IN MEMORY OF ALAN WHITE
When Alan White joined Yes in 1972, he couldn’t have imagined that he would still be playing an active role in the band 50 years later. Yes dedicated their recent Close To The Edge UK Tour to the memory of their long-serving drummer, who died in May at the age of 72. The versatile musician was a fast learner who had also played with John Lennon, both in the Plastic Ono Band and on the album, Imagine. We look back over his unexpected career.
Words: Sid Smith
Our lives are so often accompanied by the music of chance. Attentive listeners will know that strange coincidences and unexpected encounters chime loudly throughout our personal histories, echoing and shaping our world with odd connections in ways that are unforeseen, fortuitous or simply surprising. For example, take Alan White. He was born in 1949 in the coal mining village of Pelton in north-east England. Not too far from that settlement is Drum Road, now the site of the Drum Business Park. Just a few miles from his Pelton birthplace sits the town of Washington. That, in turn, isn’t too far away from Newcastle, where White’s first band, The Downbeats, played its clubs and halls in the early 60s. Fast forward a couple of decades and White became a long-term resident of Newcastle in Seattle, USA. Originally one of the very first mining towns in the region, Newcastle lies in the state of Washington. This series of apparently disparate accidents of geography and their sense of one lifetime echoing with another must have brought a smile to his face.
Alan White had a habit of being the right guy in the right place at the right time. After stints in London playing in ex-Animal Alan Price’s group, White fell in with Griffin, like him a bunch of northerner ex-pats. One night John Lennon was in the audience. Though he didn’t know it at the time the trajectory of his life changed forever that night. It’s a story White told many times over the years of how, following the gig, he received a telephone call from someone claiming to be John Lennon. Initially he thought it was a prank but discovered it was real enough with the soon-tobe ex-Beatle inviting him to be in the band that would be appearing at the Toronto Rock And Roll Revival show the next day. Having only turned professional three years earlier at the age of 17, he now found himself rehearsing on the plane with Lennon, Yoko Ono, Klaus Voormann and Eric Clapton. Released by Plastic Ono Band, Live Peace In Toronto 1969, the resulting album, commingled rock’n’roll numbers and chugging blues riffs, the latter spattered with feedback and shock therapy vocals.