Mike Cooper

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Mike Cooper is a British guitar player, singer and songwriter. Born in 1942 in Reading, Berkshire, UK, Cooper started playing guitar shortly after leaving school in 1958. In 1962, as a singer and harmonica player, he co-founded an R&B band The Blues Committee, with guitarist Paul Manning, guitarist Dicky Reeves and drummer Eddie Page. They played alongside many visiting American blues players in their home town: John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf and others as well as British r&b and blues bands such as Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated.
At the same time Cooper was playing and singing folk and country blues as a solo artist in local folk clubs...From the mid until the late sixties Cooper was one of the handful of players who pioneered the acoustic British blues Boom, playing with and alongside other British players such as Jo-Ann Kelly, Dave Kelly, Tony McPhee, Ian A. Anderson and others, as well as with visiting blues legends such as Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Bukka White. His 1969 l.p. "Oh Really!?" on Pye Records is widely acclaimed as one of the best acoustic blues albums of the period. In the early 1970s, working with producer Peter Eden for Pye/Dawn Records, he recorded four solo albums which chronicle, through his own songwriting, a fascinating shift from pure blues through to free jazz...... (Read more at Last FM)
== Links to Peel ==
Mike Cooper recorded his first session for the Night Ride of 07 August 1968 and went on to do eight sessions for Peel between 1968 and 1975. His early sessions can be seen as a part of the British country blues revival, which Peel encouraged by booking many of the artists involved for Night Ride and playing tracks from their records (see Ken Garner, The Peel Sessions, pp.50-51). The later sessions contain more self-penned material and reflect Mike Cooper's musical development towards a more exploratory style, incorporating elements of contemporary jazz; his backing musicians included well-known names from the British jazz scene, including Harry Miller, Mike Osborne, and Louis Moholo, all of whom appeared on the 1971 Peel session by the big band Brotherhood Of Breath.
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Mike Cooper was never commercially successful or fashionable with critics, but he was able to sustain a career long after he had ceased to record Peel sessions. In the late 1980s he formed the Uptown Hawaiians, whose members included Dandelion artist Lol Coxhill, but they performed mostly in Europe, and Peel does not seem to have played any recordings by them. Reissues of Mike Cooper's records won the approval of Peel's son Tom Ravenscroft, who played a couple of Cooper tracks when sitting in for Gideon Coe on BBC 6 Music on 18 August 2016 and described "The Singing Tree", from the 1972 album The Machine Gun Company With Mike Cooper, as an "amazing track".
As a producer, Mike Cooper was also responsible for giving Tom Robinson his recording debut - two tracks on the little-known LP Firepoint, a 1969 anthology of British folk-blues artists. Robinson, like Cooper, hailed from Reading and was presumably performing in local folk clubs at the time.
== Festive Fifty Entries ==
*None
== Sessions ==
Eight sessions. No known commercial release.
1. Recorded 1968-08-07. Broadcast 07 August 1968.
*Leadhearted Blues / Tadpole Blues / Divinity Blues / The Way I Feel / Maggie Campbell
2. Recorded 1969-04-29. Broadcast 30 April 1969.
*Turtle Blues / Death Letter / Poor Little Annie / Electric Chair / Oh Really
3. Recorded 1969-10-20 (with Jo-Ann Kelly). Broadcast 15 November 1969.
*Spider And The Fly / I Think She Knows Me Now / Moon Going Down (Jo-Ann Kelly only) / Tell Me Papa
4. Recorded 1970-12-07. First broadcast 02 January 1971. Repeated 20 March 1971.
*Wish She Was With Me / Black Monday / Take A Look Around / I've Got Mine / Too Late Now (first broadcast 20 March 1971 repeat)
5. Recorded 1972-03-06. First broadcast 21 March 1972. Repeated 16 May 1972.
*I Think She Knows Me Now / 3.48 / Time To Time / Few Short Lines (3.48 not documented in The Peel Sessions (Ken Garner))
6. Recorded 1972-03-28 (with Machine Gun Company). First broadcast 21 April 1972. Repeated 02 June 1972.
*Morning Glory / The Singing Tree / Night Journey / Three Forty
7. Recorded 1974-06-20. First broadcast 27 June 1974. Repeated
*Suicide Deluxe / Black Night Crash / Beads On A String
8. Recorded 1975-06-19. First broadcast 26 June 1975 (see John Peel - 1975 Extracts). Repeated 04 November 1975.
*Wild Rover / Blind Willie / Beads On A String / Rock And Roll Highway
== Live ==
*03 May 1970 concert show
#In The Morning
#Rest of set unknown
== Other Shows Played ==
;1969
*23 March 1969: Bad Luck Blues (LP - Oh Really!?) Pye
*11 May 1969: Poor Little Annie (LP - Oh Really!?) Pye
;1970
*11 April 1970: Journey To The East (LP - Do I Know You?) Dawn
*04 July 1970: Watching You Fall (Parts 1 & 2) (7" - Your Lovely Ways (Parts 1 & 2)) Dawn DNX 2501
;1971
*24 November 1971: (with Machine Gun Co. and Michael Gibbs): Broken Bridges (LP - Places I Know) Dawn
;1972
*03 March 1972 (with Machine Gun Company): Midnight Words (LP - The Machine Gun Co. With Mike Cooper) Dawn
*18 April 1972: Time In Hand (single) Dawn
;1974
*06 June 1974: O.M.M. Coda (LP - Life And Death In Paradise) Fresh Air
== See Also ==
*Gigography 1970 
*International Times: Perfumed Garden Column
*Disc & Music Echo: Peel Columns‎‎
== External Links ==
* Allmusic
* Official site with plenty of additional info and useful links
* Other
Category:Artists