Rod Clements saw considerable chart success with folk-rockers Lindisfarne, penning their hit Meet Me On The Corner. Now a solo artist, he is currently recording a new album. Rod is proud to have worked with the late, great Bert Jansch, and he continues to collaborate with various other musical kindred spirits including Michael Chapman, Rachel Harrington and Rab Noakes. We trust you’ll enjoy the latest of Rod’s regular musings in which you’ll find he’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE Hardly a week goes by now without the news that another musical legend has passed away, whether it be an iconic figure from the early days of rock’n’roll or some unsung backroom session player dimly remembered for their contribution to somebody else’s hit record. In the latter case, the obituaries invariably refer to the player’s only having received a meagre session fee whilst the headline artist went on to grab all the fame, money, girls and endless replays on late-night TV clip shows. Take drummer Bill Eyden, for instance. He was hired to play on Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale and just about the only thing we heard about him when he died was that he “only” got fifteen guineas (that’s £15.75, kids) for a three-hour session while the rest of them went on to become pop stars and ended up squabbling in court over the gazillions of pounds’ worth of royalties the track had generated. (We heard rather less about Bill’s long and illustrious contribution to the halcyon days of British jazz and a career spanning everybody from The Goon Show to Georgie Fame.) Bill would have been the first to tell you, though, that any sense of injustice one might feel on his behalf, however well-intentioned, would be misplaced. Session players like him regarded themselves as journeymen, taking great pride in their work, hired to do a job quickly and well before moving on to the next one. Many of them had full diaries and spent all day going from studio to studio playing on a few hits, a lot more misses, a few TV themes and an awful lot of advertising jingles. And it was well-paid work - fifteen guineas in 1967 would now be worth around £242. It only required a couple of sessions a day to make a very decent living, and many players worked more than that. You could argue that it’s still a pittance compared with the fortunes made by the headline artists, writers and record company, but that assumes (amongst other things) that the record was a hit. The named artist or band wouldn’t have got a penny until after the record had started to sell (if they were lucky), and somebody would have had to stump up in the first place to book the studio and the extra musicians, all of whom got paid anyway. The hired hands didn’t initiate the project, take the risk, write the songs or promote the finished product – they were simply brought in to do a specific job for which they were well paid and took pride in doing creatively and well. Ah, you might say, but what about the anonymous session-man who comes up with the hook that sells the record? Aside from the fact that it’s impossible to define which component of a track makes it a hit, most old-school players regarded improvisation - always an important element in the mix - as part of the job. A hired hand might be asked to provide a riff here, an eight-bar solo there, to ad-lib something over the fade; it went with the territory, and if you didn’t come up with the goods, you wouldn’t get asked back. Bill and his contemporaries are now, literally, a dying breed, and the world in which they plied their trade has changed beyond recognition. Studios have given way to laptops and drummers to programmed beats and samples. But Bill’s drumming on A Whiter Shade Of Pale is as fine a testament as any to that vanished era: it’s the sound of a master craftsman at work.