#Alvin lee a space in time wiki movie

#Alvin lee a space in time wiki movie

I often wonder what the rest of our career would have been like if the Woodstock movie had used another song. It had all gone wrong and I was thinking, what the fuck am I doing here?”Īnd the song that had made Ten Years After famous was becoming an albatross: “You’d walk on stage and people would be shouting for I’m Going Home, which was the last song. “You had police with guns, and cotton wool in their ears, sneering at the band and looking for half a chance to beat up the audience. I often wonder what the rest of our career would have been like if the Woodstock movie had used another song Alvin Lee

And we lost any contact with the audience. “But then it got bigger, and people had to come to ice hockey arenas and stadiums to see the band. No wonder the American media dubbed him Captain Speedfingers.īut behind the bravado that had propelled Ten Years After into the premier league was another, more insecure Alvin who couldn’t handle the superstar status that the Woodstock movie had bestowed on the group: “We’d been playing for the heads, the growing underground audience,” he recounts. Even on the slower songs his bursts of notes seemed faster than mere human fingers could manage. Riding the crest of this high-energy wave, Alvin would sneer and pout outrageously as he tore through solo after solo. I’d yell: ‘Hit ’em, you bastard!’ And he’d shout back: ‘Fuck off.’” Leo would also spur Ric on by spitting at him – anticipating the punk movement by a decade – but the drummer never minded “because he always missed”. And the bassist reveals the secret of TYA’s vigorous live shows: “Ric and I egged each other on when we flagged. Leo’s headbanging style even got him an offer from Frank Zappa to appear in a movie he was planning called The Choreographers Of Rock ‘N’ Roll. We used to have to gaffer-tape his headphones to his head.” That was fine on stage, but he’d do it in the studio, too. It really was a heads-down-let’s-go-for-it attitude. At Woodstock, Country Joe whipped his equipment on before us because he’d played after us at the Fillmore East and died a death. And there were a lot of bands in America who wouldn’t go on after us.

“It wasn’t so much playing well as going down well we’d learnt that from our years on the club circuit. “We used to go out of our way to blow them off and make them look bad. “We had this thing – and looking back I’m a bit ashamed of it now – that we had to sting any band that went on after us,” Alvin recalls. Ten Years After had been in the vanguard of the second (heavier) invasion of the US by British groups, touring relentlessly and rapidly reaching top-of-the-bill status. Or, as Alvin puts it: “That’s when 14-year-old girls started showing up to our gigs with ice-creams.” Suddenly TYA were the new heroes of British blues rock. When the Woodstock movie came out in late 1970 (more than a year after the festival) it did for Ten Years After what Live Aid did for Queen and U2: transformed them into superstars.