and it turned out that they were both musicians with shared interests.
It wasn’t long before Clark joined Sam Gopal’s Dream as vocalist, but the partnership with Gopal came to an end after legendary hell-raiser and ex-Pretty Things drummer, Viv Prince, joined. In addition to management issues, it soon became apparent that Viv’s drums and Sam’s tablas weren’t compatible, and Viv, Andy, Mick and Pete left Gopal to form
Sippen persuaded Clark and Hutchinson to sign for them after much cajoling with cannabis, and also on the understanding that they would produce a blues LP together, before making an Indian influenced one.
With a little help from Seymour Stein, Shertser and Sippen negotiated a deal with Decca Records in the UK, and reconvened to Decca’s West Hampstead Studios with the, by now, renamed Clark
another short-lived outfit called Vamp. They released one single on Atlantic, the marijuana-influenced ‘Floating’. Hutchinson was never happy with the final result. “They tried to turn us into The Monkees... They didn’t understand that the hippie psychedelic thing was happening. ‘Floating’ is about pot.” Hutchinson also infers that Viv Prince’s increasingly erratic behaviour also contributed to the demise of Vamp.
With Sears leaving to play with Steamhammer, Clark and Hutchinson formed a blues group called The Dogs. They attracted the attention of two aspiring music entrepreneurs, Peter Shertser and Ian Sippen, who signed them to their fledgling production company Underground Recording Enterprises. Prior to becoming involved in the music business Shertser and Sippen had a reputation as being part of a gang of Jewish mods from Essex called The Firm. They had cut their teeth on the music scene variously as roadies for bands like Savoy Brown, and, perhaps more famously, helping with the production, distribution and release of the first truly underground record Ptooff ! by The Deviants. Not only that, they licensed Ptooff ! to the nascent Sire Records in the US, whose owner Seymour Stein also gave them the task of finding and producing more English talent for him. According to Hutchinson, “They seemed intent on living their lives as close as possible to being in a Marx Brothers movie. The Marx Brothers were their role models.” However, Shertser and
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Hutchinson to record the mooted “blues” album. Aided and abetted by Walter Monahan and Franco Franco, it is an album of heavy guitar blues as exemplified by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Groundhogs and Fleetwood Mac to name a few. When asked if he thought that if Decca had actually released Blues in ’69 and promoted it properly, Clark Hutchinson might have capitalised on the blues-rock boomthen currently in vogue, Hutchinson responds, “Maybe if we had redone it, but it’s just nowhere near as good as we could do, so it’s not really representative.” But it does have its fair share of moments though, the most notable of which being the wistful ‘Summer Seemed Longer’. Not ranking too highly in the pecking order of Decca’s roster of artists, the quality of the recording suffered when Clark Hutchinson were demoted from the 8- track studio to a 4-track. If Decca also objected to the finished product on the grounds of one track in particular called ‘Make You’ (originally called ‘Fuck You’), then the band were just as unhappy with the finished product. Hutchinson recalls, “It was just a sort of demo. There’s no reverb on it so it’s a bit harsh sounding. We would have preferred to redo it.”
Having already turned down offers to join The Moody Blues a couple of years previously, it was around this time that Hutchinson was courted by Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum. He turned them down too because musically they weren’t sufficiently oriented towards “The East”, so to speak. Today there are no regrets, “I
don’t believe in regretting things. Chas Chandler asked me if I wanted to try out on bass for Hendrix. I don’t regret turning that one down either.” Then in May ’69, having dispensed with the rhythm section that backed them on Blues, Clark Hutchinson were booked into Recorded Sound Studios to work on their next album, and gamely tackled all the instruments between them in two 12-hour sessions. Still smarting about the disagreement over Blues, it was all that Decca allowed them. At least they were afforded the relative luxury of an eight- track studio for the entire recording this time, and they produced what is now generally regarded as their tour de force album – the legendary A=MH2. Suffused throughout with a range of global musical influences as diverse as Arabic, Indian, Spanish and blues-rock, A=MH2 was a truly innovative fusion of Eastern and Western musical styles – it even has a bagpipe chanter on it! Although it was certainly not unheard of for western folk and rock musicians to experiment with Indian musical styles at that time, when Peter Shertser today describes A=MH2 as “the first true ‘world music’ album by a rock band”, he may have a point.
Today, Mick Hutchinson says that A=MH2 is not the album it should have been. “Mixing it with jazz, blues and sort of Bachy things, A=MH2 doesn’t really reflect all of it. It was much more complex than that. With A=MH2 we were just told to go in and make an album – quick. No time to stop or plan, just do it. So A=MH2 is what happened. ‘Improvisation On An Indian Scale’, in particular, is nowhere near what I could do. It had some of the techniques, like the pedal tone fast picking thing that all the metal bands do now, and all the fast runs, but it doesn’t hold together. It’s scrappy. Now, if we could have recorded the best bits of The SamGopal Dream, it would have showed something a lot more like I’m doing today!” At least he is not totally self-deprecating, though, stating, “The rest of the album tracks hold up much better.”
There was a considerable delay between the recording of the album and its eventual release in January ’70, but if nothing else, this gave Clark and Hutchinson plenty of time to recruit a new rhythm section. Playing all the instruments in a recording studio may have been one thing, but they needed a band if they were to promote A=MH2 by playing live. Employing the talents of a drummer, Del Coverley, and bass player Steve Fields (AKA Amazing Stephen Amazing), the newly upgraded duo set about taking their own brand of blues- jazz-raga eclecticism on the road. No one Clark Hutchinson gig was the same and
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