I am saddened to hear the news today of Phil Spalding’s passing. He died in his sleep last night and I offer my condolences to his wife and family.
I don’t go back that far with Phil (we met at Phil Toms’ concert presentation of Tubular Bells in Colchester in 2017 at which Phil Spalding guested playing his original P-Bass on Moonlight Shadow) but I’ve known his kind all my career. I grew up with them, learned at their feet and hands, admired them in many ways and strove to avoid emulating them in others. He lived by what I know as ‘Rock and Roll Rules.’ (RRR) It wasn’t big; it wasn’t clever; and it was almost never pretty, but it was gripping and inspiring in the way that outlaws have always been inspiring. The term’ outlaws’ is appropriate here, because any life lived according to RRR will by definition involve illegality and a sense of outsider ‘otherness.’ That generation of rock musicians became musicians primarily in order to avoid having to have a ‘career’ in the traditional sense. They sought to avoid respectability and responsibility, revelling in their ‘otherness’ whereas the preponderance of music colleges and universities offering degree courses in pop/rock music has produced a generation of musicians who follow the traditional career development rules and are thus tame and well-behaved in comparison with the RRR generation. The RRR guys make music with a terrible innocence because it is not pursued as a career; precisely the opposite in fact – it’s pursued as an escape, and escape becomes a way of life, a way of being. Other means of achieving escape are embraced wholeheartedly. (Code for ‘taking lots of drugs and drinking heavily.’)
Phil was in many ways a contradiction: a former heroin/cocaine/alcohol addict who had just started climbing up the ranks of Freemasonry, a churchgoing religious man whose every utterance was laced with profanity, and an unschooled musician whose musicality was instinctive, innocent and wild. Whatever space he was in was littered with the hind legs of donkeys (It was a running band joke that if Phil said he was going to do a Q&A session on a show we would refer to it as simply an ‘A’ session.) Once he was off and running he was unstoppable and had no filters whatsoever. He had a fund of stories and his life force, his energy, burned brightly. He was given to disarming ( and sometimes alarming!) candour about his life and misdemeanours and did boundless work for charity. Every time I saw him he was involved in helping an ex-addict in some way. I was privileged to be in his band, the PSO, for 3 years and enjoyed playing Tubular Bells (and other Mike Oldfield material) as a power trio and he/we played every gig, even in the humblest of circumstances, as though it was a stadium show (a Rock and Roll Rule by which I have lived throughout my life.)
His knowledge and memories of his time with Mike Oldfield were hugely useful to me as I played with two other Oldfield-based projects (Phil Toms’ “Tubular Bells Live” show and Robin A Smith’s “Tubular Bells Re-imagined 50th Anniversary” shows with which I am currently touring.)
Other RRRs include the absolute supremacy of the old showbiz saw ” The show must go on,” a profound refusal to bend the knee to authority of any kind, and a dedication to the pursuit of pleasure when and where ever possible. Oh, yes: and a refusal to embrace technology, which led to furious exchanges when I sent him digital files of mixes which he would download, but forget where he had stored them, and ask for the whole lot again 2 weeks/months/years later.
I don’t know where he got the energy to keep up his furious pace, though his health had been poor for the last couple of years. I’ll miss the mad bastard a lot and count myself lucky to crossed the path of his star as it blazed across the sky.
Favourite memory? when I drove he and I to PSO drummer Herve Koster’s place in France (ostensibly to rehearse and prepare the technology for the first PSO show) and we ended up sitting in front of a complete leg of beef roasting in Herve’s living-room fireplace, drinking and yarning as the fat sizzled and the juices ran into the embers…
Go well, Phil. The world will never see your like again.
