John McVie

John Mayall is the true granddaddy of rock – and this mammoth collection proves it

• John Mayall is a curious figure in rock history, a bit part player in his own story. At 87, the multi-instrumentalist has been a headline act since the mid-60s, a prolific talent who has written hundreds of songs and released around 70 albums across a career spanning six decades. Before the pandemic, he could still be found out on the road, playing hundreds of gigs a year. Yet you never hear him on oldies radio or film soundtracks, and I suspect most music lovers would be hard pressed to name a single one of his songs. Even amongst those who know and admire him, he is renowned more for his influence on other musicians than his own voluminous recorded work. John Mayall’s 1966 album Blues Breakers represented a turning point in rock history and is still regarded as a classic, but fans refer to it as "Beano", after a comic one of his band members is shown reading on the cover. It was the first album to really signal the arrival of a new kind of guitar hero playing fierce, overloaded, sustained lead. But the hero was Eric Clapton, not Mayall. A key figure in the British blues boom of the sixties as a band leader, mentor and innovator, the constantly shifting line-ups of his backing group the Bluesbreakers provided a showcase for some of the greatest guitarists of all time: Eric Clapton, Peter Green (later of Fleetwood Mac) and Mick Taylor (of The Rolling Stones). Bassists Jack Bruce (of Cream) and John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood (still the rhythm section of Fleetwood Mac) all came through his ranks. This beautifully curated if rather expensive (retailing at £275) limited-edition box set attempts to put Mayall back at the centre of his own voluminous output. The 35 CDs includes all of his releases from the period when he was a genuine star attraction on the rock scene and regularly appeared in the album charts, along with extra tracks and seven CDs worth of live shows and BBC recordings. The standard of musicianship throughout is fantastic, as you might imagine. Mayall was an ambitious band leader, but only in terms of music rather than career, and he would genially if ruthlessly swap players whenever he spotted another interesting talent to investigate. There were 15 different line-ups of the Bluesbreakers in the Sixties, and when Mayall relocated to California in the Seventies he began to explore jazz-blues fusions in more acoustic-flavoured set-ups, with line-ups that included such gifted players as saxophonist John Almond and violinist Don Harris. Mayall was a prodigious multi-instrumentalist himself, playing guitar, organ, piano and harmonica, often at the same time, with madcap exuberance. He plays pretty much everything himself on 1967 solo album The Blues Alone, which (had it not been for his reliance on contributions from session drummers) is almost the first proper multi-tracked one-man-band album, preceding Paul McCartney’s solo debut by three years.