Little red roosters and hound dogs on my trail—they never did fit comfortably into my view of things. A life whose perimeters encompassed Piccadilly on the one side to Kings Cross on the other—a West End urban kid who could hear and understand the universal appeal from the juke box of “Reach Out” or “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” had more trouble as she became older in those sweaty clubs identifying with that male rural scenario, no matter how many John Steinbecks she read. White books.

And mainly, white bands. De rigeur harmonicas wheezing in the white heat, undulating suggestiveness of those white boys’ drawl. By the time Mick Jagger was using his mike stand as a phallic symbol I’d only got a whiff of those early days with Alex Korner and the years spent at school listening to Willie Dixon and Fred McDowall while I was deep into the pervasive romantic propaganda of Bobby Vee. So R&B, white musicians, the first wave of rock ’n’ roll, filtered in but never addicted

m Looking back over the past few months, it’s hard to say how it started. Ironically it could well have been those outings by a bunch of rock journalists from NME under the nomenclature of Blast Furnace. Charles Shaar Murray strutting his stuff, kicking back those old originals into the limelight, writing a few lines from stage front instead of behind a typewriter.

Even then, nobody, not even them, took it that seriously. Their lives didn’t depend on it. After all, getting up and having a blow on-off-duty hours just seemed like a neat thing to do,, and merely seemed to prove that all rock writers really are frustrated musicians. Which is why, as a failed grade one piano amateur, I never felt like I belonged. So Blast Furnace got taken to court by an American band and forced to drop their “and-the Heatwaves” appendage and things quieted down again. Punk was still thrashing alive, Mod was about to hit us. Everybody was busy taking note and keeping up.

Still, we’ve been moving backwards. Mod led to ska, the 60’s was plundered for what it could bring to the 80’s, maybe it was obvious that when you’re rifling the vaults for inspiration, you’d finally hit back on those R&B roots.

Towards the end of last year I bumped into Paul Jones down at Dingwalls. On stage Carol Grimes and Kokomo were getting down and getting with it in no mean way—still the best exponents of white blues no matter that the Average White Band had all the glory. Hadn’t seen him around for—well, years—last viewed doing rehersals for some new play or the other. He was thinking, he said, of maybe getting back together with some of the old Manfred Mann crowd. A few months later the Blues Band started playing small local dates: Jones back on harmonica, Tom McGuinnessfrom the original line-up. They reminisced of Bunk Johnson, the New Orleans trumpeter, and, learning the first time around that you don’tneed to get caught up in the whole pop merry-go-round but, these days, can play what you want how you want until nobody bothers to come and see you any more. They found an audience ready and waiting. Why not? Some six months on they’re the most successful British R&B band on the circuit and Paul Jones receives due accolades from the Sunday Times.

Despite the odd knack for a little bit of sexism here, a little bit of anti-gay stage stuff there, the Blues Band have successfully, accidently, found another gap to plug. An audience ready and willing to go back and receive the goods—some of them, for the second time around, the majority for the first. A whole new clutch of new young bands inspired by the freedom of punk and mod to crack it, throw up the original material, plunge into the avant-garde then get back to base by chucking in at least two original R&B numbers. Nine Below Zero, signed to A&M, are the best known to this particular batch; their new single “Homework” produced—not surprisingly—by that clever Pete Wingfield, a man who is deft at re-capturing the spirit of a period while contemporarizing the feel of it all.

Alexis Korner, credited as the British daddy of R&B in those days of Klooks Kleek, and having spent the years in between making a good living turning those dark timbred tones of his to the business of voice-overs on TV commercials, now has his own radio programme. A prime slot of 30 minutes each Sunday coming straight after the biggest rated radio show, a rundown of the Top 30. It’s a showcase for R&B: old blues, country blues, white blues in the shape of the Stones and Bonnie Raitt tracks, new blues from Nine Below and the Blues Band. With such jealously guarded airwaves as ours, you only get that kind of leeway if there’s real mileage in it for the companies and that boils down to large audience figure^.

Up north, soul still gets them dancing marathons from 8 p.rri. until 5 a.m. and then home for two hours and up in the morning for work. Down south, R&B are still waiting in the wings to occupy the major venues, even if its feet still belong ip small over-intimate hellholes. The way things go here it might not take long for white boys on the blues to take over.