As one of the guitar world’s most prolific rhythm guitar players, Andy Fairweather Low has amassed a serious list of collaborators across his career, including high-profile stints with Eric Clapton, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Bob Dylan and many more.
He also once toured with George Harrison, having been personally scouted and recruited by the legendary Beatle himself. There was a slight catch when Harrison sought the hugely prolific guitar player, though: he wanted him to play slide guitar... and Fairweather Low had never played slide before.
As he recalls in a new interview with Guitar World, the Amen Corner frontman once found himself operating in similar circles to Harrison, with whom he shared a mutual love of Ry Cooder’s virtuosic slide guitar playing.
This loose connection meant the pair found themselves bumping into each other at Cooder concerts, and before long Harrison’s reps were reaching out to the seasoned session hand with a proposition: a tour in Japan, which took place in 1991.
“We’d met a couple of times backstage at different Ry Cooder gigs and just said hello to each other and nothing more,” Fairweather Low remembers. “Then I got a phone call from Roger Forrester, who was Eric's manager at the time, and he says, ‘George wants you to come and do the tour to Japan to play all the intricate slide parts because that’s what he wants you to do. He doesn’t want to do it.’”
This request slightly baffled Fairweather Low: he considered himself a rhythm guitar player, and as such, lead slide lines weren’t exactly his forté. That didn’t phase Harrison in the slightest, though.
“Though I don't play slide and never did, I knew this was a life-changing moment – one of those moments where everything's going to change if it happens,” he goes on. “I thought, well, I’m either going to turn up at the rehearsal and they’re going to realise I’m an absolute no-go, or I can phone George and own up.
“So, I asked Roger to get me George’s number, and I rang him. I told George, ‘I know we met at the Ry Cooder concert, and I’m a big fan of Ry, too, but I’m never going to do that [play slide]. I’m having enough trouble with my fingers without putting a metal or glass bar in the way. I’ll stick to what I do.’
“But George said, ‘I tell you what, everybody seems to like you, so why don’t you just come up?’”
The meeting was a success, and both players hit it off, but when Fairweather Low once again raised the subject of the slides, Harrison simply wouldn’t budge.
He continues, “I said, ‘George, I’m the rhythm guitar player. You are the slide player. And not only that, you’re going to sing as well, so, that frees you up for just playing the slide and not strumming.’ But he wouldn't have it, so I had to play that.”
The full interview with Andy Fairweather Low will be published on GuitarWorld.com later this month.
