually nonexistent. (On a 1970 Japanese release, he dispensed with vocals entirely.) The highlight of Chris Spedding is a novelty item called "Guitar Jamboree" which features Spedding aping various guitar heroes in a show of chameleonlike virtuosity.

TrouserPress.

Though this eponymous masterpiece was not Chris Spedding's first solo album, it was the first to impact on the record buying public at large. Spiralling out of his so-memorable hit "Motorbiking," it established the leather-clad, quiff-topped Spedding as the first guitar-hero pin-up of the punk era, a full year before even punk's progenitors had heard of the term. Certainly great swathes of what eventually emerged amid the British new wave was bodily borrowed from Spedding, both visually and, with a few fashionable refinements, visually. Chris Spedding sounds like its maker looked: tight, mean, and taking no trash from no-one. The future anthem "Guitar Jamboree" could easily have been replayed with switchblades, while his take on CHUCK BERRY's "School Days" has a lot more in mind than class work and gym. Electrifying, too, are "Jump in My Car" and "Bedsit Girl." Economically riff-driven guitar pop was nothing new, of course, but rarely had it been executed with such a glowering swagger. Short, sharp and never less than brittle, Chris Spedding has few of the frills that Spedding so adeptly draped over other people's records, few of the twists and turns that distinguished his work with Sharks or later, alone. But, if ever anyone figures out how to fit a CD player into a motorcycle helmet, this should be the first album anybody buys to play on it. Dave Thompson on Allmusic