Climax Blues Band

Formed in Stafford, England, in the late 1960s, Climax Blues Band began as The Climax Chicago Blues Band around singer and saxophonist Colin Cooper and guitarist Pete Haycock, amid the burgeoning British blues-rock scene. Their early albums—The Climax Chicago Blues Band (1969), Plays On (1969) and A Lot of Bottle (1970)—established a sound heavily influenced by Chicago blues, with a sturdy rhythmic foundation and a taste for extended electric formats. Throughout the 1970s the band broadened its range toward more melodic rock infused with jazz and pop elements, heard on Sense of Direction (1974), Stamp Album (1975) and Gold Plated (1976), which features tracks like “Couldn’t Get It Right” that became staples of their repertoire. The group continued in this vein around the turn of the 1980s with Flying the Flag (1980), which includes “I Love You,” and later released Drastic Steps (1988), while regularly returning to a more straight-ahead blues approach—most notably on Big Blues – The Songs of Willie Dixon (1991) and Broke Heart Blues (1994). Despite lineup changes and Colin Cooper’s death in 2008, Climax Blues Band has remained active on stage and in the studio, as evidenced by the album Hands of Time in 2019, maintaining a style that still combines blues structures, classic rock and sparsely arranged ballads.