Andy Fraser was just 15 years old when he joined Free and I think he’s still only 16 in this performance for television.

This clip of the band performing Mr Big on Granada TV two years later is rightly celebrated as one of the greatest examples of British blues-rock.

They were huge in the early Seventies and might have had a career as stratospheric as their fellow travellers Led Zeppelin, had they not split up in 1973.

Fraser, the mixed-race son of a Barbadian-Guyanese father and English mother who had been playing in East London’s West Indian clubs since he was 13, left a year before that.

It was he who gave the band their backbone with his fluid, almost physical, basslines; and it was he who wrote their huge hit All Right Now, reputedly in ten minutes at the end of a lacklustre gig when the band decided they needed an anthemic closer to their set.

Fraser’s first break came when a fellow student at Hammersmith College of Further Education introduced him to her father, Alexis Korner, whose friend John Mayall was looking for a bass player.

At the age of 15, Fraser got the job and joined The Bluesbreakers, though he soon moved on to complete a new band that was also looking for a bassist, again on the recommendation of Korner, who also gave them their name – Free.

This performance perfectly captures his ability to play inventive lead melodies in counterpoint to Paul Kossoff, especially when he follows the guitarist’s incendiary solo with one of his own.