The Perivale Pianist
Channel hopping to find a bit of late night viewing recently, I ended up watching ‘The Rolling Stones - Live at the BBC’.
While never entirely sold on The Stones, even I have to admit, as this clip collection proved, they have (over six decades) produced more than the odd memorable tune!
My favourite ‘relic’ rerun, from the Beeb archives, was an excellent version of ‘Angie’. It’s a song that always seems to get overshadowed by a constant debate over which ‘Angie’ Keith Richard was writing about (his daughter? Mrs Bowie? even Marianne Faithfull?), but for this version Jagger abandons his usual (annoying) prancing about, and turns in a truly stunning vocal performance (while wearing a ridiculous hat!).
'Angie' - The Rolling Stones - Live at the BBC
I did find myself distracted though, right from the start of this video, by a strange question. Who is that geezer1 playing the piano? The Stones may have had a fairly fluid line up (beyond the core band) over the years, particularly to support live performances, but this didn’t look to me like any of the usual suspects.
Never fear though, Google was up to filling my knowledge gap. Playing that piano is …
… Nicky Hopkins
Who? I hear you ask (which was certainly my reaction).
Yet the fountain of all knowledge (or Wikipedia at least) soon enlightened me that Hopkins was, “an English session musician widely considered to be one of the greatest studio pianists in the history of popular rock music.”
Now that’s a pretty bold claim. But, having done a bit more digging, I would suggest the following playlist of classic recordings, all of which feature Nicky Hopkins on keyboards, confirms its a pretty justified one.
Who would have known that one guy had a hand (or two!) to play in all of these?
Nicky Hopkins (aged just 25) even got to play at Woodstock, as part of Jefferson Airplane. Not bad for a simple pianist from Perivale!
Where? I hear you ask (apart from one ‘Challenge 69’ subscriber who knows very well).
Perivale is a ‘little known’ West London suburb (perhaps best known for its art deco Hoover building) which rarely gets as much press as its noisier neighbour Ealing. So it feels good to balance that up a bit by revealing that the town was once (at least in part) a source of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’!
The good people of Perivale do at least seem proud of their most (almost) famous musical son (although Rick Wakeman, if he’s a ‘Jealous Guy’, might dispute the claim), and they have remembered Nicky Hopkins (sadly no longer with us) twice over:
Through both a green plaque at his childhood home at 38 Jordan Road …
… and a fittingly designed memorial bench in Perivale Park.
For my part; I will never hear that, “you ask me for a contribution,” line from The Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ again without it making me think of the huge one made, largely anonymously, by a very talented Perivale Pianist!
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Geezer is used here in its (very ‘70’s!) UK slang sense, to imply Hopkins looks like a bit of a ‘dude’, and shouldn’t, using its US meaning, in any way suggest he was ‘a cranky old bastard’!