12/18/2023 0 Comments Traffic sound band![]() Friends would run out into the night totally spooked. ![]() You’d wake up and hear the sound of footsteps going in one direction. Although Winwood says the band only took acid a few times, Jim Capaldi remembered life at the cottage as “very strange. “Cos if they did they had to do the washing and cleaning and it was an awful pigsty.”ĭrugs were par for the course, and Traffic’s mates Albert and Twitch were sent off to London for supplies. “Girls wouldn’t come to Sheepcote, if they had any sense,” Winwood laughs. Indeed there were dark tales in the village of orgies ‘up at the stud’, but Traffic didn’t even have girlfriends in tow. It was far more decadent there than in our place.” We used to go up to the big house and be the talking point among all the Sybillas and Ruperts. Pigott-Brown loved having a rock group on his spread. ‘You’re disturbing my pheasant and partridge with your ruddy racket!’. “There was a gamekeeper called Dave Dick who walked round with a shotgun and didn’t like us at all. “We didn’t have many run-ins with the locals,” Winwood recalls. To earn pin money they also knocked off a jingle for an ersatz orange juice drink called Zing! Traffic’s first stab at success was the sitar-strung Paper Sun, a psychedelic would-be classic of the early Summer Of Love. Winwood describes their lifestyle as “like four students living on top of one another, surrounded by filthy crockery and unmade beds.” In those days there were two sorts of LSD in Britain: pounds, shillings and pence (lsd) and the lysergic acid variety: Traffic had plenty of both. It was a place where we could make as much row as we liked – and we certainly did.” “Blackwell took the gamekeeper’s cottage down the lane so he could make sure we rehearsed and wrote material. “There was no running water, there was a well, and no electricity,” says Winwood. ![]() It was a desolate, two-storey house at the end of a long mud track on the Berkshire estate of Sir William Pigott-Brown, a 26-year-old part time jockey, full-time stud owner and leading member of the Swinging 60s aristocratic elite. The four youths were given the keys to Sheepcote Farm, a cottage in the parish of Aston Tirrold. Then Blackwell suggested we move out of London to the Berkshire Downs, where his friend had just the place for us.” “The first thing we did was the theme song for the film Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush which we were supposed to be in. “I was a pop star so I became Traffic’s MD and leader, which eventually made Dave Mason very angry,” Winwood explains. After the Spencer Davis Group remixed their Gimme Some Lovin’ with Mason and Capaldi singing on the chorus, Winwood put away his Ray Charles act on follow-up I’m A Man, quit the group, and Traffic were born. ![]()
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