It was probably only when I moved to the U.S. It ran for a few years and then stopped, but I didn’t have the money to get it fixed so I went watchless for many years, which didn’t bother me. ? It must be the one given to me by my dad after I hadn’t seen him for many years as my parents split up when I was quite young. John McLaughlin relaxing poolside with his Audemars Piguet Royal Oak (photo courtesy Ina McLaughlin) We started with the customary wrist check, McLaughlin showing me his black-dial Audemars Piguet Royal Oak over Zoom, which he appreciates both for daily wear and for playing concerts because of its steel bracelet and very slim case, telling me, “It’s the skinny one, Colin!” “A lot of watches – and a lot of guitars – have passed through my hands over the years!” he enthused. If you didn’t know he was a 1960s London contemporary of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and Keith Richards, you could be forgiven for thinking he might be a former British ambassador to Buenos Aires or Cairo (he slips with ease between languages and dialects depending on who he is talking to, and I recently heard him conduct a podcast interview with American drummer Vinnie Colaiuta entirely in a Bronx accent so fluent Robert de Niro would have been proud). McLaughlin is an affable interviewee whose natural curiosity is evident and who enjoys swapping stories in an easygoing patrician manner and mid-Atlantic, mid-Mediterranean accent. Not surprisingly we ended up discussing all three. I subsequently followed McLaughlin’s career closely over the years, through his acoustic ventures with Indian musicians in Shakti, a hugely popular guitar trio with Paco de Lucia and Al Di Meola, and the numerous ensembles that he has led since then always featuring musicians of a caliber that McLaughlin was now able to attract – right up to his current group, John McLaughlin and the 4 th Dimension, an ensemble that has been together since 2007.Īfter I recently noticed McLaughlin wearing an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak in live footage from the 1990s along with various other interesting timepieces, I somewhat cheekily asked him for an interview to discuss his watches rather than his music or his guitars, to which he kindly agreed.
McLaughlin created his own musical universe, with one concertgoer notoriously reporting leaving the concert hall feeling that he had been “rearranged on the molecular level.” Even before the first track ended, I had marched across to the counter, handed over my £5, and took the record home.īetween 19, John McLaughlin had been recording in New York with Tony Williams and Miles Davis, but The Inner Mounting Flame launched the Mahavishnu Orchestra on the world, achieving rapid commercial success in the United States and Europe and introducing a broad swathe of rock fans to music that the press liked to describe as “jazz/rock” or “fusion,” but which, with its exotic and complex chords and 7/8 and 12/4 time signatures, had little to do with either jazz or rock such as they existed at that time. This was music that I had always suspected – or hoped – must be out there somewhere but had not manifested itself to me until this point. To this day I can recall the boxy, compressed sound of those budget headphones, but they failed to diminish what was quite simply the most astonishing music I had ever heard, the sostenuto opening chords of “Meeting of the Spirits” clashing and resolving like waves upon the shore, but with an intensity verging on violence.
This was in the days when a record store had a row of turntables behind the counter and a row of headphones hanging on the wall so that you could listen before buying. Mahavishnu Orchestra’s first album, ‘The Inner Mounting Flame’ (photo courtesy Colin Alexander Smith)
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