Downtown Flyers

Sleeve essay accompanying the Beat Goes On (BGO) CD remaster of Streetwalkers’ Downtown Flyers (March 2002), drawing on fresh 2002 interviews with Charlie Whitney.

By 1974, Family were finished. During their six-year existence, the Leicester band had released eight albums and shown a creativity that had seen them restlessly work their way through psychedelia, art rock and progressive rock — but vocalist Roger Chapman and guitarist John ‘Charlie’ Whitney had decided the group had reached the end of the road. It was natural that this pair — always Family’s main songwriters — should stick together for their first post-Family project. The record, recorded with sessioners, would be issued in 1974 with the title Streetwalkers and credited to Chapman-Whitney.

By the time the pair put out Downtown Flyers the following year, they had adopted the first album’s title for their billing and settled on a line-up. (Downtown Flyers would simply be titled Streetwalkers in America.) Whitney insists that there was never an intention for the project to be seen as a duo: “We really wanted it to be a band. We did do some gigs with the personnel who did the first album. We did about four, five gigs, university gigs, but as they were session players, they were always moving. It was difficult to keep it together.” Retaining the services of guitarist Bob Tench (formerly vocalist for Jeff Beck) from the musicians used previously, they added Jon Plotel, formerly of Casablanca, on bass while Nicko McBrain took over the drum stool.

By now, Streetwalkers were finding their way stylistically. Downtown Flyers saw Chapman and Whitney adopting a back-to-basics approach, spurning the ornate arrangements and esoteric subject matter of many Family tracks for a rootsier sound, assisted in no small measure by Whitney’s decision to concentrate his guitar playing on slide work. “I’d been playing lap steel for quite a few years but I think around that time I got really interested in it so that influenced the sound,” Whitney explains. “And Bob Tench is a good blues guitar player, so it all added up to how the sound worked out.”

The new artistic direction led to recording methods that differed from the intricacy of some Family recordings: “The overdubs were kept down, going for a more raw, bluesey sound. A lot of the stuff was actually recorded live in the studio.” Asked whether he and Chapman were worried that the new sound might lose them Family’s fanbase, Whitney shrugs: “I don’t think we thought about that. With Family and Streetwalkers, we wrote the songs and they came out the way they did. That was just the way we worked.”

Downtown Flyers was recorded at Scorpio, a now non-existent studio that was to be found beneath Capital Radio’s premises in Euston Road, London. Real Thing engineer Dennis Weinreich oversaw recording, though Ray Hendriksen (formerly employed by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band) was later brought in because Weinreich’s mixes were felt to be insufficiently bluesey. It was the first time in many years that Chapman and Whitney hadn’t utilised the expertise of long-time Family engineer George Chkiantz — although Chkiantz was responsible for the initial engineering work on Raingame, which had been recorded almost immediately after the Chapman-Whitney album.

Raingame, in fact, was chosen to be the single from Downtown Flyers. Many fans feel that the delicate ballad Gypsy Moon would have made a more appropriate means by which to promote the album, but Whitney recalls a general feeling that its five-minute playing time rendered it too long to be hit-parade material. He also points out that Gypsy Moon disproves the fallacy that the Chapman-Whitney songwriting partnership hinged on Chapman concentrating solely on lyrics while he devised melodies: “That was mainly Roger’s… Some things I wrote completely on my own and some things he wrote on his own. Other times we’d come together. He can play a bit of guitar.”

One definite Chapman-Whitney collaboration on the album, though, was Toenail Draggin’ which saw one of Whitney’s riffs graced with a Chapman lyric chock-full of Delta imagery and portents of doom. Almost identical imagery and subject matter is explored in album closer Ace O’ Spades, a companion piece of which Whitney says: “A very blues thing, acoustic blues. Very down-home. ‘Toenail Draggin” was first and that just ended up as a late-night studio thing with Bob, myself and Roger live.”

A surprising inclusion on the album for some was Crawfish, an angler’s anthem first made famous by Elvis. “‘King Creole’ had been on the TV,” explains Whitney. “I think it actually opens the film and I just thought, ‘What a great song’ and I thought about trying to work up an arrangement of it.” He points out that this wasn’t completely unusual for the band: “When we first did the Streetwalkers and went on that little university tour we were doing a couple of other covers: we were doing Elvis’s ‘Trying To Get To You’ and ‘Get Out Of My Life Woman.’ It just opened it up a bit.”

Whitney remembers the album helping Streetwalkers build up quite a momentum and recalls a “fantastic” reception at London Marquee gigs in summer 1976. Unfortunately for musicians of Chapman’s and Whitney’s vintage, the summer of ’76 also marked the dawn of punk and the pair noticed a changing attitude toward them by their label, despite the UK Top 20 success of Streetwalkers’ album of that year, Red Card. Whitney admits that the band compounded their problems by breaking up the winning team that had made Downtown Flyers and Red Card by recruiting a new rhythm section for Vicious But Fair (1977), an album that itself was an artistic disappointment.

The group fizzled out — the latter album’s lack of success, the apparent disinterest of the record company and management problems all leading to the conclusion that it was time to call it a day. Chapman launched a solo career. Whitney — now part of the roots-based Whitney-Roberts Combo — has, despite their ultimate lack of success, fond memories of Streetwalkers, probably because it was a project which, in its striking difference to the Family albums that preceded it, constituted one of the more radical codas to any band’s career.

— Sean Egan, March 2002

Album credits (Downtown Flyers):
Produced by Streetwalkers. Roger Chapman — lead vocals, percussion & harmonica. Charlie Whitney — electric, acoustic & slide guitars. Bob Tench — vocals, electric & acoustic guitars. Jonathan Plotel — bass & backing vocals. Nicko — drums & percussion.

PLUS: Poli Palmer — synthesizer on tracks 4, 5 & 8. Max Middleton — keyboards on tracks 6 & 7. Pete Wingfield — keyboards on track 8.

Engineer: Dennis Weinreich. Remix engineer: Ray Hendriksen (tracks 1–3, 5 & 9). Recorded at Scorpio Sound. Photography: Campus. Original design / illustration: Michael Farrell.