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Michael Chapman never obtained the recognition he deserved. Starting in the late 60s, the British guitarist and vocalist launched a string of albums that had been feted by the likes of David Bowie, Elton John and, later, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, however the public at giant never caught on to his brilliance and he remained a cult determine till his dying in 2021. In 2013, Chapman spoke to Classic Rock about the highs and lows of his profession – and why he never obtained the breakthrough he ought to have.
So what do you do? Your supervisor’s packed up and gone. Your bandmate’s left with a girl in a inexperienced Mustang. Audiences, in the event that they present up in any respect, are detached at greatest, generally downright hostile. You’ve been mugged. Your visa didn’t come by way of. You’re alone in New York, 3,000 miles out of your family members. And you’re penniless. So what do you do?
You head house, of course. “That was the tour from hell,” remembers singer-songwriter Michael Chapman. “The only bit that went right was that I didn’t get shot. Basically the record company just wasn’t looking after me. They’d forgotten to get me a work permit, which meant that the clubs I played in had to pay them first. So I was running around America without a bean. I still have the bill from the Chelsea Hotel in New York.”
It was August 1971. Chapman, one of Britain’s most singular guitar skills, had set out on his first tour of the US to promote new album Wrecked Again. Bankrolled by EMI/Capitol and joined by bassist Rick Kemp, later of Steeleye Span, the thought was to start on the East Coast and regularly wind westwards to LA, at that time the cradle of the hippie troubadour growth.
But Chapman never made it that far. Sharing a invoice with one of his heroes, jazz nice Cannonball Adderley, was the solely trigger for celebration. “We started off in Washington DC, which is America’s blackest city, and they hated us. Then we went to Philadelphia, to a kind of Ivy League jazz club for a week, and they hated us too. Then I got back to New York and played The Gaslight and nobody came. So I just got stoned all the time. Rick had domestic problems, so had gone home already. And my manager had bailed out long before that. So I was on my own, pot-less. I ended up on the next plane back. When I got home I said to my missus: ‘If that’s the big time, I don’t need it. I’ve retired. I’ll go sweep the roads or something.’”
The entire episode was additionally a sorry reflection of Chapman’s relationship with UK label Harvest. Wrecked Again was his fourth LP in three years for EMI’s progressive arm. It had as soon as appeared like a perfect house for the 30-year-old Yorkshireman, whose improvised guitar sorcery got here served with vivid lyrics and an intense stage persona. Perhaps the nearest parallel was labelmate Roy Harper, who occupied a equally vague realm between folk and rock.
Fully Qualified Survivor, issued a 12 months earlier, had been a defining second in Chapman’s profession to date. An exciting combine of avant-blues, descriptive acoustic choosing, jazzy cadences and heavy-heavy riffs, the album featured a pre-Spiders Mick Ronson on lead guitar. Bittersweet beauties like Postcards Of Scarborough and Kodak Ghosts had been offset with the blistering Soulful Lady and orchestrated 10-minute odyssey The Aviator. John Peel declared the album, which stopped simply shy of the UK Top 40, his favorite of the 12 months, calling its creator “one of the most interesting and inventive guitarists around”. Chapman appeared on the verge of large issues.
By 1971 although, Harvest had been quickly dropping religion. Sales of Window, the follow-up to Fully Qualified Survivor, had been disappointing. And whereas Wrecked Again was clearly one other minor traditional – with Memphis horns, ravishing guitar figures and arranger Paul Buckmaster bringing in the London Symphony Orchestra – the label had all however given up on Chapman. “I asked them what they were doing for promotion and they said they weren’t,” he laments. “Then they said they’d put some money behind it if I played support on a really big tour. So I got the Emerson, Lake & Palmer tour, when there wasn’t a bigger one in the world. But they still didn’t do it. I was really pissed off with them, because an awful lot of work went into that album.”
It was to be Chapman’s final file for the label. “All the oddbods, all the losers, were signed to Harvest: me and Roy Harper, Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, Syd Barrett and Kevin Ayers. We were a bunch of stoners. EMI didn’t have a clue who we were or what was going on. The underground thing was happening, but they were all retired colonels and members of the board. They lived in a universe that had disappeared by then.”
Born simply outdoors Leeds in 1941, Chapman began on the native folk scene, juggling a musical profession with effective artwork research. For three years he taught images at a Bolton school, earlier than choosing up the guitar once more and heading down to Cornwall. It was there, in 1967, that he started nurturing his fame. “I’d be playing at The Counthouse, while people like Ralph McTell, Wizz Jones and Pete Stanley were up at The Folk Cottage. The only place you could play acoustic guitar was in the folk clubs. In those days there wasn’t a PA, so you just tried to get the loudest guitar you could find. Wizz was a bit suspicious of me because I didn’t play like anybody else. I was kind of looked upon as the fastest kid on the block.”
One night time he was noticed by a expertise scout for publishers Essex Music, which in flip led to a take care of Harvest for 1969’s shape-shifting debut, Rainmaker. It was clear from the off that Chapman was very much a contemporary stripe of singer-songwriter. Like Harper, John Martyn or Bert Jansch, his laconic songs, principally streaked with themes of remorse and loss, defied simple classification. Though most of the time he was dubbed a folkie.
“One thing I’ve never been is a folk singer,” he refutes at the moment. “People have called me that all my life and I still hate it. I never came out of that folk process, I came out of jazz and blues. I always wanted to be Big Bill Broonzy or Big Joe Williams or Lightnin’ Hopkins. And play a bit of jazz like [bebop player] Kenny Burrell and [Blue Note guitarist] Grant Green as well. I don’t know that much about folk music, except for the fact that most of it bores me to tears.”
