Twenty eight years after put together the first G3 tour, he reunited with the other two guitarists – and Eric Johnson - for a US tour last year. The G3 concept, which for a while in the early 2000s was an annual event with a varying cast, had lain dormant for the previous six years so there is a sense of coming full circle. Listening to three axemen, who were in their prime, on the first G3 tour playing their respective sets with the same skill and dedication in their mid-to-late 60s is an almost humbling experience.
Johnson's set is perhaps the most intriguing because he has remained the most inscrutable and elusive of the three, not to mention being the oldest at 70. They only give away their ages on the choice of encores: as done by , Hendrix's and Steppenwolf's . Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 50 years.
Actually 61 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance.
He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland. “Their own songs, freed from the dated sonics of their recorded counterparts, benefit most from the live treatment”: Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe’s An Evening Of Yes Music Plus retur.
