Cozy Powell - a personal take

Cozy Powell had a long and well-respected career as a drummer, sadly cut short in 1998 in a horrific car crash.

He started as a young child as many fledgling drummers did, bashing and banging at anything within reach. His real name was Colin, but he was quickly nick-named "Cozy" by his classmates after American drummer Cozy Cole, and the name stuck.

... then followed a stint in Hamburg for the underage drummer, along with Dave and Dennis Ball.

In 1970, Cozy was the drummer for Tony Joe White at the Isle of Wight festival. Though the concert was filmed, unfortunately it seems that no footage of Cozy playing exists.

He was drummer for the Jeff Beck Group, appearing on two albums, the self-titled Jeff Beck Group (1970) and Rough and Ready (1972). He bore a remarkable and uncanny resemblance to the guitarist, also sharing his great love of cars.

When that project inevidably disintergrated, due to Beck's legendary restless nature, there was plenty of other work around for Cozy. He was in great demand for doing session work. Though he had never learned to read music, he never found it a problem to pick up what he needed to play. He would cleverly delay setting up his drum kit or invent a problem with it so that he could listen to what the other musicians were doing and pick up what was required of him. His work can be heard on innumerable recordings from the era, mostly unknown, but some memorable numbers include the Sweet's irresistable boogie shuffle Ballroom Blitz, and Hot Chocolate's Louie Louie.

It was while he was playing in sessions with Alexis Korner's rock-big band fusion project CCS that producer Mickie Most approached Cozy about doing a solo recording. It was 1973. Most: "I used Cozy because he was an excellent drummer and looked good." These were the days of the height of glam rock, and the end result, Dance With The Devil, quickly became a Top 10 pop hit. Cozy had laid down the track and promptly forgotten all about it until he heard it played on the radio. Most had taken it away and worked it up into a catchy three minute radio-friendly instrumental, complete with guitar and non-verbal multi-tracked vocals. It was followed by The Man In Black, which Cozy called "Dance With The Devil part 2".

By the third single, there was a band, Cozy Powell's Hammer, and Na Na Na had vocals, and a vocalist, old mate Frank Aiello. John Cameron (the mastermind of CCS) wrote the song. It charted as well, but Cozy was tiring of being a pop star...

...became a four-piece, Beast and played gigs in the US, changing their their name to Bedlam when they became aware of a US band with the same name.

Bedlam, 1973

1973 brought the band Bedlam, and a self-titled hard rocking album, produced by Felix Pappalardi (bassist of Mountain), who also played keyboards on it. As well Cozy on drums, the band consisted of brothers Dave and Dennis Ball on guitar and bass respectively, and Frank Aiello again on vocals.

They broke up in 1974, the promising album having gone precisely nowhere, and Cozy formed Strange Brew with Greg Ridley on bass, and Dave "Clem" Clemson on guitar, but the band got no further than rehearsals. Before even finding a lead singer, the group fell apart. Clem had gone off to join Humble Pie. How different things might have been if "Strange Brew" had been given the chance to ferment a bit.

Utterly disgruntled with the music business, Cozy decided to pack it in for a while and indulge his other great love, car racing.

It took a remarkable offer to tempt him back - the opportunity to play along with Ritchie Blackmore in his his post-Deep Purple project, Rainbow. Blackmore had seen Cozy playing with the Jeff Beck Group, and accordingly offered him an audition... The union had huge potential, and even more so considering the calibre of singer/songwriter Ronnie James Dio. Blackmore had displaced the members of Elf one by one after having made a studio album with them, with Cozy stepping into the drummer's seat and taking his place in an epic line-up of an epic band.

Sadly, Rainbow were somewhat before their time, dismissed as "dinosaurs" in an era when punk held sway in their home country. However, they more than held their own, with overseas tours as far afield as Japan and Australia. (That was when I rediscovered Cozy, though I was far too young to go the damn concert!) And yet they paved the way for the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" as it was called, the resurgence of the genre in the early 80s, though by then Cozy had moved on, for a stint with the mercurial Michael Schenker (yet another eccentric, moody guitarist!) in MSG (the Michael Schenker Group).

In 1979, Cozy recorded the first of his five solo albums, Over The Top. On this record he was able to work with some of the musicians he had long admired, such as Jack Bruce, virtuoso bassist from super-group Cream, Irish guitarist Gary Moore, and also old mate Clem Clempson, with whom he had eventually made peace after the Strange Brew episode.

