
The blues in Britain has always been derivative. It was appropriated mercilessly in the 60s of course by the likes of the Rolling Stones and Cream, but the innovations of those artists took the music sideways into the kinds of rock stylings that spawned Led Zeppelin and heavy metal. Even the most 'authentic' (whatever that slippery word is supposed to mean) of the British blues artists, such as John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, although capturing reasonably accurately the sound of indigenous American blues, missed out on the penumbra of the music, the undercurrent of feeling and experience given [...]