Chords for John Helliwell of Supertramp & Creme Anglaise- RNCM Part1

_ _ _ _ _ _ Please welcome John Heliwell.
_ _ _ [Cm] _ [Bbm] _ _ [Ab] _
_ _ [Cm] _ _ _ [Ab] _ _ _
_ [Gm] _ [G] _ _ [Cm] _ _ _ _
[Gm] _ _ [Ab] _ _ [Fm] _ _ Thank you chaps.
They arranged that themselves.
That was good.
Well done. _ _
[G] When did you start playing?
Was it saxophone first or
clarinet or_
Piano for a year, age nine, gave it up, done it all.
_ I loved
listening to Monty Sunshine play the [E] clarinet in
Petit Fleur, which a neighbor introduced me to.
So I saved up for two years to buy a 15 pound clarinet.
I played that for_
well, I still play clarinet, but then I got a saxophone when I was about 15.
I just kind of_
I got into modern jazz and then I was a kind of a jazz [D] snob.
And I went to work as a computer programmer in Birmingham, left my hometown of [Ab] Todmorden.
Am I going on too much?
No, it's good.
It's great.
Keep going.
Left my hometown of Todmorden and went to be a computer programmer in Birmingham and
played on the [Gb] side, played
[N] what I thought was jazz.
Really, it was probably just some inane twiddlings or whatever.
And I went to see Tubby Hayes in Coventry.
Tubby was one of my heroes.
And in the interval,
I wandered out to get a drink and I heard this strange music coming from downstairs,
which I went to explore.
And it turned out to be the Graham Bond
organization with [G] Dick Hextel Smith [A] on saxophone, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, playing R&B,
which I hadn't really sort of gotten into or heard before.
So it was a kind of
epiphanous moment.
So I got into sort of that side of things.
So how did you, I mean, in terms of bands and eventually ending up in a group like Supertramp,
how did then the progression from different bands or was it a progression or did it just happen?
How long have we got?
_ _ [Ab] Briefly, I
_ went professional with a band called Jugs O'Henry and
we moved from Birmingham to London and we worked a [G] bit and then that band
finally sort of split up.
And I put an advert in the Melody Maker.
That was the sort of music paper of the time.
Have sax, we'll travel.
And I got this reply from this guy called Alan Bowne, who was at the time leading a band
called the Alan Bowne set and it was formed from the remnants of the John Barry 7.
Remember John Barry?
John Barry is the film composer.
He's a film composer.
Yeah.
So I joined this band.
I did an interview with Alan,
an audition should we say with Alan, and I went for an interview as a computer programmer in [Ab] Sweden and I got both jobs.
So I had to choose.
Fortunately, I chose to go and play with Alan and we were earning about five pounds a week. _
Traveling on down the country in an Austin J4 van and it was quite hard, but it was quite an education.
Yeah.
Because up to then I'd sort of
played a bit and people were very polite to me and [G] nice and I'd been to grammar school and all this and I hadn't really suffered.
But I really started to suffer when I joined Alan Bowne because they didn't have any compunction in saying [Ab] you were
effing [N] horrible tonight or you were playing out of tune or whatever.
It was quite a wake-up.
So you've got to really try and get better.
So I played through from about
65 through till 70 odd with this Alan Bowne group.
We made several albums and
didn't sort of get completely off the ground.
We had a few minor hits.
And towards the end, it's pertinent, it's towards the end of the life of the Alan Bowne set,
the bass player was Dougie Thompson,
who I'll come back to.
_ And in the end we all left Alan
because we got fed up with the direction he was taking and we tried to make a go of it
with a group of our own which we called Wizard.
And it wasn't the Wizard that was run by Roy Wood from the Move.
It was our Wizard with only one Z. _ _
But [Abm] we tried to do, we did one gig and then the manager of the Alan Bowne set took all the equipment away and the van.
So we just had no equipment to play on, [G] nowhere to transport it because he said that the equipment was Alan's.
And Alan carried on and did his own thing and we all had to sort of split up.
Whereupon I started to do work in,
I played in cabaret clubs with naked girls and strip clubs with even more naked girls.
And I also started to get some gigs backing up visiting American
soul singers, Tamala Motown people like Jimmy Ruffin, Arthur Connelly, Johnny Johnson.
Johnny Johnson and the bandwagon.
Was that sort of horn section work?
Was it reading gigs?
That was, [Abm] I started to read a bit then, yes.
Reading arrangements.
It was more or less usually a band just on the [Bb] trumpet and tenor, [G] something like that.
So we gigged around.
[Abm] Then I went to Germany and worked with this guy called [C] Pete Lancaster
who sounded a bit like Ray Charles and we had a band that played in American air bases.
About, this was 73.
_ And while I was out there, I got a call from Dougie Thompson who had, in the meantime,
[Ab] after he'd done a few different gigs, he had [G] joined Supertramp from an audition.
Apparently he was the only one they could remember.
So he got the gig.
But I'd played with Supertramp with the Alan Bown set, the Alan Bown as we became called or just Bown.
We tried to call ourselves, we had to get
the hip, you know, so it wasn't the Alan Bown set or the Alan Bown.
It was, we thought we'll call ourselves
Bown.
Yeah, that sounds really trendy and nice.
So we went to play in Wales that night and
Wales or Ireland, I'm not sure what accent I'm going to use, but the guy just came out in front of the curtain and said
Ladies and gentlemen, BIN!
So we immediately gave up calling ourselves Bown.
So anyway,
[B] yes, I went [N] along to have a play with the Supertramp as it was then and they,
after having made two
albums in the early 70s, they were just trying to
reform to make one last
effort to make something decent.
Something that they were going to be really proud of and they got, it was this
quintet which