MOVE! DOWN THE  ROAD

“A COUPLE of The Beatles were at our Royal Albert Hall show,” says Doug “Cosmo” Clifford, recalling Creedence’s first landmark performances in the UK. “I was pretty excited about that. It was great for us to finally be over in The Beatles’ home country.”

When, four days earlier, Paul McCartney had officially announced the breakup of the Fabs, Creedence Clearwater Revival were on the Continent, preparing to travel across the Channel to set foot in Britain for the first time. With hindsight, and perhaps a little dramatic licence, it was as if they’d turned up to take on the mantle of the world’s biggest band, now that the ruling group had abdicated.

“We were young, so everything was so meaningful,” says John Fogerty, looking back on the group’s pivotal 1970. “You’re pinching yourself, you can’t believe that you get to do this. We were kids from El Cerrito; we had never been anywhere. I’d only been outside the States once, to visit Baja California in 1956. But now we were in these places in Europe, playing the Albert Hall and the Olympia in Paris, where all these famous people had played before us.”

Like The Beatles, these four young men from the less glamorous east side of the San Francisco Bay had paid their dues, first in a string of unsuccessful groups, then endlessly woodshedding in their practice room, and finally, christened Creedence Clearwater Revival, with a string of hit albums and singles released at an almost-unparalleled rate.

“We were just following our own work ethic,” says Stu Cook. “Fogerty believed that if we were ever off the charts then people would forget about us, so that increased the pace of work.”

Two months after that first European tour they released Cosmo’s Factory, in many ways the zenith of their career. Their fifth album and still their biggest selling, it found the quartet adding elements of soul and early rock’n’roll to their swampy sound, stretching out on stunning bookends “Ramble Tamble” and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”.

“We wanted to show more of what we liked,” says Fogerty. “What we were about. I was planting the flag