For me, the album was a sleeper. Steeped in the hard rock of Rainbow and Purple as I was, it was hard to appreciate the album on first playing. I slotted it away and promptly forgot about it. However, some years later, there was a song haunting me, an instrumental that I couldn't get out of my head. It took me a while to identify it, but finally I realised that it was a track on Cozy's album, called Sweet Poison, a song I had heard only once. So I got the album back out and listened to it again...

Tilt, aka Thunderstorm

His second solo album, Tilt, was released in 1981 (known as Thunderstorm in Japan), post-Rainbow, and featured even more old acquaintances. The first side, like the previous album, was all instrumental tracks, but the second side featured the vocals of one Elmer Gantry. It's significant that only the instrumental tracks were included on the 1997 CD compilation The Best of Cozy Powell, and indeed Cozy's next album did not feature a singer.

That third album, Octopuss, followed in 1983, chiefly due to the cult status Cozy had achieved in Japan. He regularly topped popularity polls in the top heavy metal magazine there, appropriately named Burrn! (yes, after the screaming Deep Purple track of the same name). By that time, Cozy had joined Whitesnake, the band which singer David Coverdale had formed in the wake of the dissolution of Deep Purple. He stayed with them for a few years. His final performance with Whitesnake occurred at the massive Brazilian festival, Rock In Rio, in January, 1985. Bootleg videos of this performance do exist.

In 1986 came a stint with Keith Emerson and Greg Lake, becoming Emerson, Lake and Powell. Afterwards, Cozy described it as a bit of a mistake, though, "it had seemed like a good idea at the time."

In the late 80s Cozy became involved with guitarist Ray Fenwick's Forcefield project. This was a series of albums, starting with the self-titled Forcefield, in 1986, which featured various musicians from the Deep Purple family tree (e.g. Graham Bonnett, Don Airey, Neil Murray, Bernie Marsden, Micky Moody, Tony Martin, Mo Foster... and the list goes on). The songs covered on that first album included (what else?) Smoke On The Water, as well as Sunshine Of Your Love, White Room, Whole Lotta Love, You Really Got Me...

This was followed by Forcefield II - The Talisman in 1987, Forcefield III - To Oz And Back (the name is a reference to the fact that the backing tapes recorded by Ray, Cozy and guitarist Jan Akkerman were sent to Australia for Graham Bonnet to record his vocals, and then back to Ray for completion) in 1989, and Forcefield IV - Let The Wild Run Free in 1990. A further collection of material was put together called Forcefield Instrumentals, which included tracks from the previous albums plus 5 unreleased tracks. In Japan the albums were credited to Cozy more so than Ray, and the first album was retitled Smoke On The Water.

After The War - Gary Moore

In 1989, Cozy played on Gary Moore's last hard rock album, After The War, also appearing in the filmclip of the title track. It was Moore's final fling with hard rock before he turned to the blues...

And also in 1989, he became a member of Black Sabbath, a somewhat bittersweet collaboration, the result being the album Headless Cross.

In 1992, while working with Brian May (in the imaginatively titled Brian May Band), they had a hit with the marvelous track Resurrection, which became the centrepiece of his drum solo during their live show. This is shown in the video Live At Brixton Academy where the song features all the pyrotechnics Cozy was rightly famous for.

In 1992 came another solo album, The Drums Are Back. This is the one I travelled all the way to Japan to get. And found, of course, the very afternoon I got there. This album contained the earlier instrumental version of Resurrection, known as Ride To Win, amongst other gems.

1992 was a busy year. I also have a recording of Cozy, Tony Martin, Neil Murray "and friends" performing a whole slew of songs from their collective past, from Whitesnake, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, as well as selected tracks from The Drums Are Back.

In 1995, he was back with Black Sabbath (once the reformation with Ronnie James Dio as vocalist had fizzled out), firstly on Cross Purposes, and then for the disappointing album Forbidden (1996) with its muddy, badly mixed drum sound. Niggling injuries had taken Cozy off the road during the Cross Purposes tour, so that it was Bobby Rondinelli who appeared on the limited edition live CD/video release, imaginatively titled Cross Purposes - Live.

Dance With The Devil was a recurring musical theme for Cozy. It became, fittingly, Haunted By The Devil on his post-humously released fifth and final solo album, Especially For You (1998), another Japan-only release.

The final recording Cozy was involved with before his sudden death was Colin Blunstone's solo album The Light Inside.

20th Century Hero

(December 29, 1947 - April 5, 1998)
Still under construction !

Links

20th Century Hero

(December 29, 1947 - April 5, 1998) Still under construction !

Links

(December 29, 1947 - April 5, 1998)
Still under construction !