Playing at the blues end of the musical spectrum this week we had Roger Bolt, senior partner at London firm Bolt Burdon Kemp, strumming his six-string on Saturday at Jazz after Dark in London’s Soho with eight-piece ensemble The Big Girls Blues Band. Elsewhere, we had the Gazette’s own City reporter James Dean, who, as drummer in four-piece rock group Oh Verona, was getting ready to launch the band’s debut album at the Barfly in Camden, London, as the Gazette went to press.
Music must be the spice of legal life, eh? ‘I started my musical career at boarding school in Winchester where we had one old radio in the common room,’ says Roger (pictured). ‘There was a strange fellow student called Paul who was completely uninterested in the normal activities of popping acne spots, studying "health and efficiency", sport, climbing trees to drop things on people, shouting obscenities at schoolgirls, or smoking behind the bike sheds. Instead, he would tune in to Voice of America on crackly shortwave and listen to Willis Conover in Washington playing Duke Ellington’s "Take the ‘A’ Train" and other jazzy stuff. It was one short step from there to tuning into Radio Luxembourg playing 30 seconds of Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Larry Williams and the Teddy Bears. One defining evening they played Buddy Holly’s "That’ll Be the Day". When I heard that dried-up Lubbock Texas sound of Buddy’s Fender on the intro, I was hooked for life.’ The Big Girls Blues Band can be found next at the King’s Head Theatre bar, Islington, on Tuesday 6 July (see their website). Or, If you prefer the rockier stuff, Oh Verona’s live shows are listed (with a couple of their songs) on their myspace page).
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