Noel Redding Band - Clonakilty Cowboys - Blowin' 1975-76

Former Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding's second attempt to lead a group (following Fat Mattress), the Noel Redding Band were more of a cooperative effort than their name would suggest. Redding may have been the organizing principal behind the unit, but David Clarke wrote or co-wrote almost all the material as well as singing lead vocals, while Eric Bell played lead guitar. Whoever dominated the band, however, their debut LP, Clonakilty Cowboys, was very much a British rock album of its time. There were hints here of the Faces and there of Mott the Hoople in a mainstream rock sound that seemed utterly familiar in the mid-'70s, but didn't much remind you of Redding's work with Hendrix. When Bell took off on his solo, for example, at the end of "Eight Nights a Week" (a paean to being a rock & roll star), his high-pitched work was out of Rock Guitar 101, but it had none of Hendrix's inventiveness. Maybe it's not fair to make such a comparison, but one falls into comparisons in discussing the music because it had little distinctive character of its own. As singers, neither Clarke nor Redding made it out of the rusty-voiced ranks of generic rock vocalists. Clonakilty Cowboys didn't make any noise on the charts and it didn't deserve to. Redding and company had made a fairly typical album for their time, but hadn't done anything that distinguished them from the pack. Noel Redding emphasized his primacy in the band named after him on their second album, Blowin', putting close-up photographs of himself alone on the front and back covers, albeit with humorous intention. (He was pictured on the front blowing up a big bubblegum bubble and on the back with the burst bubble stuck to his nose.) He also took over production duties on the record and wrote a couple of songs on his own. But this was still a group effort on which lead singer and primary songwriter David Clarke took a prominent, if not dominant, role. The album rocked harder than its predecessor, Clonakilty Cowboys, and, recorded largely in the U.S., seemed to have more of an American, on-the-road feel, beginning with its opening track, "Back on the Road Again." But the Noel Redding Band were still a faceless, nearly generic rock group with a rusty-voiced singer mouthing rock & roll clichés and a standard-issue guitarist. Blowin' didn't sell any better than Clonakilty Cowboys had, and that was about the end of the Noel Redding Band. AMG

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