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Malcolm Guite - Vocals and guitar
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"Rainy days on the Great Lakes"
The first Album I ever bought, at the age of 12, was Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. I remember buying it second hand in a thrift store in Hamilton Ontario and putting it on the turn-table in the basement where my sister and I could safely play our kind of music. I don't think I really knew what my kind of music was then, but I certainly did by the time the needle was clicking on the groove at the end of side one! What a revelation! Poetry, Country blues, and Chicago R'n'B all melded together to make a music that moved your body, stimulated your mind, and drew your soul towards a mystery you knew you would never unravel. I was hooked!
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"We're gonna try a song we never played before... uh, we put
together kinda for the occasion. It's called 'The Last Waltz'..."
Through Dylan, I came to The Band, through The Band I discovered Van Morrison and Neil Young, all these people who seemed to know more than I did about what was going on in my life and to have already set it to music. The whole Canadian vibe in the early seventies, when I was growing up there, was just alive with good music, and the place where it all came together for me was a triple album, the only item for which I have successfully saved, called 'The Last Waltz'. The movie came to the Arts Theatre in our town and stayed for ages as night after night assorted "heads", musos and misfits would sit in that little cinema with the music turned up loud and the projector-beam struggling to make its way through the sweet-scented smoke of herbs brought up from Mexico to Canada by some real life Cheech and Chong. But it was the music that intoxicated me most, and when Paul Butterfield got up with the Band to play his harp on The Band's perfect rendition of 'Mystery Train' I felt completely connected with life, went home and begged for a guitar!
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"You've been with the professors..."
Quite a few guitars later, (a high strung plywood acoustic with cheese-cutter strings, a Satellite Strat copy with dodgy pick-ups, then finally a decent cedar-topped Seagull guitar and a beautiful old Harmony H77 made in Chicago, home of the blues, in 1964) I had the chance to play my kind of music with a like-minded friend at Pembroke College Cambridge where I was studying English.
In a college where the sons of the privileged were buying designer safety-pins so as to pretend to be alienated punks (there was even a college band called the Class-War Band, with gigs billed 'rock against the dons'; they're all stock-brokers now) I would sneak off and play Dylan, Neil Young, some first faltering songs of my own, and when we were drunk enough, Hank Williams.
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Malcolm in 1979
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"Road maps for the soul..."
Leaving university and getting a job in the "real world" seemed to involve laying down my guitar for a long time, but when, much to my surprise I found myself called to be a priest, music and the muse woke up too. After brief stints in The Crocodiles, a rock'n'roll outfit that hived off from the worship-band at Romsey Mill, and Ecu-Jazz, an Ely-based acoustic trad-jazz band, I formed Prevailing Rock, from an unlikely combination of Bikers and Church-leaders.
Our biggest gig was the first ever Cathedral Rave-in the Nave, an occasion when I enjoyed the double-thrill of riding my motor-cycle through the west-door of Ely Cathedral and then playing through my Marshall, turned up to 11, under the Octagon! The jury is still out as to which of these two events was loudest.
<-- Prevailing Rock, led by St. Mary's Church curate the Rev Malcolm Guite,
take centre stage.
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"The priest wore black..."
I moved on from Ely, leaving PR to rock on without me, and became a chaplain in Cambridge. It was there, whilst I hosted a blues night at the Blue Ball (thanks as ever to Steve Lockwood for getting me that vital gig) that Mystery Train began to coalesce. Suddenly and without effort I found myself surrounded by players of real ability and experience who all loved this kind of music and could lock into a tight groove. With all this talent swirling around me, my three chords had never sounded so good. Playing in Mystery Train has inspired me to get out there and write the songs and find the gigs, and go for it. As the momentum of this band, smoking down the tracks, keeps building, I get the same vision and the same thrill that I had when Paul Butterfield and The Band first turned me on to rock and roll by playing 'Mystery Train'.
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Sharing the Tele...
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