JOHN ETHERIDGE
Photos courtesy of Moonjune Records
Of Soft Machine, Darryl Way and early Brit rock
Interview by Gary Gomes, Part 1
(February 2025)
John Etheridge is undoubtedly one of the greatest guitarists not known to the general public. He has had an active music career from the sixties onward, and has played and recorded with well-known and highly regarded musicians from several different backgrounds, including time spent in progressive rock (Darryl Way's Wolf), fusion (Soft Machine, in the 1970's and now), jazz legend Stephane Grappelli, classical guitarist John Williams and Andy Summers of the Police.
I first heard of John when he filled the position left vacant in Soft Machine when Allan Holdsworth accepted an offer to join Tony Williams's second version of Lifetime in the mid -1970's. I wondered what could replace Holdsworth's relentless legato style? But Etheridge was beautiful. He had the appropriate chops, was lyrical, cutting and smooth. Allan was a genius, but I liked John's playing better, which astonished me.
Of course, John's background was much more varied than just two periods with Soft Machine decades apart, and this interview covers a great deal of his background, experiences and influences throughout his lifetime. Now read on...
Note: This is a second interview. The first was scrambled by poor voice recognition software. Many thanks to John for his willingness to talk with me twice so we could get an accurate interview.
Thanks to Moonjune Records for helping to arrange this.
PSF: Tell me how you originally became interested in music and how you started playing.
JE: Well, I started playing when I was about 12. My father was a keen amateur pianist...almost semi-professional. He played jazz in a style very like Teddy Wilson from Benny Goodman's band. Teddy Wilson was his hero, so the first music in the house I grew up listening to was some of the recordings of Teddy Wilson he played, but mainly my father playing piano. He used to play every evening. He'd have his dinner and he would sit down and play the piano for about half an hour. And his repertoire, it was jazz standards played in the stride piano style. And so I got to hear all those. That was the first thing I really heard. And my father was a very keen and enthusiastic jazz listener. When I got interested in in various bits of music, or jazz or something, he'd always be there to kind of criticize or say it was good or not so good.
But the first thing that happened to me, in terms of inspiring me to play guitar, was seeing, I think seeing, rather than hearing, Hank Marvin and the Shadows, who were a very big time group backing Cliff Richard. Cliff Richard--that was our Elvis Presley imitator, you know. Every country had their own version of Elvis. And Cliff was a big deal, but his band, the Shadows were, if not innovative, at least quite fresh sounding. And Hank Marvin was the preeminent guitarist of the era, really, although he never made America at the time.
PSF: it was those Burns guitars, I guess (Irrelevant sidenote: Burns was an English guitar maker that was very similar to Fender in design-Baldwin stamped Burns Guitars as Baldwin after Baldwin failed to acquire Fender. Burns made Hank Marvin edition guitars and other Shadows-related gear. You will see why many British guitarists avoided Fender products in John's comments below.)
JE: I mean, the thing was, the Shadows started having their own hits. The Shadows had their own independent hits, instrumental hits. The first one was "Apache" in 1960 and so I'd heard that. But it was going to the cinema with my mom and seeing Cliff Richard in a film called The Young Ones. At one point in the movie, the Shadows were on stage playing one of their third or fourth big hits called "The Savage" and it was visually absolutely stunning. I revisited this some time ago, and it absolutely still, still knocked me out. There's two red Stratocasters and Fender Precision Bass and drums, obviously. So, it's two guitars, bass and drums, similar to the Ventures in America at the same time, but not necessarily influenced by them.
And of course, I'd never seen a red Stratocaster before, and I'd never seen anybody doing this, and they were, they had some choreographed steps, and they looked just totally amazing. And the track was a great track, if everybody wants to, please check it out. It was called "The Savage" by the Shadows, and it's great, you know. And the sound of his guitar, the sound of Hank Marvin's guitar, really chimed with everybody at my age, and everybody wanted to be Hank Marvin, and many of the guitarists of my era here, you know, people like Jim Mullen, Albert Lee and Richard Thompson. We all heard Hank Marvin as a first kind of inspiration, because it was it and again, there is that very important thing, which was the tone of the instrument. It was the way he used a Stratocaster. He held the whammy bar in his hand as he played. So he was moving it all the time. He had a Binson Echo Rec. So there was tape echo.
