The years of the mid-1960s, John Mayall said, “were a special period in British music history” – the foundation of all today’s rock.
“Our source was all the American black music that Americans weren’t listening to,” he said. “People mention Eric Clapton, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, the Animals, the Rolling Stones: all these people came out of a small time period – four years. We were all so dedicated to where this music came from and the injustice of the fact that the blues was not appreciated in America. We were damned if we were going to let it go on being unnoticed.”
Mayall, who has died aged 90, did more than most to get the blues noticed in the UK. He composed music, sang, and played several instruments, but above all he was a bandleader, notably with the Bluesbreakers. Ever alert to musicians who might realise his ideas while developing their own, he employed leading blues players across two generations, from Clapton and Peter Green to Walter Trout.
Born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, John was the son of Beryl (nee Leeson) and Murray Mayall, who played the guitar in pubs. As a boy he absorbed his father’s records of Leadbelly and the boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons, and learned to play the piano, guitar and harmonica. After army service in Korea and four years at the Regional College of Art in Manchester (now Manchester School of Art), where he formed his first band, the Powerhouse Four, he worked as a graphic designer and led a group called the Blues Syndicate.
In 1963, encouraged by the blues aficionado and bandleader Alexis Korner, he moved to London, formed the Bluesbreakers and played regularly at the Flamingo club in Soho. Signed to Decca Records, he made his first single in 1964 and the LP John Mayall Plays John Mayall in 1965. Soon afterwards he hired Clapton, who had just left the Yardbirds.
Mayall had always been a record collector – I remember him as a fellow searcher for rare American blues 45s at Transat Imports, a fitfully open basement shop off Leicester Square – and at Decca he found another, the producer Mike Vernon. In 1966 they collaborated on Blues Breakers, the most momentous album in British blues history, revealing the 21-year-old Clapton’s precocious talent. “If the blues prophets were Mayall and Korner, and the god Clapton,” wrote Clapton’s biographer Harry Shapiro, “then this album was the bible.”
By the time it was released, Clapton had left to form Cream. He was succeeded by Green, heard on A Hard Road (1966), which got to No 10 in the UK album charts, then by Mick Taylor, who played on Crusade (1967), which reached No 8 and was perhaps the early Bluesbreakers’ most cohesive performance as well as the best showcase of Mayall’s sometimes inconsistent singing. Through the band’s ranks also passed the bassist John McVie and the drummer Mick Fleetwood, on their way, with Green, to found Fleetwood Mac.
On a scene where many musicians were drugged, drunk or disordered, Mayall had a reputation as a no-nonsense boss, with what Shapiro tactfully called “a finely tuned sense of discipline”. Band members who broke his rules were summarily fired. The drummer Aynsley Dunbar responded to his sacking by forming a band called Retaliation. For Clapton, however, Mayall was a father figure; his was the one band where he felt most at home. “John has run an incredibly great school for musicians,” he said. “Most of the people that have gone through it have turned out pretty well.”
But the curriculum of Mayall’s blues academy was not set in stone: though he started out as a devotee of Chicago blues, he was receptive to other strains of American music. The pastoral textures of the album Bare Wires (1968), which reached No 3 in the UK charts, glinted with light refracted through Charles Mingus or early Ornette Coleman, while on The Turning Point (1969) he used the acoustic guitarist Jon Mark “to explore seldom-used areas within the framework of low volume music”.
By the end of 1970, with the Bluesbreakers in abeyance, Mayall had moved to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. From that point onwards he employed American musicians on various recording projects: the guitarist Harvey Mandel and the bassist Larry Taylor from the blues band Canned Heat, older jazz players such as the violinist Sugarcane Harris, the trumpeter Blue Mitchell and the tenor saxophonist Red Holloway.
Through five decades he recorded prolifically, making more than 50 albums (not counting reissues and bootlegs), toured regularly and wrote incessantly. From the start of his career he had mixed the older blues repertoire with original compositions, some of them tributes to musicians he revered, such as Leadbelly, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Jimmy Reed and, especially, JB Lenoir. But despite his respect for his forerunners, he found it hard in his own songwriting to match their colloquial ease.
In 1979 a fire at his home destroyed much of his archives, a catastrophe he relived in the song Lost and Gone. “The late 70s and early 80s were a pretty rough time not just for me, but for a lot of blues players getting record deals,” he recalled, yet from 1975 to 1979 he released nine albums. In 1982 he re-formed the Bluesbreakers with Taylor and McVie for an extended world tour. The response encouraged him to maintain the band, for which he hired Trout and Coco Montoya, succeeded in 1993 by Buddy Whittington, who helped refresh the band’s sound on albums such as Spinning Coin (1995) and Padlock on the Blues (1999).
On Along for the Ride (2001) he was reunited with Green, Taylor, McVie and Fleetwood, and in 2003 a 70th birthday concert in Liverpool, celebrating the music of his early career, put him back on stage with Clapton. From 2009 to 2016 he had a settled lineup with the guitarist Rocky Athas. In 2018 Carolyn Wonderland became his lead guitarist.
He was appointed OBE in 2005. In 2016 he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, and earlier this year into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His autobiography Blues from Laurel Canyon: My Life As a Bluesman, written with Joel McIver, was published in 2019. Three years later his “epic road dog days” came to an end, and he released his final studio album, The Sun Is Shining Down.
His marriages to Pamela Heap and the musician Maggie Parker ended in divorce. He is survived by six children, Gaz, Jason, Red, Ben, Zak and Samson, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
• John Brumwell Mayall, musician, born 29 November 1933; died 22 July 2024
