Rod Stewart never sang better than this. And he never had a better song to sing than this one – In A Broken Dream.
It’s also got one of the best guitar solos ever put on record. Rod didn’t write it himself. He wasn’t even a member of the band who released it – Python Lee Jackson.
Before he became a solo star, before The Faces, Rod Stewart was a jobbing studio session singer, picking up whatever work came his way. This particular job earned him the princely sum of a set of seat covers for his car.
I like to think there’s a lot of karma involved in that, given his own notorious parsimony – Rod paid the bloke whose mandolin playing basically brought him fame and fortune on Maggie May a measly £15 for his troubles.
Python Lee Jackson were an Australian RnB band (and that’s something I didn’t know yesterday) – a kind of Aussie equivalent of The Animals – who once did a great cover of Ike & Tina Turner’s I Idolize You sung by Malcolm McGee.
He was one of three singers they had – along with a dozen other members – in less than three years before they broke up in early 1968.
In a reversal of the transportations of a century earlier, Scotland-born guitarist Mick Liber re-formed them as a cruise-ship band later that same year in order to pay their way to Britain, hoping to launch their career here.
In A Broken Dream was written in their first spell together by band member Dave Bentley who decided, despite being their singer and keyboard player at the time, that his vocals wouldn’t sound quite right for this song. So he brought in Rod.
Originally released as a single in October 1970, it didn’t make the charts at all and was only re-released two years later to cash in on Rod’s growing stardom, following his string of hits (Maggie May, You Wear It Well, Stay With Me).
It crept to the dizzy heights of No.56 in the American charts but fared better here, where it went to No.3.
The song was later sampled by rapper A$AP Rocky on his 2015 single Everyday, which gave Rod a co-credit – unlike Python Lee Jackson – along with Miguel and Mark Ronson. Rather aptly and symmetrically, the US rapper’s version peaked in the UK charts at No.56.
Rod re-recorded the song in 1992 with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin on bass and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour supplying the guitar fireworks but it wasn’t released until it turned up in 2009 on a box set, The Rod Stewart Sessions 1971-1998, while the Python Lee Jackson original finally appeared under Rod’s name when it was included on his otherwise dismal 2015 album Another Country.
Meanwhile, little more was ever heard of Python Lee Jackson after their move to the UK, though Liber – too good a guitarist to disappear – would go on to play in two of the better blues-influenced groups of the early Seventies, Medicine Head and Ashton, Gardner & Dyke.