And anybody should just check him out, just check it out. It was a very, very attractive sound. In fact, Jimi Hendrix, years later, when asked who his favorite guitarist was, he said, Hank Marvin. And they said, "Oh, you're joking." Hendrix said, "No, I'm not joking." So this guy was incredibly influential. So this was the first, my first major influence, and Marvin was a major influence on most of us from this era--Hank Marvin and the Shadows and we always wanted to have red Stratocasters. They were fiendishly expensive at the time. They were huge.
You know now that you've got your new president--there were enormous tariffs, tariffs, oh yes, tariffs are the key, the key word. And the tariffs on the Stratocaster to come into England were gigantic. The import duty was gigantic, and Stratocasters were the equivalent of about $10,000 now to buy. So nobody had one, and they were amazingly exotic. And we all tried to get guitars that looked rather like them. For $30, you know, for $100 for $70 you could get the guitar that looks something like it, and so we all had those. That's how I got started.
PSF: So Hank Marvin was the gatekeeper, basically...
JE: Yeah, that was your entry into the world of guitar.
PSF: But you were a contemporary of all these phenomenal guitarists that started coming from England, at the time, like Clapton, Hendrix (from U.S. but England gave him his big break), Rory Gallagher came from Ireland of course, so those are the three that come off the top of my head. There were so many that that came out of England,
JE: Well, my, yes, exactly, and so you know, we had Hank Marvin. Then my development followed similarly to everybody else's. It was the Beatles. I had bands that started playing Beatles tunes. And then I got, at the same time, almost the same time, as others, with Hank Marvin, I was also- and this was very special to me- a few of us were into Django Reinhardt, and this was by accident, when I had my Shadows band. The other guy in the group was my best friend. His father was the guitar equivalent of my dad. In other words, his father played a kind of chord heavy 1930's dance band type guitar; he said, "you should listen to Django Reinhardt." And my friend Nicky, he was my best friend and the other guitarist in the group, he said, "Oh, this Django Reinhardt, it's amazing." He played me the record. And, you know, I was absolutely blown away. I mean we'd never heard anything like it. We thought it was ridiculous. I mean, how? Yeah, you know this, everything about it meant, first of all was the speed. I remember the one of the first tracks I heard was their version of "Swanee River" in 1934, sounds like it's sped up. He does these incredible chromatic runs, which I mean at the time, you know, I hadn't heard anything remotely like it. And it was incredibly exciting. And the sound of the guitar and the attack and then everything about it, you know, later on, I appreciated the harmonic complexity and the tone and the creative ideas. So right from the start, it grabbed me. So right from the start, really, from say, 1962 onwards, I was listening to all the contemporary people, like the Rolling Stones, and a bit later, R&B, Buddy Guy, people like that, and Django. Django was our sort of personal hobby. So me and my friend used to play these Django tunes, which everybody thought was rather cute and eccentric, but we'd play them. We'd listen to Django all the time and tried to copy the stuff. This was a big deal. Okay, so then the big thing, as you mentioned, I'm a little bit younger, but not hugely younger, than the amazing guitar players who came up in the middle '60's period. And this really was something, of course. It started with Eric Clapton and the Blues Breakers period. And this was, you can't overestimate how important this moment was, because I know that, because I was absolutely in the room at the time, as it were, you know, I was there.
So I do feel, you know, I think perhaps everybody has this in their life. I feel like there was something going on and I was absolutely there at the time. It's like being there when the Berlin Wall came down or something. I was there. And the reason I was there was because I was studying in London, and I was putting together, trying to put together a little band where I was studying. This is 1965 and say September '65 and the drummer that I hooked up with, he said, "you know, have you heard Eric Clapton?" And I went, "Oh, yeah, Eric Clapton, yeah, Yardbirds, yeah. He's pretty good, you know?" He said, "Well, you should see him now!"
