Listening to him with the Allmans while it’s obvious that Derek Trucks is a great player, the Allmans’ repertoire doesn’t give Derek a chance to work in his full range of influences. With his own band, those constraints don’t exist.
As a result, you take the blues/rock foundation from the Allmans and Derek & The Dominoes and add a variety of external influences - Coltrane and assorted horn players, for a start. Derek prefers to listen to horn players on the basis that if you listen to other guitarists you end up sounding like them.
But there are other elements in there as well. Sufi devotional music, for example. Not that you’re likely to have heard too many examples of that genre transposed onto slide guitar.
Which is what I’m talking about when I refer to the old elements put together in a slightly different way with a few different elements thrown in to bring a bit of variation.
So, while there were artists like Derek Trucks who I would have probably have caught on to anyway, there were albums I bought during the Radio Show era because I needed different elements to add to the mix. Most were the result of a favourable review in Mojo or Rhythms and while the strike rate wasn’t 100% I ended up catching some quite wonderful stuff that I might otherwise have skipped over.
Possibly the best of them was Surf, by former Aztec Camera front-man Roddy Frame, allegedly recorded at home on his iMac, just a voice and an unadorned acoustic guitar. As I went through the motions of shuffling things around with the radio shows I went as far as relabelling Just Another Sunday as High Class Music and switching the theme track from Little Feat to Roddy Frame.
While the Tuesday night show was tainting the airwaves the Fools Gold theme was by Graham Parker & the Rumour.
Now while Mojo and Rhythms (and Uncut, for a while until the movie content prompted me to question whether the continued expenditure was justified) provided a number of interesting new listens, the theory behind Hughesy’s radio career was that there’d also be suggestions coming from the listeners.