Free followed their huge hit All Right Now with this jaunty pub piano singalong, My Brother Jake, showcasing the subtler side of Paul Kossoff’s guitar pyrotechnics.

Free had burst onto the music scene with the huge hit All Right Now, one of those songs that has become so over-familiar that I can’t bear to listen to it any more (see also: Satisfaction by the Stones, Hey Jude by the Beatles, Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple…).

Bravely, they followed it up not with another riff-heavy blues rocker but this jaunty pub-piano singalong – embellished by joyful squeals of guitar. Paul Kossoff really was an astonishing blues guitarist, packing far more emotion (pain, principally) into his playing than showier contemporaries like Gary Moore. I wonder what Nick Coleman has to say on that subject.

I find that Free, for all their beardy hairiness, were astonishingly young when they formed just three years before this: singer Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke were 18, Kossoff the superstar guitarist was only 17, and bass player Andy Fraser, remarkably, was just 15.

Kossoff and Kirke had already been in an RnB band called Black Cat Bones when the former saw Rodgers sing in a band called Brown Sugar at a Finsbury Park club with the superb name of The Fickle Pickle (note to self: track it down). Fraser, who was already playing with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers – presumably after doing his homework – was recommended by Alexis Korner, who also bestowed the name Free upon the new band, who made their debut at a Battersea pub called The Nag’s Head in April 1968.

That’s five months before Led Zeppelin played their first gig and I’ve often wondered, had Kossoff not fallen into heroin addiction, making him increasingly unreliable and leading to splits in the band, whether Free might not have been as big as Led Zeppelin themselves. My old football chum Les Linyard may well have an opinion on this.

There’s certainly a case to say that Page and Kossoff are/were the two most talented British guitarists of their generation, and it’s sad that Free split so soon, in 1973. Anyway, back to My Brother Jake: Fraser wrote it about a friend of his called Horace Faith… luckily he was smart enough to realise My Brother Horace would not be as catchy.