Regrets – I’ve had a few
Kent Barker says a documentary about the venerable and venerated Hastings blues guitarist Roger Hubbard, reveals a musician ruefully aware of roads not taken during his career.
In my rather dusty vinyl collection is a 1970 album titled How Blue Can We Get? It contrasts the burgeoning white British blues scene at the time with that of black American musicians. There are the likes of Peter Green and the sadly departed Christine Perfect, opposite Otis Rush and Larry Johnson. I recalled Jo Ann Kelly being featured, and so I was delighted to see her credited in Joe Snelling’s fascinating documentary of Roger Hubbard, Home Lovin Man.
At the end of the 1960s, Jo Ann loaned her front room to Roger to do an audition for the enigmatic Nick Perls. Originally an audio engineer, he’d scoured the US for early recordings of black bluesmen and remastered the original 78s for re-release on vinyl. Now he was seeking British musicians who could cover those same classics, and asked Kelly to be a sort of talent scout. She immediately recommended Hubbard. Perls brought an enthusiastic Larry Johnson along to hear him and promptly signed him to his Blue Goose record label. A two-day recording session resulted in Hubbard’s first album, Brighton Belle Blues. At the close of 1970 Hubbard was just 20 and seemed to have made the crucial breakthrough into a musical career, with a record deal and the offer of dates in New York’s clubs and coffee houses.
Roger in his workshop today
Pictures courtesy Lucky Day Films
But there were problems. He didn’t much like the way his voice sounded on the album and had no say in the cover picture cover which he hated. “I looked like a girl and couldn’t identify myself with it,” he says, “so I didn’t go out and promote the record”. And then he pulled out of the New York tour. “I was a bit scared and I just let it go… I wasn’t confident enough at performing.”
As the film makes clear, it was a decision he regrets to this day. But it coincided with the breakdown of his marriage, and a dark period exacerbated by experimentation with LSD. So Hubbard left Brighton and moved to Hastings, formed a new relationship, and supplemented his meagre musical income working as a furniture restorer.
The documentary is filmed largely in Hubbard’s workshop, and anyone with an interest in carpentry and traditional tools is in for a double treat, as he lavishes attention on a chest of drawers in between playing his inimitable finger-style and bottleneck blues. The legendary Muddy Waters once said of him, “Roger Hubbard is as good as any blues player in the UK or the United States,” and in this documentary, director Joe Snelling has collected several eminent musicians and bluesmen to flesh out that view. Andy Newmark, Kevin Brown and Ray Book Binder all testify to Hubbard’s extraordinary talent. And they try to explain why, and how, he’s failed to gain the wider recognition he so obviously deserves.
Jon Cleary originally from Cranbrook in Kent, who has played with Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal and BB King perhaps puts it best: “Professional musicians have to obey the laws of commerce. Trying to steer a clear musical path is hard to do. It’s not for everybody. Some people have more musical integrity than a desire to get into the music business. Roger has a lot of musical integrity.”
Most agree that Roger Hubbard’s resonance today is quarried from the 50 years he’s been gigging in pubs and clubs – generally around Hastings. “Every single experience he’s had in life is being expressed in that playing,” says Glastonbury mainstager Kevin Brown. Hubbard himself seems to agree: “It helps to have a bit of life experience and probably helps to have a lot of bad times as well, especially if you are writing in the blues vein.”
Even when, as the film shows, opportunity came knocking a second time just a couple of years back, it seems that he was unable – or unwilling – to grasp it. Promoters ZYX Music offered him a contract to distribute his albums in Europe. But first he had to organise and promote his own tour dates. Brexit and lack of an agent rather squashed that, and in any event, he feels they confused the blues with rock. “It’s a shame, they tried to pigeonhole me. I’m not a showman.”
True perhaps, but what a player and songwriter he is. One of his influences is the great Delta bluesman Robert Johnson who, legend has it, sold his soul for exquisite musicianship. One can only speculate what Roger Hubbard may have exchanged for his abilities – self-confidence and self-contentment perhaps. “There’s still a lot of sadness in my life … there’s still unresolved stuff emotionally. That’s the well I draw from”.
• Home Lovin Man: The Story of Roger Hubbard is available on youtube
www.rogerhubbard.co.uk
• Latest single ‘Don’t Take Your Love Away’ can be streamed here
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