Alvin Lee, co-founder and guitarist with Ten Years After, has died aged 68.
According to a statement posted yesterday (March 6) on his website, Lee died from complications following surgery.
Born in Nottingham in 1944, Lee played in a number of local bands before he founded Ten Years After in 1966 with bassist Leo Lyons. They released their self-titled debut album in 1967. In 1969, they played the Newport Jazz Festival and, notably, Woodstock, where Lee led the band through a memorable version of "I'm Going Home" that you can watch below.
Tom Waits is staring back at me from the cover of the new Uncut, which goes on sale this Thursday, January 31. It’s a picture of the young Tom that I’m looking at, long before he ended up with a face that now makes you think a tractor tyre must recently have run over it, a corrugated look he shares with his friend, Keith Richards. He is in fact startlingly young in the picture, even though it would seem he hasn’t shaved for a week and for just as long has been sleeping in the clothes he’s wearing.
This week’s new issue of Uncut features another 50 Great Lost Albums – those that are unavailable new or as legal downloads right now – chosen by the mag’s readers. Consequently, I thought it’d be useful to put our original Top 50 online, as they appeared in issue 156 of Uncut (Neil Young was on the cover, narrowing it down a little).
Maybe it’s all the Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac in the office these past few weeks, but there’s a lot of “Tusk” in the air at Club Uncut tonight. The gated tribal rumbles, the lush, clenched-teeth harmonies, the general air of progressive pop.
Residual indie prejudices can be tough to shake off and, for me, one lingered longer than most: a profound distrust of Fleetwood Mac. I read all the essays about them – and especially about Lindsey Buckingham – where they were extolled as great emotional confessors and discreet musical radicals. But their records always seemed to me the epitome of hollow decadence, redolent of a certain air-conditioned, blow-dried Hollywood vulgarity, the criticism of which is now every bit as clichéd as the original material.
Not for the first time, of course, I was wrong.
