Michael Messer and Chaz Jankel offer Chichester gig on back of album

Mostly We Drive won great praise for Michael, a slide guitarist ranked alongside Duane Allman and Ry Cooder for technique, and for Chaz, guitarist and keyboard player with Ian Dury & The Blockheads and co-writer of Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.

“We became friends around 78 just as the Blockheads were rising,” recalls Michael. “I was not a professional musician at that time but Chaz was. I enjoyed the whole social scene. It was great. But I was not in that world. And then things happen when you're in your 20s and you move on. You make friends but life changes.

“But over the decades we kept in touch. And then we met around 20 years ago for a musical day. I spent the day with him and we had a great time and then after that it was occasional telephone calls saying we must get together but then it happened. A few days before lockdown, I got a call from him saying come over and bring your guitars and let's make some music. We had never done that before but Chaz being Chaz instead of just grabbing guitars and having a jam, he had put some tracks together and recorded some stuff that he thought would get into my vibe. He was absolutely spot on. We put a microphone up and we jammed our way through some tunes. We had some fun and then we went to the pub for a meal and then we came back and jammed some more and recorded. And then lockdown happened but over the next week or two we both listened to what we'd done and we both thought it was great and we both thought we should do some more. I started writing songs and Chaz started firing musical ideas at me. And when Chaz gets an idea in his head, he is really prolific. Every day there were more musical ideas coming at me. Some of them sat with me and some of them didn't but throughout the lockdown, we started to get the feel of what an album could be. Once we were out of lockdown I went to Chaz’s house and we started, and the great thing about working with Chaz is that he is a multi instrumentalist. You can build a track in an hour. It's not computer generated. It's the real thing and over the next 12 months we did it. It was just we decided that we would write a song and then record it and mix it and finish it and then do another. It was maybe a song a month.

“The great thing is that we both push each other in different directions. We're both very open to different ideas. My career from day one has been taking the blues and putting it into different settings and that's very much what Chaz was with the Blockheads. Without Chaz that wouldn't have been a funk group. He put in the different colours.”

And who knows, but there could be another album at some point: “We're not saying let's make another album but we are saying that we need to write some more songs and that's how this album started. And I think it's the friendship that makes it work and the fact that for reasons of the lockdown and budgetary considerations we kept it to as a minimum as possible. There was nobody else putting any input into this apart from our partners. Basically it was just the two of us, I think that's what made it work. It was very much the two of us with equal pull and push on both sides.”