If Joe Bonamassa has come back with British Blues Explosion, a year after the Rolling Stones’ Blue And Lonesome, it has cemented the fact that the British Blues Boom was more than just a trend. More than a simple musical trend, it was the interest of a younger generation for the great American blues idols that had been ignored in their country, which led to a real revolution, with three major agitators leading the charge, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, considered in the UK as the “Holy Trinity” of rock and guitar. If they were far from being the only musicians involved, it is through their respective careers that we have discovered that blues, far from being an outdated musical genre, is some kind of getaway to other musical areas and has allowed for endless innovations.
German guitar hero and little brother of Scorpions’ member Rudolph Schenker, Michael Schenker perfectly describes the impact of the British Blues Boom in the middle of the 1960s: “It was as if guitar started singing from that period on.” He had the “revelation while discovering Jeff Beck and his Truth album, Eric Clapton with Cream and Rory Gallagher with Taste”, and it belonged to those who dealt with the teething problems of a new genre directly descended from the movement, hard rock, associating the time with one of its British pioneers, U.F.O. Guitars won’t only sing in by-products charged in decibels, and some, who will tend to think that hard rock was some kind of “collateral damage”, will favor quieter styles. We will give an overview of the very different careers of three major guitarists who have the fact that they have all been members of the Yardbirds in common.
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