18/04/2025
CHRIS YOULDEN 1/1/1943 ~ 4/4/2025
Chris Youlden died of bronchial pneumonia on April 4th 2025. I’ve used the notes I did for his album as the basis for this tribute from me.
Chris Youlden ~ Closing Time.
Everybody has to start somewhere, and for Chris Youlden it was in the Dagenham delta around 1963, when he and John White formed the Downhome Blues Band with Shakey Vick. They did the usual circuit including The Marquee Club, Beat City and colleges until John decided to move on, leaving Chris and Shakey Vick to continue as a duo until they were joined by Dave Peverett (later of Savoy Brown and Foghat). Chris was hungry for any opportunity to be heard at this time and seized the chance to sing with pianist Johnny Parker after Johnny – famed for his piano intro to “Bad Penny Blues” - had left Humphrey Lyttleton’s band and struck out on his own. The gig was at a boating club somewhere on the Thames and Chris was coaxed into doing it by his friend who was Parker’s drummer. Johnny began the evening with some peerless instrumentals and then Chris thoughtfully suggested “Roll ’Em Pete” by Big Joe Turner to close out Johnny’s first set and introduce himself to the world at large. Immediately afterwards at the interval Chris was approached by a clearly unimpressed, blazered and striped-tied club secretary who collared him and said, “I say old chap, would you mind awfully not singing?”. Chris dutifully sat out for a while until the same fellow suggested that he should “…play something or we won’t be able to pay you”. Left-handed Chris was passed a standard acoustic guitar by Johnny’s wife who sang the second set and he pretended to play it upside down for the remainder of the evening to earn his share of the take. He sang no more that night but was thankfully undeterred by the experience. Various projects and associations with like-minded musicians led Chris deeper into the muddy waters where in 1965, manager Gilda Romero introduced to him to blues boy Martin Stone from the southside of the river. This led to a brief involvement as the singer in Stone’s Masonry along with Keith Tillman (bass) and Pete Thomas (drums) until Martin continued upstream to join Kim Simmonds in the Savoy Brown Blues Band. One night, Savoy Brown’s singer was too sick to make the gig, so Chris got the call from Martin to dep for the evening and made a big impression on Kim and manager Harry Simmonds. Next time the deck got shuffled, Chris got the permanent gig with Savoy Brown...but Stone had caught an earlier tide and moved on again.
Although it spawned many singers, bands, and musicians who went on to greater fame, the crack in the clouds that became known as the British blues boom did not last very long. My friends and I were fortunate enough to have it on our doorstep. Standing on the shoulders of Alexis Korner and Chris Barber before them, the likes of John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, Savoy Brown, Black Cat Bones, The Boilerhouse, Chicken Shack and others were frequent performers at our regular haunts which were mainly The Star Hotel in Croydon, The Ram Jam Club in Brixton, The Marquee Club in Soho and the tiny upstairs room at The Nag’s Head pub in Battersea. Until Chris Youlden joined Savoy Brown, only a handful of English bands were acknowledged as real interpreters of the blues and despite valiantly trying, up to that point by comparison, the original Savoy Brown Blues Band somehow hadn’t quite made the cut. I owned the first album and went to see them with Bryce Portius on vocals on my seventeenth birthday on 10th June 1967 at an all-nighter at The Ram Jam Club on the same bill with John Lee Ho**er and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers - featuring Peter Green for the last time. In September later that year, Paul Riley and I went to the same venue to see Mayall with his new drummer Keef Hartley and the young Mick Taylor making his debut on guitar. That night, with the nod from Mayall, Kim Simmonds made it on stage and introduced a ragged looking Chris as Savoy Brown’s new singer and the two of them played a very well-received version of “Don’t know which way to go”. By the time I saw them again at The Nag’s Head with Chris at their forefront, this incarnation of the Savoy Brown Blues Band had sprouted a hairy chest and joined the respected clique. Youlden’s influence on the newly constituted band was blindingly obvious and they were now genuinely world-class. As the sun went down on that new dawn of British blues and after contributing hugely to some of Savoy Brown’s most successful albums, Chris left the band to pursue a solo career. Astonishingly, even with one of the best voices of the era and two solo albums on the London label, he failed to make an impact and slipped quietly through the net of household names that caught so many others at the time.
