Colin Carter obit

Colin Carter Passed Away

 

He was not on the list.

What Colin Carter always found funny was that a quite a few people used to mistake him for Roger Daltrey, and back in the day the two English singers’ resemblance seemed uncanny indeed, especially in their on-stage stance, yet musically the frontmen of, respectively, FLASH and THE WHO didn’t sound alike at all. But while the latter has been in the public eye for decades on end, the former dropped in and out of view over the course of many a year. And now, the venerated vocalist vanished into eternity on January 10th at the age of 76.

Of course, most listeners knew Carter from the aforementioned FLASH that he formed in 1971 with Peter Banks from YES to deliver three blistering records – sadly more remembered for their racy cover artwork than adventurous music – and even a hit in America, “Small Beginnings” which reached #29 in the “Billboard” charts, but Colin’s brush with success had begun much earlier. It was in the late ’60s that his ensemble COCONUT MUSHROOM, or simply MUSHROOM, started playing on various projects by producer Mike Berry, who originally wanted to sign them to Apple yet failed to do so, while supporting different prominent acts on stage before the warbler first got invited by Peter Bardens to tour in support of "The Answer" and then meeting with the other Peter B. When they fell out and the band broke up, CC stayed in the States where he gathered STORM, a bunch of kindred spirits whose number included such future luminaries as Al Greenwood and Kenny Aaronson and who nevertheless couldn’t take off – and neither could a similarly stellar line-up tentatively titled BLAZE Colin and his colleagues gelled into a couple of years prior to Carter’s American chapter. He teamed up with another expat, STEAMHAMMER’s Martin Pugh, and their troupe actively gigged only didn’t cut any fresh material.

Since FLASH remained Colin’s main claim to fame, he agreed to work with Banks again, in the ’80s, a spell that didn’t result in any new music, unlike Carter’s reunion with the collective’s bassist Ray Bennett: the old friends took part in the Baja Prog festival in 2005 and then came up with an eponymous album in 2013 which extended the band’s history. The history the singer was very proud of, saying to this scribe, when somebody attempted to put out the veteran’s bootleg, “We have standards we’d like to maintain. It’s us and our music, after all!” This is why he was happy to take part in the "In The USA" project – and even more happy to go solo and issue "One" in 2018 and "Tracks In Space" in 2023. He planned to follow it up with another batch of pieces and didn’t finish working on those.

A gentleman and an artist of the highest standard, Colin Carter will be sorely missed.