So I went along to this pub. Most of the pubs in London have a function room, and the function rooms used to be used, still are used, for gigs. And you can get sort of 70-80 people in the function room. And I walked in and there was this thing going on, which I just couldn't, absolutely blew me away. The sound of this instrument, the sound he was getting out of the guitar had never been heard before. I mean, it had absolutely never been heard before. And really, you could tell, you know, it came from a blues background. I could tell the antecedents. I mean, I'd already been playing for five or six years, and I knew Django Reinhardt, knew Buddy Guy, I knew where it was coming from. But that's not the same thing. That's like saying when you heard Charlie Parker, you knew it was coming from Lester Young. It's not the same thing. This was something radical, a step up. You know, amazing. I mean, the fact that he was really the first person to make the guitar actually sing, and this was vital, because it meant that actual guitar playing appealed to people, rather than just other guitarists. So, you know, it still happens. I go to George Benson concerts. You know, you go to a George Benson concert, and the fans are all there. And when he's singing, they're all jumping around and enjoying it. And then when he starts playing a solo, they start talking to each other. Well, the thing about Clapton and, of course, Hendrix later, and Jeff Beck and people later was that when they played, the whole room paid attention, and that's because, rather than dealing with lines, they were playing like singers. Clapton was playing like a vocalist. And it was it helped that John Mayall was a pretty poor vocalist. So when Clapton started playing, this was like the song, this was like the person singing. It was an extraordinary sound and very easy to imitate. So within a year or two, people had got it. When I say easy to imitate--the most difficult thing for us was getting the vibrato right, so the notes are fairly simple, but the tone was important. Of course, like all imitators, imitators never got really to the core of what was going on. And I would urge people who are reading this to play "Steppin' Out" from the Blues Breakers album, which is the album that the band made in early 1966 and the "Steppin' Out" solo is an absolute classic. I mean, the advantage for Clapton is obviously they played it 100 million times on the circuit, so when he goes in, he's absolutely confident, but the solo, the sound, the phrasing, the dynamics, the rhythmic placement of the notes, the building of the solo, it's an absolute instinctive masterpiece. So if anybody listens to that, they'll get some idea. Because it doesn't sound revolutionary anymore. The listener understands where this is coming from, they've heard this a million times, but they haven't. Actually, if you listen in detail, you'll hear that nobody's actually done it any better anyway.
This was a big influence on me, and when I heard it, I thought, "well, this is so amazing, I mustn't copy it, because that would be an insult to the artist." So I couldn't believe it when, when everybody started copying this. I mean, I was gob smacked. You know, the world gob smacks you all the time at the sort of, you know. Then everybody got a Les Paul, everybody got a Marshall. And the giveaway was that Les Paul's, which were absolute failure as a guitar and Clapton paid 70 quid for his. They went up and up and up within a year out two years, there were 300 quid, 300 pounds (about 700 dollars in 1960's money; about $3,200 in 2024 dollars). And so everybody got a Les Paul, everybody got a Marshall, and everybody started playing with that sound. And it's heartbreaking, because quite soon, within two and a half years, two years, he just sounded like everybody else, you know. And so everybody's going out Clapton, "yeah, he's all right, but I'm into it, you know." You know, I don't mention any names, but everybody you know, all the, all the next generation, or the next few years, throughout most of the guitars who are thrown up, you know, the good players. You know, Peter Green, Dave Gilmour, these people, even Jeff Beck. They're all coming from Clapton, except for Albert Lee, Steve Howe, Peter Banks, Robert Fripp, they were about the only ones who are kind of free of the Clapton influence. So I tried very hard not to play like that. But I was under a lot of pressure in the bands I was in. People say, why do you play all that jazzy thing? But luckily, I was backed up by his (Clapton's) encouragement, because he came and played with me and my band, and heard me play, and heard us play, and he was very encouraging to me. He sort of, he said, he said to the drummer, "oh, he's really great, that bloke, you know, he's fantastic player" and all that.
And also Jimi Hendrix then came over and, of course, he was, you know, amazing in a different way, in a very different way. I mean, they, there's really no comparisons, you know, two guys. They're very, very different. But Hendrix was extraordinary as well. Obviously, we know that Hendrix continues to sound extraordinary. That's the difference. There's a very big difference in the history of music, say our music, between the influential stylists and the great virtuosi. Now Charlie Christian is an influential stylist. When people hear Charlie Christian now, they go, "oh, that just sounds like jazz guitar." Louis Armstrong is quintessential is an influential stylist. Django Reinhardt is a virtuoso. When people copy Django Reinhardt, they are obviously copying Django Reinhardt and Hendrix is similar. Hendrix is a virtuoso. When people copy Hendrix, they sound like they're copying Hendrix. But the certain thing about people like Clapton, Chuck Berry, Charlie Christian, that you can copy them, and then when you copy them, you can then sort of bend it slightly, and so it becomes the standard way of playing. Charlie Parker is bebop, Django Reinhardt is his own style, Charlie Parker is bebop. That's classic. You know, Louis Armstrong is jazz trumpet, and Eric Clapton is famous for rock guitar. Rock guitar became Eric Clapton, but Hendrix, of course, was such a huge, broad talent, and kind of unique that when people copy him, it's pretty obvious. So I don't think of him as influential, but obviously as an artist, he was monumental, you know, and he was around playing small clubs, and I saw him, and I got to know him as well. Hendrix was very nice to me. He was very complimentary about my playing, when he came down and had a listen, he came up to me, actually came up to me afterwards. I didn't go to him. He came to me and sort of said," Oh, it was great." And, you know, fantastic.
