7. Silas Hogan – Trouble
I have recently re-found this record on CD. Again, I just bought the album from a shop for a quid. I also used to thieve. I was quite an expert at pinching records. There was a place called Beanos in Croydon, and during punk, everyone was in the punk section and nobody was in the blues or bluebeat or ska or soul sections. And they didn’t have cameras or anyone looking at it.
So although I loved punk and I loved new wave, I also liked the stuff that nobody was keeping an eye on as well. I had this weird combination of tastes going, and I was getting it really cheap or free. Silas Hogan is much more up tempo and again it was really good for learning harmonica, more Chicago style blues. This is a brilliant sounding record.
My mum found a fantastic book for me called Blues Who’s Who – this enormous A-Z of blues musicians. I would look through it constantly, memorising the photos so if I ever saw any of them on the street I could talk to them. That is how it worked with Champion Jack Dupree. He was sitting in a hotel lobby and I went up to him and said: "how fantastic to see you here." He said I was the first person to recognise him in 20 years. I got his autograph.
Silas Hogan was in the Blues Who’s Who and I found out a little about him, but there were so few fans it was hard to find out much information. But it was exciting times. I presumed, from the notes on the record, that he was almost like a one-off record. A lot of them moved to Paris and would play London occasionally.
