#jim capaldi

Traffic - Steve Winwood

“We immediately developed this wordplay, you know, like a play on famous names. Things like, Who gave Roberta Flack? Was Marvin Gaye? Was John Mellencamp? You know, it just went on like that, and he loved that. So he would… the last few things he emailed me: ‘Who gave Cecil B. DeMille,’ and, ‘What was William Holden?’ And we immediately clicked on that level of humor.  And I had this character we developed, because he had this mask in the house of an old piratey Desperate Dan type of looking face; you put it over your head and it was complete with a patch on the eye and the chin all stubbled and bald, you know. And then for some reason in the bathroom, the French for dandruff is les pellicules, and he just said, ‘Yes, your Les Pellicules.’ So I became Les Pellicules, that’s my secret name with this kind of odd sea pirate thing, a mask on my head. So then we took it a few stages further, put like a cloth cap on my head, scarf round my neck and a raincoat with a ukulele in my hand. He’d gotten viciously into the ukulele. When George gets into something, he really gets into it. You know, so he went and joined the George Formby Appreciation Society in Blackpool, and he’d have movies and he’d get all these beautiful ukuleles renovated, and he’d buy different ones. And Joe Brown’d introduced him to the ukulele. Joe’s local. It was a lot of friends in the area, a whole group of us. So he’d always like serenade you to the door with a ukulele.” - Jim Capaldi, BBC Radio 2 (2009)

Traffic, 1967

3/19/26

📷 Gered Mankowitz