Billy Bragg: the privilege of playing with Ian McLagan
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Version 0 of 1. Having been a teenage Faces fan, to simply meet Ian McLagan would have been an honour. To have played with him in a band and to know him as a dear friend was an immense privilege. For someone who was regarded as a deity by mods of all ages, Mac was a surprisingly down to earth fellow. He had been at the centre of British pop in its world-conquering heyday between 1963 and 1973, but he was always happy to sit at the bar and chat with anyone over a pint of Guinness, whether they knew he was rock royalty of not. His time in the Small Faces was one of innocence and pleasure, getting to do everything he ever wanted to do while being paid £20 a week, as much as his dad earned as an engineer. By the time the Faces were formed, he’d emerged as one of the greatest keyboard players of his generation. His unashamedly goodtime style of piano playing was a fitting soundtrack to the Faces raucous image but they were also capable of moments of great tenderness and on those numbers, it was Mac’s soulful Hammond B3 organ that set the tone. I first met him in the 1980s, when he was living in LA, working as a hired hand for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt. He used to hold court at a mock English pub, the Kings Head in Santa Monica, where he’d regale visiting musicians from home with tales of a life in rock. His move to Austin Texas in the mid-90s was an admission that he wanted to get back into the life of a gigging musician. Austin is a town where you can play a different bar every night if you wish and Mac soon established himself as a much loved and respected member of the musical community. I ran into him again while in town for the annual South By South West festival and when Wilco were unable to tour America with me to promote Mermaid Avenue, Mac offered to back me with his Bump Band. We did a month on the road in the US and Canada and when that came to an end, I enticed him to join the band I was putting together in the UK, the Blokes. Although Mac was a good decade or so older than the rest of us, we soon found out that he’d lost none of the mischievous sense of humour that was a feature of both the Small Faces and the Faces. Whatever stupid situation we found ourselves in, Mac always had a tale to tell us of how this had happened to him before but in much more bizarre circumstances and involving celebrities who were household names. On stage, he played up a storm. The weekly club dates he did at the Lucky Lounge in Austin meant that he was on top of his game. Nothing seemed to phase him. The Hammond B3 organ and the Leslie cabinet speaker that comes with it are notoriously fickle, their great sound relying on lots of moving parts. As we were hiring a different one every night, it wasn’t uncommon to find Mac under the organ, fiddling with the electrics or adjusting the Leslie in some way while I was introducing the next song. All this was done while looking sharp. Years of being in the premier mod band had left Mac with a sense of style that was finely tuned. Shirt to shoes, he was immaculate and that signature Faces hairstyle was still drawing approving nods in the early 2000s. The death of his beloved wife Kim in a traffic accident in 2006 hit him hard, but he found his feet recording a tribute to his soul mate Ronnie Lane, whose work Mac did so much to keep alive following Lane’s untimely death in 1997. His wonderfully written autobiography, All The Rage, contains plenty of tales of rock’n’roll debauchery, but it’s his evocative description of summer holidays he spent as a child with his Gran and uncle Ned in Ireland that stand out for me. The book contained all his great stories from a career of amazing achievements, yet the dedication he wrote in the copy he gave me read “This is the life and these are the days!” It was that “live in the moment” attitude helped him keep his feet on the ground through the incredible highs and the lows that he experienced in a life lived to the full. I’m glad to have known him and sorry that he’s gone. |