So, both Clapton and Hendrix were very encouraging. And I was playing a kind of early jazz rock style. It was my what I was trying to do was bring sort of bluesy stuff, not trying to copy Clapton, but that sort of vibe with Django Reinhardt, which is you would call kind of jazz rock, and that's what I was trying to do. And I think a lot of people were also, in their own way--Peter Banks, Robert Fripp, Steve Howe--sort of saw how people were trying to do it, and we were all sort of, kind of doing this, but it wasn't very popular. Everybody wanted somebody who sounded like Eric, yeah. So then I went to university and I came back in 1970 and just to complete this section, I'd say that I came back in 1970 and I actually came back at a good time, because when I came back, everybody had had enough of the Eric Clapton sound, so I got work immediately, because I played differently, because I played my kind of style, and when I came back in 1970, I got work.
PSF: They were looking for something different, yeah,
JE: Yeah.
PSF: Well, what was your professional experience before Soft Machine? You mentioned some of the bands you were in; I believe you mentioned Darryl Way's Wolf. You had a certain amount of progress, or moving up through the ranks, like everybody does when they're developing a professional career.
JE: Well, I can cover that period. Okay, so basically, I came back to London from university. I studied history of art, got a degree, came back to London in 1970 towards the middle, end of 1970 and I started answering adverts in the Melody Maker. And this was how you got work in those days, Melody Maker, which was the Bible of music press, and came out every Thursday. And in the back of it, there would be adverts. "Guitarist wanted," you know, "no time wasters, must travel," etcetera. Anyway...so I started answering these adverts. And I got lots of gigs through this. And I played sort of briefly, with a whole lot of eccentric groups. And I was very very fussy at the time. I was always leaving bands, sort of just like that. It was all kind of the hippie era. Things were pretty, sort of casual, as it were, so I'd be in and out of these bands and not really play much with them. Then I hooked up with a band that called itself a bed, and you go, and we played time signatures. And this was his 1971, it was a kind of jazz rock group of pretty undistinguished, but, there were a few good players went through it, a few players actually were in it, who went on to become quite famous. There was a guy, John Altman, who became a well-known film composer; Linton Nafe, who was the pianist with a band called Affinity that was quite popular. But anyway, those were the sort of bands I was playing with. And then I answered an advert, and it was towards the end of, middle of 1972 and I was doing a bit of touring, and, you know, I toured to Romania with a group. And so I wasgetting professional experience, and then I saw an advert for, you know, a well-known instrumentalist, looking for guitarist. I went along, and the audition was for a guy called Darryl Way, who'd been in a group called Curved Air, which was a pretty well-known group. It had some hits. The had one big hit called "Backstreet Love." So they were very well known band. So I went along. But this was quite a big deal, this audition. There are lots of people there, and I did my thing, and he liked it, and he (Wolf) phoned me up and said, "I like you playing, you know, but I don't like your image. You'll have to get some clothes. Let's get some good clothes anyway." So I joined his band, and then we started rehearsing. And it was, I'd say, December '72.
So the Mahavishnu Orchestra was quite in vogue, and he wanted to do something sort of semi Mahavishnu Orchestra. And I was quite a big John McLaughlin man. I mean, that had been a big influence on me in the late '60's. And so I was doing my thing, and Chris Welch, of Melody Maker, came along to hear the group rehearsing, to give a sort of preview of the band. And he really took to me, took a big shine to me. And was, you know, very incredibly complimentary. In fact, rather too complimentary, because I kind of got embarrassed, because I was just beginning to hear some great guitar players, Albert Lee, Ollie Halsall. Allan Holdsworth, you know, really, really good players that were in London playing that I felt they should be getting the praise, not me, you know. But anyway, he praised me to the skies, which was great in a way.
