Mick Jones from Foreigner was an old friend from Spooky Tooth days and before. Were there any projects over the years that you were offered but couldn’t pursue? I’d like to have a little shuffle behind Eric Clapton – if you’re reading, Eric! Be nice to be able to say I did it. I also got to meet Hendrix briefly, and I’d have liked to chat more with him, ’cos he seemed a real nice guy. We had a table right at the front, and that was scary, but he was a gentleman. He was heartbroken, but he put on the show of a lifetime. He was playing a nightclub with three people in the audience. I did get to talk to Buddy Rich briefly, one night in Wildwood, New Jersey. I’d like to have met Lennon, and to have picked Al Jackson’s brains, the drummer from Booker T & The MGs. What would you have asked your music hero of that era? From the 60s, bands survived longer and longevity became reality. Then my brother Angus and I had Apostolic Intervention 30 odd years later. Yeah, my mum played piano, and my uncle Cecil and my dad had The Casino Dance Band, from 1928 to 1933. Shirley’s account of his storied career, Best Seat In The House, has been published by Rebeats, and he met RC in a metropolitan hostelry to recount his stick-wielding heyday.
Along the way, he played with the likes of Alexis Korner, The Who’s John Entwistle, Billy Nicholls, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and David Gilmour, and George Harrison, as well as touring with Badfinger and acting as the percussive fulcrum for Natural Gas, Magnet and Fastway, which he co-founded with Motörhead’s ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke.
They reconvened from 1979 to 1981, and Shirley secured rights to use the band name with a new line-up from 1988, working on and off until a final studio set emerged in 2002.
Ever so humble pie co series#
In 1968 he teamed up with Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton and Greg Ridley in the blues-rock titans Humble Pie, and hit UK No 4 with Natural Born Bugie, subsequently knocking out a series of hard/ prog rock albums until 1975, when the band disintegrated after the usual rock cliché excesses on the road in America (with several million quid going up in smoke en route).
Ever so humble pie co mod#
After learning piano and guitar as a whippersnapper, London lad Jerry Shirley took up the sticks to keep time for 60s beat outfits Little People and The Valkyrie, before joining the mod band Apostolic Intervention, who issued sides for Immediate.