Sutton Coldfield Festival of Arts

• Venue: The Gate Inn

Minworth’s answer to organ great Jimmy Smith will grace the tiny stage of The Gate Inn during the Festival.
This may come across as Sutton-centric hyperbole, but it shouldn’t. Norman Haines, now aged 61, has a superb pedigree, having recorded for EMI Parlophone.

He wrote and sang Brum blues and soul band Locomotive’s 1968 top 30 hit Rudi’s In Love - an out-of-character ska number which still graces countless compilations.

Vinyl copies of his 1971 album Den Of Iniquity, slated for release by his group Sacrifice but eventually put out under the name The Norman Haines Band, fetches £500 a time on the internet.

A limited edition CD re-issue of 1,500 copies, mailed from home, sold out in no time at all 14 years ago.
Collectors can’t get enough of the quartet’s heady brand of blazing progressive R&B meets jazz meets psychedelia, which sounds like it could have provided the soundtrack for Austin Powers’ goofy gadding about.

Recorded at Abbey Road, it recalls Chicago Transit Authority at their blistering best, long before they turned into Chicago and became masters of overblown rock ballads.

It’s tight, melodic and punchy, and a world away from the output of some of Haines’ contemporaries who wore their hair long but wrongly measured their artistic credibility through the length of their solos.
Haines himself rather drifted away from cutting-edge prog music, not to pen his own version of Hard To Say I’m Sorry, but to support his family through the guaranteed regular income that working as a telecoms engineer would bring.

He met his wife Elaine when he was just 13 and the pair have two sons in their 40s and four grandchildren. Hardly your archetypal rock star, then.

Norman picks up the story at the start of the 70s, when Locomotive, whose Gus Dudgeon-produced album We Are Everything You See is also highly collectable, looked like it would hit the buffers. Declining an offer to join Black Sabbath (”I didn’t think they were going to go anywhere!”), Haines quit to form his own group which he intended to call Sacrifice, and recorded Den Of Iniquity.

“When the album was completed it was almost impossible to keep the band together because we had run up some pretty heavy debts,” he said.

“The next gigs were about three months away and before the album was pressed, the band fragmented and broke up. People went off to do other things.

“When [pop impresario] Tony Hall contacted me about supporting the album with dates, I had to tell him we had broken up. He asked me if I was going to get some other guys together, but I had started working by then for Post Office Telephones - we owed a lot of money. A tour of Sweden didn’t seem a large enough prospect to hang everything on.

“At one point they were going to re-possess my Hammond organ. Eventually the publisher Essex
Music paid off the Hammond for me. I had to sell off the band equipment and the van.

“Once I had got a job, it was a case of sod’s law - I had no end of gigs. It took me two years before I was clear of all the money I owed. I had 19 court judgements against me and I couldn’t get any finance for years.

“What money I had came from Rudi’s In Love. It’s on about 12 compilations at the moment.”

Haines played jazz in Birmingham’s clubs and pubs with the Norman Haines Trio, and later went out under the name Tony Norman, with a “60s tribute thing”, accompanying himself on guitar. Playing music has never stopped having a part in Norman’s life, one way or another.

The Norman Haines Band revival started when BBC WM presenter Jenny Wilkes put Norman in touch with Eddie Blower, a collector who had contacted her programme.

Blower sorted out leasing the Den Of Iniquity tapes (and the Locomotive LP) from EMI with a view to re-issuing them as CDs.

Nothing prepared Norman for the waves of interest that followed.

“Because I had been out of the business for so long, people assumed I was dead,” he said.

“When I re-emerged we had our phone number as the contact number in the advert for the Den Of Iniquity CD so people could speak to us.

“There was no lack of interest. Everything went mad. People contacted us from everywhere, day and night. We had someone come over from Los Angeles who stayed overnight with us and bought about 30 CDs from us.

“It was a pleasant enough surprise to me when the original LP [which had also had only a limited pressing] became collectable. It had seemed a waste at the time, to give up the band, but it wasn’t.

“For example, I went to a jam night in Lichfield and this bloke from the Climax Blues Band said “you’re a bloody legend, you are!”

“It’s another kind of success, if you like!”

Norman will play at The Gate in a trio with drummer Phil Andrews, and former Fairport Convention and Chris Barber guitarist Roger Hill.

Born in Yorkshire, Phil moved to Birmingham aged two. He began playing clarinet at age of seven and taught himself drums as a teenager in order to join the beat group scene of the time.

Phil played drums in a couple of successful but not well known groups, then function bands and finally settled happily into accompanying cabaret artists including Marti Caine, Frank Carson, Little and Large, Charlie Williams, and the Krankies.

Ten years ago he picked up the sax again and joined the Danny Steel Orchestra ( a Steely Dan tribute band) for a couple of years and more recently gained festival experience with the Big Blues Tribe.

He is currently also playing sax with local band Rewind that features his daughter Fay as lead singer.

Music starts at 9pm at The Gate.