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The Yardbirds—Legends of the '60s British Invasion

The Yardbirds—Legends of the ‘60s British Invasion


Featuring Original Members Jim McCarty and Top Topham


Thursday, September 12 at 7:30pm










Thursday, September 12 at 7:30pm

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Preferred Seats Front of Orchestra: $65

Reserved Seats: $55

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The Yardbirds—Featuring Jim McCarty and Top Topham



OFFICIAL YARDBIRDS SITE

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THE ONCE AND FUTURE YARDBIRD:  Top Topham, their
first lead guitarist, quit The Yardbirds just before the group flew into
pop’s highest stratosphere. Alan Clayson lends a sympathetic ear to his
story.



During 1963’s rainy autumn,  lead guitarist Top Topham was urged
emphatically by his parents to quit The Yardbirds, the group he’d
launched a few months earlier with singing harmonica-blower Keith Relf,
drummer Jim McCarty, rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja and, on bass, Paul
Samwell-Smith.

    Decades later, when Eric Clapton, his replacement, was filling the
Albert Hall for a customary few weeks every winter, Topham could be
heard for the price of a pint at Bob’s Goodtime Blues, sessions every
Wednesday at the Station Tavern within close earshot of the diddley-dum
clickety-clack of west London’s internal railway. Like Eric, his Top
Topham-Jim McCarty Blues Band embraced R&B set-works from another
Station long ago if not especially far away - where the capital
dissolves into Surrey.

    In 1958, Topham and best mate Chris Dreja commenced secondary
education at Surbiton’s Hollyfield Road School (where the older Clapton
was also a pupil).  A flair for visual art found both in a dedicated
academic stream. ‘There was a building away from the main school,’
remembered Dreja, ‘where a handful of us were left completely alone to,
theoretically, follow our artistic inclinations. No-one interfered, even
when we brought guitars into class.’

    In an atmosphere of coloured dust and lumpy impasto, the musical
skills honed by Topham and Dreja centred on the blues - in which Mr.
Topham had immersed himself as other fathers might have in, say, golf or
wine-tasting. ‘Top’s Dad had all these import records,’ gasped Dreja,
‘Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Boy Fuller… They kept me awake, just
thinking about them - and I went ballistic over the electric sounds of
Jimmy Reed’.

    ‘Blues absolutely changed my life,’ concurs Top, ‘I’d always be
seeking the ultimate blue note, the ultimate experience from that feel -
though I first wanted to be a drummer.  Despite the embargo on selling
American instruments, my first serious acoustic guitar was a Harmony
Sovereign and my first electric was a Stratotone (which, incidentally, I
sold to Dave Brock of Hawkwind). A few years after that, I blew my
entire college grant on a Gibson 335’.

    Early in 1963, Chris and Top’s talk of starting a group led to Jim
McCarty entering their orbit. ‘He was the link to Paul and Keith,’
recollects Top, ‘who were half of The Metropolitan Blues Quartet’.
Within a fortnight of their ‘unbelievably good’ first rehearsal, the
five made a maiden appearance in the rotting grandeur of Twickenham’s
Eel Pie Island dance hall. Billed in due course as ‘The Yardbirds’, a
flow-chart of further bookings unfolded in similar parochial venues -
and at Studio 51, London’s oldest jazz venue.

    ‘We got more popular,’ reminisces Top, ‘and took over from The
Rolling Stones at what was named the Craw Daddy after it moved from
Richmond’s Station Hotel to the Athletic Ground’.

    ‘We heard the Stones were leaving’, added Jim McCarty, ‘so we got
Giorgio Gomelsky, who ran the place, to come to a rehearsal in a
functions room above a hostelry next to the Station. As he climbed the
stairs, he heard one of our “crescendos” (later known as “rave-ups”) and
thought immediately we’d do’.

    The late nights were taking their toll on Jim’s training as a
City financier. ‘My Mum took some convincing that The Yardbirds were
going places’. Top, however, had to jump an ultimately, insurmountable
hurdle of opposition: ‘I was only fifteen, and my parents wouldn’t let
me continue six nights a week as a Yardbird, even though I was bringing
home double what my father was earning. It was a blow, but I was very
talented at painting and had already started a full-time course at Epsom
Art School’.

    So it was that Top Topham, the Stuart Sutcliffe rather than Pete
Best of The Yardbirds, sat on the sidelines as the other lads became pop
stars. Mixed feelings caused him to pledge himself to The Fox, a group
with whom his commercial discography began. Their second single, ‘Hey
Mister Carpenter’ was B-sided by ‘Seek And You Find’, co-written by Top,
who left after the unit opened for The Who at London’s Roundhouse in
October 1968 - as the likes of Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex and Robert
Plant’s Band of Joy had to The Fox during relentless one-nighters.

