The now highly sought after Sweet Pain sessions (1969) featured the precursor line-up to the Bluesblasters and Mainsqueeze, representing a truly fundamental collaboration of musical protagonists. Members of Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers assembled to record some impromptu blues sessions, released on Mercury. The Melody Maker summarised Sweet Pain as simply a, “Hot and heavy blues set from British musicians Dick Heckstall-Smith, John O’Leary, Keith Tillman and Annette Brox.” An air of competence pervaded the LP and reviews received, but the consensus was undoubtedly that these aficionado blues musicians at this stage lacked a degree of commercial appeal, utilising rather raw and ‘primitive’ rhythms. Like an experienced vintage the line-up continued under further guises, evolving to The Famous Bluesblasters, whom provided Dick with a semi- professional unit playing as he recalls mainly at weekends, thus caught in the rather lack lustre cultural climate of the time towards cutting edge blues.
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