Ollie Halsall - The Man

Meet Ollie Halsall...

OK, a lot of people may not have heard of him, but a lot of people have certainly heard him  on the early Rutles recordings, and possibly even seen him in the Rutles movie, in which he played Leppo, the fifth Rutle who disappeared. On the recordings, Halsall handles the "Paul" vocals - slightly speeded up - as well as all the lead guitar work.

No matter how significant Ollie’s part in the Rutles was, there’s far more to him than this, however.

Emerging in the early 1960s as the self taught vibes player in a band called Timebox with singer Mike Patto at the helm, Ollie taught himself to play guitar whilst with Timebox and when the band morphed into the sublime Patto, he was ready to play some of the most amazing guitar you’ll ever hear - and all this by 1970, too. He was also a bloody good pianist.

No-one in rock before him had ever played guitar like Ollie.

Absolutely no-one.

His playing was defined by long winding legato runs given an amazing fluency by his use of hammer-ons and pull-offs and all within musical structures which owed little to blues and more to jazz and even, dare I say, fusion.

Ollie’s late-blooming prowess on guitar influenced a young Alan Holdsworth when the two met in John Hiseman’s Tempest after Patto split up. Holdsworth’s refinement of Halsall’s legato runs in turn, influenced a certain young chap called Edward Van Halen who wrote a whole new chapter of what became known as "shred" guitar. Listen to the late Eddie’s playing and you can hear Halsall in there as clear as day.

Make no mistake, Ollie was an unknown but highly innovative player whose explorations of long fluid runs mark him as one of the key figures in the development of modern rock guitar.

His recorded legacy is patchy, to say the least. Like virtually all great lead guitarists, his major work was as a backing musician – not as the featured player. Consequently, we have a handful of Patto releases, collaborations with people like Kevin Ayres, Viv Stanshall, Neil Innes and John Cale, albums with his later band Boxer when he was united with Mike Patto, and various other recordings – many made in Spain during one of Ollie’s lengthy stays abroad.

I can whole-heartedly recommend the Patto studio releases – all of which feature plenty of very dense and intense playing. To be honest, it’s not always easy listening due to its sheer mass in terms of notes per second and occasional rather freeform vibe. My favourite Ollie track is ‘Loud Green Song’ from a bootleg of BBC radio sessions where he shows what he could do with his style in a straightforward rock setting.

Unfortunately, Ollie’s life story wasn’t a particularly happy one. Dead from a heroin overdose in 1992 aged just 43, Ollie enjoyed getting regularly wrecked on anything he could get his hands on. Even the rest of Patto – his most musically rewarding association – seem to have shared his bad luck, with Mike Patto dying of cancer, bassist Clive Jenkins, suffering from severe brain damage in a car crash and eventually dying, and drummer John Halsey physically disabled – from the same accident as Jenkins.

Sure, listen to Ollie and you’ll hear lots of qualities and characteristics that marked early shred and fusion guitar and which now seem hackneyed, but then think when he was first playing like this – in 1970.

"Ollie may not have been the best guitarist in the world, but he was certainly among the top two.” - John Halsey.

File under "guitar genius".