Darryl Way's Wolf- London Records promo photo
Left to right: Ian Mosley (drums), Dek Messecar (bass, vocals), Darryl Way (violin, keyboards), John Etheridge (guitar)
Photos courtesy of Moonjune Records
And I think Darryl, probably wasn't that mad about my playing, I think because he used to say things like to me, like, "why, why don't you play like Richie Blackmore, you know?" I'd say, "well, I don't want to play like Richie Blackmore but I got very, very good reviews." And the band three albums, which the first one, actually called Canis lupus, is probably in in musical terms, the best, but I didn't do any good guitar on it. I was mortified. It was my first experience in the studio, and I didn't feel like I played. I didn't know what to do in a studio. I mean, it's, it's so traumatic, one's first experience in the recording studio, particularly in those days where you played loads and loads and loads of gigs, so you were totally okay with how to play on stage and what. And then you get into this environment, and you've got headphones on, and they want to do overdubs, and you don't understand what's going on, and you just, you just can't play. I mean, so I couldn't really play on the album, but it's quite a good album. Then, then I started playing better on the second album, called Saturation Point, and the third album came out, and we were kind of splitting up, and I started to play quite well on that album. I think it was called Night Music (1974).
So there's three albums with Darryl, way, and that was my sort of first big-ish group, in the sense that Darryl was well known. The group was talked about. We were constantly reviewed in Melody Maker, etc. The albums were always reviewed. The album sold. So it was, it was a moderately successful, a medium successful progressive rock band, but there were problems, and one of the problems was me, and my attitude. I was, I was very jazz snobbish, and I'm sorry about that, you know. I could have made more of an effort to play like Ritchie Blackmore! But the band, you know, eventually folded, and then I was sort of sitting around after this really extraordinary year I had between sort of middle of '74, April '74 and April '75, because I did very little. And I mean, I practiced all the time, but I just sat at home and practiced, and I really didn't make that much effort to get work. It's very odd when I look back on it.
Anyway, a keyboard player. James Lassals called me, and he was in the Global Village Trucking Company, and he called me around February '75 and said, "we're looking for a guitar player. Do you know anybody?" And I said, "well, I'm not doing anything." He said, "you know, I don't think it's up your alley playing with the Global Village Trucking Company," which was kind of like an English Grateful Dead. And I said, "well, how about me having a go?" So he said, "Well, okay, you know, so come along and play." And I went up, and they had a communal house with a proper hippie set up with wives and children and animals and non-stop jamming, non-stop playing. And it was a really lovely atmosphere. And they were good, good people. I mean, basically they were a kind of Grateful Dead/Bob Dylan band. But there was lots of instrumental playing, but I was just sort of fitting in and playing, you know, in a, in a sort of prog side. Wasn't really doing what I did with Darryl way I was, because it wouldn't be appropriate for them, you know. So I was just fitting in.
And the point, why I say this is because I then went on tour with and then I'd met Allan Holdsworth. I knew Allan Holdsworth from the scene. I bumped into him, and he said, "What are you doing?" This was, I think, just before I joined the Global Village, I said, "I'm not doing anything." He suddenly left Soft Machine, and he gave them my number. Now they wouldn't have known anything about me, because they were jazzers. They were on the jazz scene, and things were very separate in those days, and, you know, separate in the sense that people just didn't know about other people because you couldn't hear you couldn't hear anybody unless you bought the record, you know. So people didn't really hear people. So Allan anyway left my number with the Soft Machine, so I wasn't...I think I wasn't aware of this. He called me up and said, "Have they called you?" And Allan called me from America, and he joined Tony Williams Lifetime, and he asked me if they (Soft Machine) got in touch. And I said, "No, they haven't."
Anyway, I was playing in Swindon with Global Village, and just, you know, just fitting in, playing along and the road. He said, "Oh, the Soft Machine guys were here.: I went, "oh no, no," because I really wasn't playing. I was just fitting in, you know, playing basic, basic guitar, you know, not doing a lot, because I was enjoying the environment, you know, I didn't want to be the ego guy who plays the blistering solos, because it wasn't appropriate to the music. So I was playing, playing, just playing along with them and loving it, in a way. And I went, "oh no."
And apparently it was John Marshall and Karl Jenkins. John Marshall said, "Oh, he's no good." And, Karl Jenkins said, "No, I think you can play." Anyway. They went home, and I phoned up their management immediately and said, "Look, can I do an audition?" And they fixed it up. And I went down, I played, you know, I played light, proper, you know, I played my full stuff, and so they liked it, and they said it was okay. So I joined, you know, and replaced Allan Holdsworth in that band. So that's how I got started in the Soft Machine. And that was April ('75). We're now coming up, according to our super fan, to the 50th anniversary, it'll be April the 25, 2025 warmer. Be the 50th anniversary of me at the Soft Machine. So there you go. That's how I joined.
And see our tribute to Mike Ratledge
And see our article about early Soft Machine
