BRITISH SESSION ACE CHRIS SPEDDING ON BEING ASKED TO AUDITION FOR THE ROLLING STONES, PRODUCING THE SEX PISTOLS’ EARLY DEMOS AND RECORDING HIS FINAL ALBUM WITH ROBERT GORDON
By Mark McStea
OVER A CAREER spanning nearly 60 years, British session ace Chris Spedding has worked with pretty much everyone in the business. For U.S. audiences, he might be best known for his long association with latter-day rockabilly legend Robert Gordon, who passed away in October 2022. Gordon’s final album, which was released weeks after his untimely passing, Hellafied, sees Gordon and Spedding team up for one final go-around.
It was very sad news about Robert, who was just 75 when he died.
I guess his health hadn’t been all that great for some time. I had a call from him when he told me he’d been diagnosed with leukemia, which was a bit of a shock. I think initially he thought he’d have a lot more time left, but then he was gone a few weeks later.
It’s interesting that Robert’s work wasn’t self-consciously retro in the way that the Stray Cats were; he was actually creating a modern take on rockabilly when he broke through in the Seventies, with you and Link Wray in particular bringing a harder rock edge to the sound.
Well, me, Robert and Link were all first-generation rockers; we weren’t reviving anything, you know? I think the attitude and the guitar sounds were much more modern, and in the Seventies that sat well with the punk and new wave audiences as well as traditional rock ’n’ roll fans. It was a real joy for me to play with Robert, to be able to play that straightforward rock ’n’ roll that we both loved.
What was the situation with Hellafied? Was it old demos, etc.?
Some were done way back in Denmark where we had to abandon the sessions as the studio wasn’t up to par, but Robert recently listened back to them and thought we could salvage them with some new guitars and vocals. There were a few really old demo ideas as well that we used, but for most of the songs I ended up re-doing my parts in the U.K. on Pro Tools and Robert would do his new vocals in the States.
Reeling way back to the earliest days, was the intention always to work as a session musician or was there never any real gameplan?
There was no gameplan at all. I just thought I’d like to be a musician. I’d been listening to all sorts of music — there was a period when I was really into jazz in the Sixties, which was how I got into the whole fusion thing with bands like Nucleus and playing with Jack Bruce, but my first love was really rock ’n’ roll, I guess.
