Why The Rhythm Kings Were Formed

In the two years following my departure from The Rolling Stones in 1993, I hardly touched my bass guitar. During that time I was a busy man. I married Suzanne Accosta, and developed my Sticky Fingers restaurant business. I also found the time to work on a variety of diverse projects like books, archaeology and photography - things I had had no time to get into in a serious way whilst I was a member of The Rolling Stones.

When I again became inspired by musical thoughts in late 1995, I did so without any very serious intentions. I just fancied playing a bit of music, but I knew I wanted to do things differently this time. I wasn't interested in playing commercial music, but decided to try to get back into our early traditional roots.

I began jamming at home with Terry Taylor and we thought of calling ourselves the Dirt Boys - playing and singing old raunchy blues numbers. Then we began to concentrate on the more serious music of artists like Fats Waller, Louis Jordan and Billie Holliday, and thought it would be worthwhile taking the sessions a little further with other musicians. I put the word out, and events snowballed.

There were certain people I knew I wanted to work with, and I approached the brilliant vocalist and organ-player Georgie Fame, and guitarist Albert Lee. I called Peter Frampton - an old friend who I've known since he was a fourteen-year-old guitar prodigy. I got in touch with Andy Fairweather Low and Gary Brooker - both who had been involved in my 'fun band' of the late 1980s - Willie And The Poor Boys. Everyone was full of enthusiasm about my idea, and happy to be involved.

I started looking for a pianist who could play early jazz and blues styles, and found the extraordinary Dave Hartley. I asked around for a black girl singer with a bit of soul, and was introduced to Beverly Skeete, who had worked as a backing vocalist for artists like Chaka Khan, Jamiroquai, Elton John and Texas. She turned out to be my biggest find of all - putting another dimension into our songs. We then contacted Martin Taylor - a brilliant melodic jazz guitarist, who wad ideal for anything that needed a 1930-40s bluesy-jazzy style.

We began to record anything that came to mind, and the benefit of working in this way, apart from the spontaneous atmosphere we created, was that I could pick and choose musicians for the particular style I wanted for each track. The result of these early sessions became the first Rhythm Kings CD - released in October 1997, which sold much better than we anticipated. We decided to play a few gigs in small clubs in Northern Europe, with audiences of around a thousand people, which was like going back to my early days with The Stones, when we played early Blues to sometimes unimpressed audiences in London traditional jazz clubs in 1962 and 1963.

In October 1998 our second CD was released, and we did a 3-week tour of Northern Europe and Scandinavia, to great audiences and rave reviews. In England our CD was in the Jazz & Blues Chart for 2 months, and reached the No.5 sport - which took us all by surprise, considering it was hardly played on radio - It was time to tour England.