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Rowena Pool does most of the vocals. A wonderful bass player, a wonderful musician called Richard
Sadler, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. Remember a guy called Giles Hedley?
BiTS: I do. Yes.
SK: Well the guy who played bass for Giles for about 30 years, when Giles decided to retire from
playing music and I needed a bass player to come in and my first choice was Richard Sadler because
obviously, I’d been working with him for 30 years. But I’d never worked with him outside of that
blues and delta blues format, so I wasn’t sure deep down in my soul that it would work, but Richard
turned out to be one of the best reggae players
I’d ever worked with. One of the best musicians
I’d ever worked with and one of the best - how
can I describe it? Gig person or band person that
you can work with. Not only is he a good
musician, he would do anything for you. If he’s
in the band and he likes what’s going on, he’ll
do anything for you. So that’s the line-up. It was
a six-piece. It’s now a four-piece and it’s
working beautifully .
BiTS: The last album that you did was called
“No Barricades”. Have you got any plans to do
another?
SK: I would like to. Like with so many other
musicians and so many bandleaders and people
who put bands together, it’s trying to find the
finance to do it justice. I feel like “No
Barricades” is a really good album. There’s a
beautiful variety of material on there, but it’s trying to get it out to the right places because I think,
for instance, if I could get it to a publisher, it would be great, some of the music on there, for TV
and films and things like this, but I haven't been able to get enough finance to get it out and
publicise it enough. I would love to do another because now that the band has settled down into a
four-piece, it’s found its own form, and this time, what I’d like to do is put in more band material
because if you looked at the credits on “No Barricades”, there’s 14 tracks on there and I think about
ten or 12 are written by a brilliant, brilliant songwriter guitarist. A guy called TW Henderson—an
American who I worked with many years ago. I’ve felt for years that the music and the lyrics and
the melody and the songs weren't given a chance to develop because TW was a guitarist who sang a
bit and wrote a bit. You get the feeling that the stuff around, the lyrics and the other things around
was leading up towards a guitar solo. It couldn’t wait to get into a guitar solo.
BiTS: That’s wonderful
SK: So I feel if I took it and got my band to do it, redo the songs, we could maybe kind of push the
boundaries a bit more.
BiTS: Have you been able to get gigs done with COVID, the four-piece, I mean?
SK: It’s picking up because I’m lucky enough to have my partner Diane Tuppen, who is also my
booker for the band. She’s got about another six or seven other bands on her books, but yes, people