In the interview with Aquarium Drunkard, journalist Jason Woodbury asked Chapman how his music still sounded so fresh and youthful. He also found a peer in Pennsylvania guitarist Steve Gunn, who recorded two of Chapman’s acclaimed, latterday albums, the 2017 return-to-form 50, and True North from 2019, and toured with artists including Moore, Kurt Vile and Bonnie Prince Billie. A compilation tribute album, Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done, saw his work covered by artists including Lucinda Williams, Meg Baird, Hiss Golden Messenger, Bridget St John and William Tyler. That was, until Sonic Youth attended a gig he played in Massachusetts in 1998, leading to a correspondence with frontman Thurston Moore.Ī period of rediscovery by other artists followed, including the late Virginia guitarist Jack Rose and the No Neck Blues Band, which inspired Chapman’s late-career foray into noise with 2011’s The Resurrection and the Revenge of Clayton Peacock. “Everyone forgot about me,” he told the Guardian in 2017. He continued to release prolifically throughout the 70s – an era partly influenced by time spent in Memphis, where he made the album Savage Amusement with the producer Don Nix – and 80s, until a heart attack in 1990 stalled Chapman’s career. “I’m not of that opinion, but there you go.” “He sacked the singer and turned him into a roadie and Trevor and Woody and the Rats became the Spiders from Mars and some people think they got a bit better,” Chapman told Aquarium Drunkard. He appeared on the record but wouldn’t leave his band, the Rats, to tour David Bowie soon appropriated the Rats as his own live band. The album appealed to Elton John, who indirectly appeared to ask Chapman to join the band that would play on his self-titled 1970 album, Chapman said later, admitting that he had not realised it at the time.įor his next album, 1970’s Fully Qualified Survivor, Chapman asked Hull guitarist Mick Ronson to perform with him. It was at least 75% cheaper to live in Hull than London and I’m a Yorkshire man – I don’t waste money.” He was pigeonholed as part of the new London folk scene despite never living there: “It was a very southern thing and I’m strictly a northern person,” he told Aquarium Drunkard in 2016. It was the first of three albums he recorded with Gus Dudgeon. A reissue on the label Light in the Attic called Chapman “a true stylist in his own right” and said he “holds a middle line between John Martyn and Bert Jansch with the provocative electric rock of Martyn juxtaposed against the traditional folk so wonderfully espoused by Jansch”. I’ve been at it ever since.”Ĭhapman released his debut album, Rainmaker, on the famed hippie label Harvest in 1969.
“I said, tell you what, I don’t want to stay outside in the rain, I’ll play guitar for half an hour. Yo La Tengo, BBC Radio 6 Music DJ Marc Riley, guitarists Chris Forsyth and Ryley Walker and broadcaster Danny Baker were among those to pay tribute to Chapman, who moved between folk, roots music. “I had an art college education and on a rainy night in 1966 I went into a pub in Cornwall but I couldn’t afford to pay to go in,” he once recalled. A trip to Cornwall in the late 1960s started his career in earnest.
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