Track One - Lew Lewis Band: Caravan Man

If I was ever to get my own radio show I'd want this as my opening theme. Something about the mixture of Harmonica runs along with the chopping guitar sound is almost hypnotic. The credits imply that this was jammed, rather than being written.

I first heard the track on an album called "Hits Greatest Stiffs", a compilation of tracks from Stiff Records' first 15 singles which had been deleted. I lent it to a friend many years ago and never saw it again. This track, more than any other, was the one I missed and I only recovered it a few years ago with the reissue of Lewis' one and only album.

Lewis played with Eddie and the Hot Rods, just before they achieved success on the coat-tails of punk. He was kicked out of the band after they recorded their first single, Writing on the Wall.

The Hot Rods, like Graham Parker and Dr Feelgood were pub-rock bands with their roots firmly in the R&B boom of the 1960's, but each, to some degree or other, owed their success to the 'New Wave' that followed the Punk Revolution. Lewis never quite made it. The Harmonica was not a 'Punk' instrument and he was, at best, an adequate singer.

There is an obvious reggae influence to this track, something that was also associated with Punk. His band made one album for Stiff in 1979, Save the Wail, which was re-released in 2002. Nothing on it matches Caravan Man.

Lewis missed out on the success of Eddie and the Hot Rods, and bouts of illness and drug addiction have prevented him for making any great headway with his music. In 1987 Lewis was sentenced to seven years in prison for robbing a Post Office with a fake gun. Since then he has had his own band and has played with friends from Dr Feelgood and Wilko Johnston's band. He is, by all accounts, a difficult man to know, and has had drug-related problems with his health in recent years. Last I heard of him he was out of hospital and clean, but the long promised new material has never appeared.


Buy 5: Lew Lewis and His Band

A Side: Boogie on the Street (Lewis)
B Side: Caravan Man (Zear/Green/Ocean/Clouter/Araby/Lewis