White blues

BBC4 has carved an entertaining and informative niche with its music documentaries and the latest, Blues Britannia, keeps up the good work with a mix of archive footage and talking heads.

The programme is going to reveal, we are informed at the start, an unlikely love affair that was awakened in drab Fifties Britain, and by the Seventies had blossomed into a global passion. We are singing the blues.

The story begins in bombed out, austerity Britain where the post-war kids included Keith Richard, the Rolling Stone who gets more wrinkly with every appearance.

How unlike another contributor, ex-Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones, whose ridiculously youthful looks indicate that Dorian Gray style, he must be keeping an aging portrait of himself in the attic.

Back in those post-war times, there was nothing for young people unless you liked Ovaltine, dance bands and crooners. “Not everyone sought solace in the two-step,” it’s reported.

Chris Barber talks of the “gutless music before rock”. But it wasn’t the new fangled rock ’n’ roll but the blues – black folk music from the American South – that caught the ear of the likes of Richards, Jones, Mick Fleetwood, John Mayall and Ian Anderson.

The performers that attracted them had names such as Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters and Lead Belly. This caused some confusion when Brian Jones visited the US and said he wanted to see Muddy Waters. “Where’s that?” asked his host.

Then there were the lyrics. The Brits had trouble understanding the blues. Ian Anderson talks of trying to decipher the words, although they knew that some of the lyrics dealt in double meanings of a sexual nature.

Fans would gather in each other’s houses to listen to their collection of blues records. “Our version of Tupperware meetings,” says one musician.

Jones, who had one of the biggest record collections, went on to form the Rolling Stones. They released a blues song, Little Red Rooster, although some thought it could be the end of their career.

But it was traditional jazzman Chris Barber who was responsible for bringing the first US blues artists to this country.

A lot of the time they stayed with fellow musicians or fans. Champion Jack Dupress felt out of place. His approach was summed up in a photograph taken during that period. Behind him are bottles of lager, three different types of whisky and a bottle of milk. The latter, he explained, was taken with whisky to line his stomach. Another landlord returned home, opened the bathroom door and was confronted by Sonny Boy Williamson plucking a live chicken, just like he’d do at home in the American South.

But the question that needs to be asked is how posh white boys could possibly sing the blues. As Dupree explains in a clip from an interview: “Anyone can play the blues, but he can’t feel when I feel because he didn’t live the slave’s life.”

VERONICA faces living someone else’s life in ITV1’s new four-part drama Boy Meets Girl. She finds herself occupying the body of a man in this gender swap comedy, while the man fills her high heels.

The switch occurs when Danny (Martin Freeman) is stealing copper wire to repay a debut. He and stranded motorist Veronica (Rachael Stirling) are struck by lightning – and change bodies.

This results in her going around behaving like a bloke, demanding fizzy pop and being appalled at the state of men’s public lavatories. At a dinner party with friends, she lounges about wearing a hoodie and talks about conspiracy theories just like Danny would.

So far Veronica has been seen doing most of the discovering what it’s like to be a man in a woman’s body. And Rachael Stirling is very good at being blokish, whether it’s her mannerisms or her speech.

Her boyfriend is understandably mystified by her new mannish behaviour.

She’s not much enamoured of him either.

Worse still, she reckons his record collection is rubbish.