Jeff was disappointed to find out that life is
nothing like a box of chocolates so he bought a Fender Stratocaster and a Fender Deluxe
amplifier to get his own back on those who he says had cheated him of his birthright.
He didn't practice enough but eventually got the hang of pentatonic scales and
minor 7th chords. He was almost a jazz musician but after hearing John
Lee-Hooker he decided to become a bluesman instead because as he puts it 'It's easier'. He
met the totally chaotic but immensely talented Pedro in a guitar shop in Oxford and
between them they decided to form Blue Mamma a Yorkshire-Portugese fusion blues band. They
recruited the ever smiling and unfailingly polite Kazuya all the way from Osaka in Japan
to play scary good bass riffs for them and persuaded Pawel from Gdansk in Poland to
playing the drums. This took some time because Pawel is a guitar teacher.
They played their first gig at the St Aldates Tavern about 3 weeks after they
formed and then decided that they better rehearse some of this stuff. After a great summer
of pub gigs with loads of free beer the band had run its course and disappeared in a puff
of smoke as often happens.
....................and then:
Undaunted Jeff bought loads of guitars but they were all really hard to play so he formed
the Second Line, a more traditional take on the blues using mainly Martin acoustics and a
borrowed Telecaster called Florence. Soul bearing was definitely on the agenda and these
guys had the blues, no question. Following a Facebook spat in which it turned out that
there are just too many bands called the Second Line and a number of slight revisions to
the line up the band morphed into Swamproot and so began a period of really showy and
surprisingly tight stability. Jeff has a small but perfectly formed collection of
Gretsch guitars far too pretty to be played in pubs where people might spill beer on them
and a really cute pedal board in a brief case. He is very tidy and likes Coco Pops. He
summarises his approach to song writing as 'Drink lots of red wine then play a riff and
hope it hasn't been used before too many times'.He describes the process of lyric writing
as 'Really hard' so he just writes any old rubbish and gets Chad to sort it all out. He
likes to be driven to gigs and for people not to realise that slide guitar sounds a lot
harder to play than it really is. His main ambition in life is for the guy he borrowed the
Telecaster from to forget who he lent it to. He cites his main musical influences as
'garage rock' because he thinks it makes him sound cool.He is a bit like that and quite
likely to lie about his age, his height and his sign of the zodiac. His favourite answer
in interview is 'It depends' which is actually quite a good answer depending on the
question.