DURING 1973, the Rainbow –a palatial former cinema in London’s Finsbury Park – was arguably the home of rock in Britain. In October, you could take in a Lou Reed residency, with the New Yorker resplendent in his Rock’n’Roll Animal phase. The following month, Pink Floyd, fresh from the success of The Dark Side Of The Moon, played a tribute concert for the recently injured Robert Wyatt. A week later, Roxy Music’s Stranded tour reached the capital, introducing dazzled audiences to a post-Eno future. Just a few days after, on November 19, Miles Davis returned to the Rainbow for the third and final time that year. Ostensibly a jazz trumpeter, Davis was now as flamboyant as Roxy, as cutting and charismatic as Reed and as exploratory as the Floyd.
“He travelled the world like a rock star,” says Colin Hodgkinson, whose band Back Door had supported Davis at the Rainbow during an earlier appearance on July 10 that year. “The Rainbow was a proper rock venue, a great venue with good sound. He had the big sunglasses and all that – and a red trumpet, I think. Oh yeah, that was very unusual.”