Andy Newman - Rainbow - 1972
Andy "Thunderclap" Newman (born November 21 1942, died March 20 2016) was a jazz pianist and founder member of Thunderclap Newman, a cobbled together session band whose anthemic Something in the Air was the surprise hit of the summer of 1969.
The band, who went by Newman’s school nickname, was formed by Pete Townshend, guitarist with The Who, and the music impresario Kit Lambert to demo tracks written by the singer/drummer John “Speedy” Keen, Townshend’s occasional chauffeur.
Townshend recruited Newman, a pipe-smoking GPO telephone engineer whom he had known at art school, to play keyboards and Jimmy McCulloch, a 15-year-old Glaswegian guitarist, who later played in Paul McCartney’s Wings. Townshend himself played bass, under the name Bijou Drains, on their only album, Hollywood Dream.
Performing in a trilby, spectacles, braces and bow tie, the bearded Newman provided a dapper counterpoint to his younger long-haired bandmates. He looked like a professor taking his students on a class outing. On his barrelhouse piano, however, he delivered a stomping Dixieland bridge for Something in the Air that blended perfectly with his bandmates’ psychedelic rock.
In July 1969 the song went to Number One in the British charts where it remained for three weeks. “To us it was absolute bedlam,” recalled Newman. “People would come up to me as though I was the person who knew how to pull hits out of the stratosphere.”
It was, however, their only successful single and the band split up two years later. Although, as one critic noted, “if you are going to be a one-hit wonder, you might as well be remembered for something as wonderful as Something in the Air.
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