Former Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist
Noel Redding's second attempt to lead a group (following
Fat Mattress),
the Noel Redding Band were more of a cooperative effort than their name would suggest.
Redding may have been the organizing principal behind the unit, but David Clarke wrote or co-wrote almost all the material as well as singing lead vocals, while
Eric Bell played lead guitar. Whoever dominated the band, however, their debut LP,
Clonakilty Cowboys, was very much a British rock album of its time. There were hints here of
the Faces and there of
Mott the Hoople in a mainstream rock sound that seemed utterly familiar in the mid-'70s, but didn't much remind you of
Redding's work with
Hendrix. When
Bell took off on his solo, for example, at the end of "Eight Nights a Week" (a paean to being a rock & roll star), his high-pitched work was out of Rock Guitar 101, but it had none of
Hendrix's inventiveness. Maybe it's not fair to make such a comparison, but one falls into comparisons in discussing the music because it had little distinctive character of its own. As singers, neither Clarke nor
Redding made it out of the rusty-voiced ranks of generic rock vocalists.
Clonakilty Cowboys didn't make any noise on the charts and it didn't deserve to.
Redding and company had made a fairly typical album for their time, but hadn't done anything that distinguished them from the pack. ~ William Ruhlmann