    More enduring was Top’s association with multi-instrumentalist
Duster Bennett, a fellow student he’d known from childhood. ‘We had a
Chicago-style blues band that played at an art school dance in 1964 with
Jimmy Page - yet to join The Yardbirds - on slide guitar’. 

    Topham and Bennett were each to be signed to Blue Horizon,
brainchild of Mike Vernon, compiler of R&B Monthly, the first
‘fanzine’ of its kind in Britain. Top, however, was unable to capitalise
on critical praise for a debut album, Ascension Heights, owing to
ill-health. 

    Tiring of showbusiness, Topham moved to mid-Wales and not so much
dipped a toe as plunged headfirst into interior design and painting: ‘I
had a family of many children, and needed to make money. Then, in 1987,
work took me to Florida where I read in a US magazine about a Yardbirds’
World Convention in Oxford that autumn’.

    Offending none by refusing to autograph, say, a dog-eared Five
Live Yardbirds LP, Jim McCarty was at this event too, and subsequent
discussions triggered the emergence of The Top Topham-Jim McCarty Blues
Band. On eliciting a glowing review from Guardian journalist Mike
Oldfield - present during one of their regular Bob’s Goodtime Blues
bashes - the group (fronted by singer and guitarist John Idan) remained a
club attraction until 13 July 1990 when Topham announced his departure
straight after an engagement at Reading’s After Dark.

    Since then, Top has returned to North America - where he worked
principally with singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey - and has been seen on
small British stages, sitting in with such as Berkshire’s Jive Alive
during their seasons at Twyford’s Waggon and Horses where his playing
staggers the type of person who attends Eric Clapton concerts out of
habit. It was the same on a Friday evening this March at a packed
auditorium attached to Twickenham Stadium when, with McCarty, Dreja and
other old campaigners, Topham was at the heart of a friendly, downhome
celebration of half-a-century since that first rehearsal with what
became The Yardbirds, his fingers barre-ing the familiar chord changes
of this slow blues or that ‘rave-up’ of yore.

    ‘That’s what interested me most about The Yardbirds,’ Top
concludes, ‘Later on, they shifted away from it - and, if I’d stayed,
I’d have been pushing, like Eric, to keep blues as the band’s focus and,
probably, I’d have left for the same reasons he did’.

    As if in acknowledgment, Top is central to Top Topham’s Early
Yardbirds, a group consisting otherwise of musicians based in
Lancashire. Nevertheless, he’ll still be pitching in on ‘For Your Love’,
‘Shapes Of Things’ and further hits as an official Yardbird early next
year in a round-Britain theatre tour - though in a parallel universe,
perhaps it’s Eric Clapton enduring this sweet torment of celebrity by
association while Top Topham is sustained into old age by income and
acclaim for his latest big-selling album as much as the repackagings of
hits he’d recorded back in the dear, dead Swinging Sixties.



SIDEBAR

After The Yardbirds’ disbandment in 1968, Top was approached to join a
new edition of the group: ‘I received three telegrams from Jimmy Page
and Peter Grant, The Yardbirds’ last manager, expressing an urgency to
get in touch. I called Jimmy, who said he wanted The New Yardbirds to
hit America, and asked if I’d be interested. As everybody knows, they
were to mutate into Led Zeppelin. Wait for it: I said no. As I was busy
with Ascension Heights then, it seemed the right choice’.   

    Topham had committed himself also to six months on the road
accompanying old friend Christine Perfect, striking out on her own in
the wake of ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’, her Top Twenty strike with Chicken
Shack. This trek was not a happy experience. ‘It was an awful band,’
sighed Top, ‘Dreadful! It was like how to strangulate the soul out of
blues music in one easy lesson’. 



BACK CATALOGUE

DUSTER BENNETT

Bright Lights

(1969)

With pseudonymous Peter Green on bass, Top lent poignant accompaniment
during this ‘blues boom’ titan’s concert at Godalming’s Gin Mill. 



TOP TOPHAM

Ascension Heights

(1970)

Backed by London session musicians, Top delivers twelve scintillating
(and mostly self-penned) instrumentals, reissued on 2008’s Complete Blue
Horizon Sessions.



GEAR

1966 Fender Telecaster: ‘It’d been run over by a taxi. I had it put back
together by renowned London luthier Graham Noden with P-90s plus Hot
Rails in the middle with a 5-way switch. I don’t use pedals. It’s just
the guitar through a Fender Super Reverb from the 1970s.



AND ANOTHER THING:  ‘Christmas Cracker’, a self-penned Blue Horizon
single by Top Topham, was issued in time for 1969’s December sell-in.
Its flip-side, ‘Cracking Up Over Christmas’ featured Mike Vernon on lead
vocals.



MORE INFO ON TOP TOPHAM
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