The story of how Mick Ronson got here to play on Fully Qualified Survivor is treasured. Struggling to make a crust as a guitarist, he was mowing the garden of a native college when outdated mate Rick Kemp handed by, on his approach to Chapman’s album session. “I wanted to get hold of Mick, because I’d heard him play with [Hull band] The Rats,” remembers Chapman.
“Rick knew him better than I did, so he said: ‘C’mon, we’re going down to make a record with Michael.’” Producer Gus Dudgeon, recent from engaged on David Bowie’s Space Oddity and Elton John’s second album, had already drawn up an inventory of potential guitarists from the London session scene and was resistant to the unknown Ronson. “Gus didn’t want him on there, but I said: ‘No, I’m bringing this gardener from Hull. I like the way this kid plays. He’ll fucking kill ya!’” Soon after, Chapman launched Ronson to Bowie, who now had his right-hand Spider.
Later in 1970, whereas Bowie’s new guitarist helped file The Man Who Sold The World, Dudgeon really useful Ronson and Chapman to Elton John for his new opus, Madman Across The Water. The pair, in accordance to Chapman, roughly took over the unique classes, although by August 1971, the singer-pianist had assembled his personal band for the last lower. It was solely much later that Chapman acquired an alarming confession from Dudgeon.
“At some point in the 90s, my wife was having dinner with him and his missus,” he explains. “Gus told her: ‘Elton says that Michael was always his first choice as guitar player in his band.’ But Gus had told him I wouldn’t do it! It would’ve been nice to have at least been asked. I remember at the time Gus asking if I knew of a guitar player who could do acoustic and electric, so I suggested Davey Johnstone. He must owe me about three million quid and a house in California by now.”
But would Chapman have accepted Elton’s supply? “No. I would’ve been the wrong guy. I’m not a rock guitar player, unlike Mick Ronson. Coming out of the jazz world, I like it clean and loud. And I always liked just being me and doing my own thing.”
Post-Wrecked Again, the the rest of the 70s discovered Chapman unfurling his sonic experiments on the Deram label. By 1978 he’d launched an educational album, Playing Guitar The Easy Way, and struck up a long-lasting friendship with US iconoclast, and touring associate, John Fahey. “A trouble magnet,” Chapman laughs. “Fahey could start a fight in a phone box. He was crackers, but once you figured that out it wasn’t so bad. I have a great video of John taking his coat off and trying to play guitar at the same time.”
Now completely saddled with the stigma of ‘cult artist’, the following decade noticed his gross sales dwindle additional. As did his output. By his personal admission, it was a fallow artistic interval. At one level he briefly ended up in a German jail.
“The 80s are what my missus calls ‘Michael Chapman: the Missing Years’,” he says. “It seems like we all have to misbehave to such an extent that you just go haywire for a time. It was down to drink and drugs. How much was I drinking? Too much to count, let’s put it that way.” He solely pulled himself collectively after spouse Andru threw him out: “I was sleeping in a shop doorway in Scarborough. Believe me, it’s not a great place to wake up.”
The 90s noticed him rejuvenated, honing his method to enable extra ambient spaciousness in his sound. Albums arrived at a charge of knots, his guitar experiments generally sprayed with sequencers or industrial noise. 1995’s Navigation was arguably his greatest since his Harvest work. Chapman continued to file into the millennium, delivering stressed soundscapes like Words Fail Me and Americana. By which era he’d begun to appeal to a brand new era of admirers.
Suddenly he turned hip. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore declared himself an enormous fan. Chapman toured the US with late guitar innovator Jack Rose; Seattle label Light In The Attic issued remastered variations of Rainmaker and Fully Qualified Survivor, alongside a two-CD compilation, Trainsong: Guitar Compositions 1967-2010, although his standing as godfather to a recent breed of ‘American Primitives’ was sealed with 2012’s tribute album, Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman. Guests included William Tyler, Hiss Golden Messenger and Meg Baird, together with relative veterans Thurston Moore, Lucinda Williams and Maddy Prior. “I was amazed,” says a nonetheless incredulous Chapman. “That tribute album was put together by my wife. It took her two years and I never got a smell of it. Thurston jumped in straight away and she got everyone else to do their tracks. She just gave it to me on my birthday.”
Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! imprint additionally supplied a house for a brand new pair of improvised Chapman albums, The Resurrection And Revenge Of The Clayton Peacock and Pachyderm, each styled after the avant-minimalism of his late good friend, John Fahey, whereas earlier this 12 months, he and Moore travelled round the UK on the Acoustic Fire Musics tour. Both males had a blast.
“Thurston is a delight to work with,” Chapman presents. “At the end of each night we both got together and were just torturing guitars.”
It’s been an unlikely, if vastly deserving, renaissance for a person who’s spent most of his profession in the wilderness. And the 72-year-old is making the most of it. A 3rd improv set is due quickly, there are plans to reunite with arranger Paul Buckmaster in California and the risk of recording with US underground artist-producer Jim O’Rourke. Factor in a stirring reissue of 1971’s Wrecked Again and Chapman is having fun with the balmiest of Indian Summers.
Not that he’s pushing any of it. “The one thing I learned early on in this business is not to make any plans, because they don’t work. Just go with the flow and see what happens. And it’s been a pretty good ride sometimes. I haven’t written a song for over three years. But then I’ve written over 300, so maybe that’s all there is in the tank. Or maybe it’s because I’m just too fucking happy these days.”
Originally printed in Classic Rock challenge 189
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