On the other hand it’s difficult to find any redeeming features in the leaden Blue Condition. You could, perhaps, liken Baker’s spot in the limelight as akin to Ringo’s vocal contributions to Beatle albums, but one would gently point out that for most of the time Mr Starr had Lennon and McCartney doing the writing. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that if they’d had more than three and a half days to cut the album or anything else in the way of Baker-penned material Blue Condition would have been consigned to the outtakes basket.
Or maybe it suffers a bit more than it deserves (a possibility I’d be inclined to discount, but there you go) because it comes straight before the sublime Tales of Brave Ulysses, the product of a chance meeting between Clapton and Australian artist Martin Sharp before they ended up as co-residents in The Pheasantry in Chelsea. The way Clapton tells it he was at the Speakeasy with French model Charlotte Martin when they encountered Sharp, recently returned from Ibiza, where he’d written this poem about the Greek hero Ulysses and Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.
Hearing that Clapton was a musician, Sharp wrote his little poem down on a napkin, handed it over, and the rest, as the saying goes, was history.
Setting Sharp’s words to an uptempo melody he’d been working on based around The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City, Clapton slowed things down, overdubbed lashings of wah-wah guitar and came up with something that’s often rated as the band’s finest effort. While I’m inclined to hand that label to We’re Going Wrong I can see where the Ulysses crew are coming from.The contrast between the calm minimalism of Bruce’s vocal line as Baker pounds away underneath and that frenzied wah wah was mind-blowing back then and still sends chill down the spine forty-five years later. It wasn’t the only Clapton/Sharp composition, but the contrast with the rather charming Anyone for Tennis couldn’t be much more extreme.
They could possibly have left the title of the Bruce/Brown collaboration we’ve come to know, love and attempt to pronounce as SWLABR as the full length She Walks Like a Bearded Rainbow, but the mystery in the initials lines up with the ring a rosy guitar licks Clapton delivers, Bruce’s surreal vocal showcases the substance-driven inspiration behind the lyrics and the whole package rocks along in suitably surreal style (what with the subject matter and all).
But as stated previously, Hughesy’s tick for the album’s standout track goes to Jack Bruce’s We're Going Wrong, which stems from the masterly underplaying Clapton demonstrates throughout, that old saw about what you leave out being as important as what actually goes in. It’s not quite an exercise in minimalism. Check the slow inexorable build under the Bruce vocal line from the starting plea to open your mind, little licks that stay under the surface until that verse gets repeated as Baker gives the rolling drums the mallet treatment.