COSMIC STRUT
ON January 4, John McLaughlin celebrated his 80th birthday – but he shows no sign of slowing down. “I will not pass the day without meditation and yoga,” he tells Uncut. “It’s like eating breakfast. It’s as stimulating for me as working with Herbie or Miles.” McLaughlin is speaking to Uncut on Zoom from his home in Monaco, where he has lived since the 1980s, and where he still practises the guitar every day. “For me, playing electric guitar is like riding a motorbike – it comes easily. But the acoustic guitar, that’s like riding a pushbike in the Tour de France. It’s hard, physical work and I need to keep myself in shape. Since Covid, I’ve barely been able to play live, and I feel like an athlete preparing for a race that’s never happening. But I’ll keep on doing it.”
McLaughlin was born in Doncaster, although, having lived around the world for more than 50 years, he has long lost any traces of Yorkshire from his speech. As a teenager, he relocated to London where – by the time he was 25 – had assembled the kind of CV that most rock musicians would kill for. He’d played guitar with everyone from the Stones and Tom Jones to Georgie Fame and The Four Tops, and worked with top-flight producers including George Martin, Burt Bacharach and Tony Visconti. But despite these substantive achievements, something wasn’t right.
“The problem is that, as a session player, you had no autonomy,” McLaughlin says. “You were told exactly what to play. For a creative musician, this is torture.” So, in mid-1967, McLaughlin jacked in his lucrative session career to concentrate on his first love – jazz. Only 18 months later he found
