* En anglais uniquement
Canadian-born guitarist
Paul Rudolph has led a multifaceted career in psychedelic music, heavy metal, proto-punk, and progressive rock. He entered the music history books in 1969, when he replaced Sid Bishop in the lineup of
the Deviants, the renowned late-'60s British underground band, in time to appear on their album No. 3. It wasn't long after this that singer Mick Farren departed and
Rudolph, bassist
Duncan Sanderson, and drummer
Twink reorganized the band as
the Pink Fairies.
Rudolph cut an incredible swathe across their first two albums and innumerable concerts with his free-flowing blues-based playing, he and
Sanderson generating a sound of laser-like precision and intensity at their best moments, while
Sanderson and
Twink held the beat as well. The group's music was a cross of psychedelic and heavy metal, yet also embraced elements of what would later be labeled punk rock; even in the absence of a name for exactly what they were doing, their reputation soared like
Rudolph's playing, and it seemed as though it would only be a matter of time before the group broke through to wider, even international recognition.
Instead,
Twink departed after the first album, and
Rudolph left after its follow-up -- the highly successful What a Bunch of Sweeties -- and the group went on to success without him before splintering. Meanwhile,
Rudolph had jumped to
Hawkwind, a metal band with underground roots similar to (and rather closely intertwined with)
the Pink Fairies, who had just fired their bassist,
Lemmy; for the next two years his bass work illuminated their space-borne metal rock on both stage and record, though his past associations with
the Deviants/
Pink Fairies still occasionally caught up with him. One of
Rudolph's great, transcendent on-stage moments was captured for posterity when he returned to
the Pink Fairies lineup for a July 13, 1975, show at the London Roundhouse that put together the group's original lineup and paired him with his successor,
Larry Wallis, with appropriately scintillating results -- it's worth hearing just for the interaction between the two of them and
Duncan Sanderson's bass.
Finally, in 1977,
Rudolph and drummer Alan Powell decided to form their own band, after a short stint in a group called Kicks alongside ex-
Vinegar Joe bassist Steve York and ex-
Quiver/Cochise/
Al Stewart alumnus Cal Batchelor. And amid all of that heavy metal/proto-punk activity from 1973 onward, he also recorded extensively with
Brian Eno on the latter's albums throughout the decade, which put him in the august company of
Robert Fripp et al.
Rudolph has participated in various reincarnations of
the Pink Fairies and
the Deviants, and subgroupings from their respective orbits, in the decades since. ~ Bruce Eder