Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends: How Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Nicky Hopkins and Noel Redding all combined to create “the worst record ever released”
When a string of the most esteemed musicians in modern history produce the “worst record ever released” we’re all in trouble. The tragic horror of Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, featuring Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Nicky Hopkins and Jimi Hendrix’s bassist Noel Redding, seems almost like an indictment not just of rock ‘n’ roll but rather the human race in general.
Screaming Lord Sutch, the dastardly singer behind this sorry mess, wanted to assemble a slew of heroes to recreate rock in a new mould—in the end, the album is akin to summoning all the Gods of all the religions and setting out a utopian reckoning for the world, only to render the whole place one giant, stale Sunderland.
Jokes aside (Sunderland isn’t that bad), this sorry album sent the promising Lord Sutch screaming down the swanny. It was bashed from pillar to post upon release, and ultimately, when the BBC ran a poll on the worst albums in history back in 1998, Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends came out on top. So, does this highlight the overlooked essence that the eminence of a band is not underpinned by the quality of its members but rather by how well they coalesce? No.
While it might be true that the greatness of a group boils down to the mix, there is rather more at play when it comes to this diseased outing. You see, the comic Lord Sutch was not just considered a great singer at the time, he was also considered a wild presence to be around. For example, he holds the record for contesting the most Parliamentary elections in the UK, having stood 39 times between 1963 and 1997—bolstering his cause in 1982 by founding his own party: The Monster Raving Loony Party.
So, when someone like that asks his associates whether they’d like to join him in a Hollywood studio for a rollicking good time trying out classic rock ‘n’ roll music in his new proto-shock-rock style, it is not surprising that they thought, ‘Yeah, that’ll be a laugh’. However, in true political fashion, Sutch was being rather duplicitous with his invite. “I just went down to have a laugh, playing some old rock ‘n’ roll, a bit of a send-up,” Jimmy Page told Australian Chart Book author David Kent. “The whole joke sort of reversed itself and became ugly.”
That inversion of a lark then played out on the world when dedicated rock fans raced to see what this wonderful ensemble would sound like. The Rolling Stone review upon release captures the sentiment of the disappointed masses: “[They sound] like a fouled parody of themselves.” That, in essence, was exactly the case. The band thought they were rattling off piss-taking demos for Sutch to later work with, but it turns out these drunken studio frolics were set to be the real McCoy with Lord Sutch correctly thinking that slapping their names on the cover of his LP would help shift some units and give him a much talked about debut. Once again, he wasn’t wrong, but for all the worst reasons.
In truth, Sutch had put his finger on something when he dreamt up a new type of pantomime rock. Only a few years later, Alice Cooper would toss a chicken off stage that a prankster had placed there, incorrectly thinking that the flightless bird would take off, only to see it hurtle towards a disabled man sat at a designated space near the front of the crowd, and then have the wheelchair user rip its head off in a rage and inadvertently invent shock rock proper. So, Cooper accidentally beat Sutch to it because The Lord’s conniving ways called the rock elite to disown his album, dismiss it as a farce, and then he had to wait 12 years before he got another shot at making a solo studio record.
Now, the maligned LP remains an oddity—the sort of record you see while trawling through the second-hand rack and think it must be some sort of fan compilation. These days, it would be taken down by respective labels over legal rights, but back then it was allowed to fool the world into thinking something magical had happened for a moment, only for them to be met with a crackly farce with virtuosos clumsily rehashing old riffs as though they’re high on laughing gas, and a monster raving lunatic wailing over the top.