He’s played with artists ranging from Robert Gordon to Bryan Ferry. But journeyman guitarist Chris Spedding admits, “I don’t really listen to anything that I’ve played on.”
BY MARK McSTEA
CHRIS SPEDDING’S LONG career has seen him move from first-call session musician for 1960s pop producers to solo chart success at the height of the U.K. glam-pop scene, in 1975. In later years, his most visible role for U.S. audiences has been as Robert Gordon’s longest-standing collaborator. Along the way, he contributed to many of the biggest-selling solo albums by Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry.
For someone with such an extensive catalog, Spedding makes a surprising admission. “I don’t really listen to anything that I’ve played on,” he says. “For about 99 percent of it, there’s always something I wish I’d done better. I did record ‘It’s So Easy to Fall In Love’ a few years ago for a tribute to Buddy Holly, where I played an extended solo that I look back on as really great. That’s probably a favorite of mine, but it’s not actually on any of my own albums.”
Spedding applied the same sense of perfectionism to the work he did for other artists. “Time constraints were always an issue, and I would usually be the only one who wasn’t satisfied,” he explains. “I’d go by the reaction of the people that I was working with though. If they were happy, then that was the most important thing. I learned early on not to ask if I can go for another take as, invariably, it often wasn’t as good as the first one anyway. Really, you’re just happy that you’re getting the work and people like what you’re doing.”
Spedding admits he’s often worried about where his next job will come from. “I’ve been feeling like that for 50 years,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve never had the sort of success that means that I could retire. I’ve always got to work. Fortunately, something usually crops up.”
For that matter, he says, “I would never turn work down. It didn’t matter who it was. The thing is that you just don’t know what you’re going to get when you arrive at the studio. You never get enough information to even consider whether it’s an artist that you’d want to work with. Of course, things often don’t pan out the way you expect. Something that seems unlikely to be good could turn out to be the best thing you ever did.”
A trawl through Spedding’s canon reveals that there is very little acoustic-based work
