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“I’m astonished. I wrote that song when I was nineteen and it holds up. Not because it is stellar writing or anything but it amazes me that even though I was that young I still managed to avoid painting myself into any corners. I didn’t use lines or phrases I would- n’t later be able to sing as an older person. I didn’t say anything that restricted me or I wanted to take back. We played that song and Dana [Colley] put that beautiful bari- tone sax on it and the sound man said ‘That’s such a beautiful song’ and I said ‘Whaaat? I was nineteen when I wrote it.”

One of his most moving – and emotion- ally brutal – songs is Father’s Day, which addresses the realisation of his dad’s mortal- ity with lines like ‘Can’t we just see what’s become of me before you’re gone/Not lost no more, but still not found/Still afraid I found a way to let you down…’

“That was a hard one to write. I felt I was getting old and my dad was definitely getting old and I knew it wouldn’t be too long before I’d lose him. Not that he was sick, but he was coming up to 90. He was tremendously important to me and we became good friends by the time I was 45. I spent a lot of unconscious time trying to prove I wasn’t a total screw-up.”

“It was very clear to me that no mat- ter what, there would always be huge love… and that puts a terrible burden on you. A shrink once told me that the worst thing a parent can say to a child is ‘I just want you to be happy.’ But if you are unhappy you’re not only unhappy, you feel you’ve let your parents down. The burden that imposes is unbelievable.”

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ne of his favourite songs – per- formed at King’s Place with real pride and no small amount of vivid expression – is No Love To day, a song of broken hearts and loneliness cleverly sculpted into memo- ries of the fruit sellers on wagons who’d go around New Orleans selling their wares back in the day.

“To me that’s a very cinematic song. There was a TV drama series called Tremé, a neighbourhood in New Orleans about musi- cians and hookers and all those things that are very New Orleans and they had music throughout and tons of singers making cameos and I can’t tell you how much I wanted to be in it. Here was I from New Orleans with a quintessential New Orleans song and I kept trying to contact them to get in it but… nothing.”

It was a big deal spending several weeks in New Orleans – more time than he’d ever done since leaving – to record Still On The Levee. He still talks in animated wonder of a visitation from the great Allen Toussaint to play on No Love Today and a couple of other tracks.

“I knew his son but I’d never met the man himself. He’s wonderful. He’s a clothes horse. The only thing slightly odd about the way he dresses is that he never wears regu- lar shoes, it’s always open-toed sandals with flamboyant socks. Everyone in the studio was a huge fan of his. You can’t be in this kind of music without being aware of him, so we were like kids waiting for the baseball stars to come in.”

“But he couldn’t have been more court-

ly. And he was an endless worker. We were working for two hours in the first session and everyone said ‘let’s take a break’ and

had coffee and he was still sitting out there. His son Reginald said ‘he’ll still stay sitting out there until you tell him to come in’. He was just out there noodling away, working on different approaches to the songs.”

Chris is 70 now and, while he’s cut down on the gigging (so he doesn’t miss seeing his daughter grow up) he entertains no thoughts of retirement, reflecting con- tentedly on the course of his long career. And the way the audience reacts, it’s clear that in Leave The Light On, he has a solid gold anthem.

“I wrote it in one of those middle peri- ods when the songs were flowing and I wrote the whole thing in one day. I thought ‘That’s a nice little song’. One day I was play- ing a showcase at a little club in New York in front of an audience of strangers who didn’t know my music at all and there were a lot of people from a conference there and I played the song in the middle of the set and everyone stood up. It was a brand new song and I had no idea where it should go in the set so I just put it out there. Oh my God! Half the people were singing the chorus before I’d finished it and I thought ‘Hmm, maybe I should pay attention to this song.’”

“I think it’s anthemic for a certain gen- eration. Most of my songs are. When I was younger I wrote far more depressing songs than I write now. I still do some lowdown

blues but if somebody asks what my songs are like, I usually say they are hopeful and Leave The Light On is the epitome of that. The message is to stay in the moment.”

You seem very content, Chris…

“I’m very happy. I’d never have dreamed of having such a good life. For the most part I feel productive and think I’ve added something to the general ambience of life on the planet. On the whole people have been enormously accepting, much more than I deserve at times.”

Mostly accepting anyway. There was one bizarre show in the 1970s when he opened for Roberta Flack in Boston in front of a virtually all-black audience. After ten minutes the audience began to voice their displeasure in ever-more virulent terms until demands that he remove himself from Roberta’s stage immediately reached the point he could barely be heard any more.

Chris stopped. Carefully eyeballed the audience and said the following:

“Listen – I’m being paid 500 dollars to be up here for 30 minutes and if you think I’m going to get off before I get my money you have another think coming!”

The boos suddenly turned to cheers. They’re still cheering. smither.com

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