British blues legend John Mayall dies aged 90

John Mayall performs on stage at Teatro Nuevo Apolo on October 08, 2019 in Madrid, Spain. Photo / Getty Images

OBITUARY

John Mayall has died aged 90, cutting a vital link between British music and the rest of the world’s rocking-blues past. Mayall presents a curious figure in music history, a bit-part player in his own story, yet at the centre of a fabulous web of music and talent, weaving magic that touched us all.

The passionate, gregarious, sociable and vocationally driven multi-instrumentalist wrote hundreds of songs and released about 70 albums across a career spanning six decades.

A road warrior of the old school, Mayall played hundreds of gigs a year right up until 2022, when he retired due to declining health, sailing off in a farewell blast of harmonica and keyboards. He was often referred to as the Godfather of British Blues, awarded an OBE in 2005 and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, in the musical excellence category.

Yet Mayall will be remembered more for the connections he made and his influence on others than for his recorded work. The greatest album that bears his name is chiefly celebrated for the presence of another musician.

Blues Breakers, John Mayall’s 1966 album, represented a decisive turning point in rock history and is justly regarded as a classic. It was the first album to signal the arrival of a new kind of guitar hero playing a fierce, overloaded, sustained lead that elevated the blues to a new plane.

But the album’s hero was Eric Clapton, not Mayall. Clapton was already causing such a sensation with his unrivalled playing that his name appears on the cover, “With Eric Clapton” flashing right underneath Mayall’s. Clapton would go on to become a rock god. Mayall would content himself with providing a platform to launch a whole generation of stars.

A key figure in the British blues boom of the 1960s as a band leader, mentor and innovator, the constantly shifting line-ups of the Bluesbreakers, Mayall’s backing group, provided a showcase for some of the greatest players of all time: Clapton, Peter Green (later of Fleetwood Mac) and Mick Taylor (of The Rolling Stones). In a social media post paying tribute, Sir Mick Jagger credited Mayall with recommending Taylor to replace Brian Jones, following Jones’ sudden death in 1969 aged 27.

Bassists Jack Bruce (of Cream) and John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood (the rhythm section of Fleetwood Mac) all came up through Mayall’s ranks. For five years in the second half of the 1960s, Mayall provided a showcase for British electric blues music to transform into the harder, wilder, freer and more aggressive sound we now characterise as rock.

He was an ambitious band leader, but only in terms of music rather than career, and he would genially if ruthlessly swap players whenever he spotted another interesting talent to investigate. There were 15 different line-ups of the Bluesbreakers in the 1960s, and when Mayall moved to California in the 1970s, he began to explore jazz-blues fusions in more acoustic flavoured set-ups, with line-ups that included such gifted players as saxophonist John Almond and violinist Don Harris.

Mayall was a prodigious multi-instrumentalist himself, playing guitar, organ, piano and harmonica, often at the same time with mad-cap exuberance. On The Blues Alone, his 1967 solo album, he played nearly every instrument. Had it not been for his reliance on contributions from session drummers it would hold a historic position as the first multi-tracked one-man-band album, preceding McCartney, Paul McCartney’s solo debut, by three years.

Five Mayall albums made the top 30 in the British charts in the first five years of his career, yet it is not hard to understand why Mayall is less revered than many of his contemporaries. You had to see him live to feel the full impact of his talents. Once converted his audience has remained loyal.

As a singer on record, Mayall’s voice was thin and flavourless. You can’t help but wish he’d done what other blues band leaders of the era opted to do and hire Rod Stewart, Chris Farlowe, Robert Plant or some other young gun with a bit of grit and texture to front proceedings.

And as a songwriter, it surely says something that he filled so many albums with his compositions but never had so much as a sniff at a hit single. Unfortunately, Mayall was a banal lyricist, whose prodigious output was partly fuelled by the simple expedient of apparently singing whatever was on his mind over a blues chord sequence.

“What’s wrong with me? / I still got virginity,” he lamented on Wish I Knew A Woman, from Memories (1971). “Guys are driving me mad with all the women that they’ve had / All I got is my hand for satisfaction every night.”

Too many Mayall songs dwelled on lecherous views of women, and have not dated well. When his house in Laurel Canyon, California burned down in a brush fire in 1979, he lamented that he had lost a valuable pornography collection dating from the 1800s. A more honourable obsession was environmentalism, but I am not convinced the greatest vocalist on earth could do much with lines like “Make manufacturers uncomfortable / Containers that are non-returnable” from Nature’s Disappearing on USA Union (1970).

He plunged to William McGonagall depths of oratorial triteness on Accidental Suicide, his misguided “tribute” to Jimi Hendrix from Back to the Roots (1971). “Drugs may bring you joy / But the danger there’s that they destroy / So watch what you do / Or you can be the next to go.” Let that be a lesson to you, kids.

The real rewards to be found in his copious output manifest every time Mayall drifts from the microphone and lets his players express themselves. Many Mayall albums were recorded live, because that is the environment in which his bands flourished, revelling in a weave and tangle of instrumentation around the blues frameworks he provided.

His shows were filled with extended jams, with guitars and later violins flying off into the stratosphere, lots of nimble bass solos and a few too many drum solos. His early recorded work remains fascinating in terms of the different touches and instincts of Clapton, Green and Taylor. Without Mayall’s discernment and encouragement in setting stellar talents on their paths, the history of rock may have turned out very differently.

Mayall lived a long musical life, cast a long shadow, helped carry the blues from its acoustic American origins into a new electric forum and reshape as rock, then spend decades simply playing it with unbounded joy. That is a life to be celebrated. So long, John.