PETER GREEN AND THE SPLINTER GROUP • EXETER PHOENIX ARTS CENTRE, UNITED KINGDOM, NOVEMBER 4, 2003

Just awesome. Incredible. Best musical performance that I've witnessed in at least five years. I mean, having lived in the Deep South for the better part of a decade-having seen Willie Dixon, Henry Gray, Gatemouth Brown, Tabby Thomas, Bo Diddley-these guys are one of the best blues bands I've ever seen. They are, without any question, the greatest white blues band that I've ever seen, on the other hand I can't ever remember seeing an all-white blues band before.

Anyway. Organic, creative, tight but not so seamless as to choke the life out of it...I mean, you can't have a proper blues show without a few of what Tomcat Courtney calls “bad notes.” The unquestionable brilliance of the Splinter Group has actually worked against Peter Green in the eyes of some desperado critics, but we'll get to that in a minute.

You start with Mr. Green. Arguably the greatest of the blues players to emerge from England in the late ‘60s, shortly thereafter tied with Syd Barrett for drug counselor's poster boy #1. “What the hell happened?”, and “How could this happen?”, and “How sad,” and “What can you say?”

I am pleased to report that Peter is back full-throttle, not only as a world class musician, but also on the emotional plane. His occasional banter made a lot more sense than most of the stuff I see in the House of Commons debates, and he made a joke about laundry detergent being an “agent” that was absolutely hysterical. He smiles a lot these days, and the lights are all on behind it.

A source of nearly continuous debate amongst blues guitar cognoscenti, since Peter emerged from his self-imposed exile a decade ago, is who plays what. Peter is the star and legend, but it has been said that Nigel Watson is the musical wonderlord behind the glorious new recordings. The problem is muddied in that they're often going off at the same time, classical blues stylizing isn't always as pronounced as in other genres, and on CD you can't see the players very well.

The concerns are legitimate, but without merit. Nigel is an extraordinary blues guitarist, worthy of mention among the greats. He is as close to technically perfect as you'd want him to get, though his homework is occasionally otherwise questionable, as on his vocal insistence on being returned to “that same old place in California/Sweet Home Chicago.” But I digress...

Nigel does indeed play a lot of extraordinary stuff, gloriously impossible and fluent solos, sold rock foundation chords, and a lot of things that defy classification. So does Peter. Seeing the two of them together onstage the mystery unravels, giving rise to even deeper mysteries.

Much of the impossibly wonderful fretwork and fingering is Peter, a nearly equal amount is Nigel. Many of the killer chord foundations are Nigel, a slightly lesser amount is Peter. On some occasions, where on CD you would try to figure out who is playing, it's BOTH of them! They're trading licks seamlessly in a single solo, two guitars of one mind to a degree that I've never seen approached anywhere else. Not by Keith Richards and Ron Wood in their prime, not nowhere, never seen it done like this.

The epiphanous moments of convergence notwithstanding, the two do have distinctive styles. Nigel is more of a classical blues master-think T-Bone Walker with Johnny Winter accents, or Eric Clapton in a mood without the bourgeoisie coloring. Peter Green is, simply, Peter Green. There are points of reference, but they aren't close enough to what he's doing to make any sense in context (a Mediterranean bed & breakfast, Audrey Hepburn's wardrobe, eagle feathers). Peter does the blues stuff when he feels like it, and he paints blue pastels when the spirit moves him.

And it moved him often. And he moved us.

Behind the two guitarists is a rhythm section (Larry Tolfree, Pete Stroud) that does precisely what a blues rhythm section is supposed to: they lay down a great beat, mix it up in opening more doorways for the guitars, write some good numbers, and stay the hell out of the way. To the side is Roger Cotton, the public face of the band.

Blues allows for banter between songs, and Cotton is good at it. Part historian, part cheerleader, a politician (he did mock Tony Blair at one point, but these days who doesn't?) masquerading as a used car salesman (he mentioned the great new CD, “Reaching the Cold 100” so often that the audience was bringing it to his attention when he failed to), Cotton just also happens to be an extremely versatile bluesman.

On keyboards and guitar Cotton rounds out the foundation, adding occasional emphasis by short three-note run, or single chord, dissonance. The first time he did it I thought it was them “bad notes.” After a few more I realized that he was punctuating passages, and accenting alternate passages that weren't there. One of my favorite moments of the show came when, in mid-solo, Peter Green did the same thing, simultaneously beaming his smile up from his guitar and onto Cotton.

The set was largely the blues standards that you'd hope for and expect, with emphasis on Robert Johnson. The setlist of “Reaching the Cold 100” was mixed in, nearly in its entirety, and another amazing thing is how well the new numbers held their own. It's a great blues album, a great NEW blues album. Green was anything but a hippie burnout, in fact downright sinister, as he gritted his way through “Dangerous Man.” Nigel worked his barrelhouse vocals to their gruffest sawdust perfection on “Can You tell Me Why (aka Legal Fee Blues).”

“Black Magic Woman” danced its way through each of the players and the crowd, and Peter introduced “Green Manalishi,” incontrovertible evidence that spiritual rehabilitation is complete, as a song that's “truly terrifying.” With a smile.

Versions of t his review originally appeared in FM Sound and the Exeter Flying Post.

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