Paul and I became friends in 1967 playing in groups together. Nobody really thought about the future in those days, and it certainly never occurred to either of us back then that our musical paths would cross with Chris’ within a decade. Although he moved away from our locality around 1970, I stayed in touch with Paul. As 1973 rolled by, I had pretty much given up any thoughts of playing music full-time and was the manager of Drum City in London’s Soho doing the odd gig on the side. In the meantime, he had already carved a name for himself as an in-demand bass player and was blazing a trail working flat out in Chilli Willi and the Red-Hot Peppers with Martin Stone. The tremors from those pub rock pioneers rumbled into an earthquake of independence that changed the music landscape beyond recognition and Paul stayed in the thick of it. By the summer of 1979, a plethora of London venues were competing for new blood. “Boss” Goodman of Dingwalls invited him to form his own blues-band for a Sunday night residency starting in August. Even though we did not average thirty years of age, Paul called asking me to fill the drum chair in the outfit he was naming “The Old Tossers” joining him with Martin Stone on guitar and Will Stallibrass on harmonica. I was knocked out when he told me that Stoney had been in touch with Chris Youlden who’d also agreed to join the band as the singer. Stallibrass was an old chum and a band mate of Paul’s from Croydon who had been an ad hoc harp player with the Willis and guested on their album. Chris excelled as our featured vocalist and the Sunday night sessions soon attracted others keen to sit-in with us for a few numbers. Jo Ann Kelly was the most frequent of our guests and her duet with Chris on Fontella Bass and Bobby McLure’s “Don’t Mess Up A Good Thing” was always especially good. Other regulars included Phil May, Paul Jones, Jona Lewie, Wayne Kramer, Lew Lewis, Noel Brown and Bill Hurley. The residency lasted for quite some time into 1980 but none of us remember exactly how long. The gigs were popular and well attended but eventually came to an end. During the Chilli Willi days, Paul had got interested in recording techniques during the making of the Bongos Over Balham album and in the intermediate years following their demise had gained a reputation as a fine studio engineer. At some point he wrangled us into Nick Lowe’s Ampro Studio for a day to attempt recording some OTs tracks, but they didn’t amount to anything worthy of use. So alas, a grainy “live” cassette recording with plenty of flutter and not much wow, and a couple of out-of-focus photos are the fading shadows of those Sunday nights. Inevitably, we all went our separate ways. But I wasn’t going to leave it there.
During the mid-eighties, I got a couple of gigs for the band and asked Dave Briggs to play guitar because Martin was not available. Using mostly the same material as at Dingwalls, we performed as The Slammers at The Tunnel Club in Greenwich and it sounded good. Eager to give my drums a rare airing in 1987, I booked The House In The Woods for a long weekend to see if we could recapture any of those Dingwalls shadows. I hoped that with a chance to relax over a few days, we’d get a better result than our hasty effort at Ampro. The basic idea was to get down there on the Friday to get the gear set up and then head to the pub and figure out what we might record…go back to the studio at closing time…turn it all on and then let it fly. A great plan. Paul rigged the room as he wanted it and got very interested in the beat-up old Hammond organ and Leslie rotating speaker cabinet that were gathering dust in the corner. Then we all piled into my 1976 “white-on-white-in” white convertible Cadillac Eldorado and headed to the village boozer to get in the mood. To the alarm of passers-by, we pulled up outside The Whyte Harte in Bletchingley with “Trout Mask Replica” on full whack. By a minute after eleven, stage one of the plan seemed to be working. Paul had been insistent that we should try and write at least one original, so we aimed back to the studio and by midnight were indeed ready to put stage two to the test. Back at the studio and aided by Giz’s dizzying hospitality, Will’s guitar got plugged into the Leslie in the early hours of the morning. Anyone who has been in a studio with Paul at the helm will tell you that he has a great sense of vision and is full of ideas. The sound of that guitar through the Leslie on the got under his skin and he laid out a guitar riff for us and suggested that Chris should have a crack at writing some lyrics for it. It wasn’t long before “I Wanna Stay Alive” started to spring to life. By dawn, we’d nailed it, and you can tell it was recorded in the middle of the night. It was the highlight of the weekend session. (Some years later, a rough copy of the tape found its way into the hands of CC Adcock who unashamedly ripped off the music and whole vibe of the recording claiming it as his own composition “Couchemal” for his 1994 debut album on Island Records.) Chris’ vocals were outstanding throughout the weekend. The handful of tracks that we cut in a couple of crazy nights were generally done in one take with live vocals. Paul was playing bass and mixing on the fly too. A great time was had by all and the tapes got mothballed as they were never intended for commercial release. I got a cassette of the session from Paul and often played it at home and got ideas for additional material if the opportunity presented itself again. By 1991 I had the chance to suggest another few days of sessions back in Bletchingley and through Paul, I was able to hire Geraint Watkins on keyboards to add another dimension in Will’s absence. Chris, Dave and Paul agreed again so we had another crack at it. The formula for these dates was basically the same as before with most of us staying at the house for the duration - facilitating visits to the local pub and the further appreciation of the groaning board of Marijke’s fabulous cooking morning, noon and night. Watkins’ addition on keyboards provided a chance to tackle different repertoire and we managed six keepers. Paul took advantage of the fine double bass that Giz had acquired in the interim and can be heard putting it to great effect on all the 1991 cuts that completed the album we released of Chris Youlden and the Slammers “Closing Time”.
Chris had largely retired from professional appearances but in 2010 I assembled some friends for my 60th birthday party at the 100 Club and Chris, Martin Stone, Paul Riley and I got together to play some of those old tunes again. The following year, Martin was invited to put together a band for the 40th Glastonbury (he had performed at the first one) and we got together again with Will Stallibrass as the OTs to do a few gigs culminating with being the opening act of the festival and getting off the site before the mudslides started.
We kept in touch and in April 2025 I phoned, texted and wrote to him to say that Paul had unearthed a fine demo recording of one of his originals entitled Yesterday’s News that we did in the Proper Records studio with Paul and me, Dave Briggs and Gary Walsh around 2012 which I was going to offer to Jimmie Vaughan for an upcoming album. Chris never got that bit of news.
Here is that demo. What a voice.
~ Malcolm Mills
LISTEN TO "Yesterday's News": https://zurl.co/G28k6
WATCH Chris with Martin Stone and Friends: https://zurl.co/gbbvx
