Words: Jeremy Miles Pictures: Hattie Miles
I was so sorry to hear that my friend Gilson Lavis, longtime drummer with both Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra and Squeeze died last week at his home in Lincolnshire.
He was 74 and had been battling health issues for some time. Late last year, after a career that had lasted nearly 60 years, he announced his retirement, bowing out in style with one final concert with Jools Holland’s Rhythm and Blues Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.
He had played in the celebrated big band for more than three decades and had previously worked with Holland in Squeeze which he joined as a founding member in 1976.
But his career extended way back to the 1960s when, having turned professional when he was only 15-years old, he toured with visiting American acts including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Dolly Parton and he took valuable experience to the young Squeeze line-up.
His impressive skills and intutive feel for music in all its forms soon gained him widespread respect from his bandmates and fellow musicians. But it wasn’t all plain sailing.
Gilson had his demons and in the Squeeze days struggled with heavy drinking that eventually saw him descend into alcoholism. Much as they loved him, his wild and erractic and often wild behviour proved too much for the band and he was sacked…twice!
Eventually he managed to get sober and despite a busy touring and recording schedule, devoted the rest of his life to being an ambassador for Alcoholics Anonymous and helping others struggling with drink and addiction.
He is probably best known today for his regular TV appearances on Later and the annual New Year Hootenanny with the Jools Holland R&B Orchestra. He was also the session drummer of choice or many top musicians.
A list of those he has played with is truly extraordinary and includes Eric Clapton, BB King, Ray Charles,Paul McCartney, Adele, Amy Winehouse, Ronnie Spector, Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Dionne Warwck, Doctor John, Marc Almond, Graham Parker and many more.The list goes on
He could adapt seamlessly to any genre of music playing rock, pop, soul, jazz, folk reggae, R&B or anything else that was required with equal feel and precision.
Beyond music he was also a talented painter, creating striking monochrome portraits of many of the musicians he worked with or particularly admired. Initially he just made sketches with a biro back stage but as his skill developed he began to paint in what would become his signature style which is how I met him when he approached me to help promote his art.
Having been a longtime admirer of his drumming, I was delighted. My wife, photographer Hattie Miles and I met Gilson at his home, a converted farmhouse in the Lincolnshire countryside. After a photo session in his home painting studio we chatted over lunch and I wrote a series of interview and feature articles and even found him a gallery that was keen to exhibit his paintings.
The show at The Hatch Gallery in Christchurch was one of the first that he staged and helped turn what had been a small side-hustle into a significant professioinal practice .
Gilson was a lovely man, kind, considerate and excellent company with endless fascinating and often hilarious anecdotes about the rock and pop stars he had worked with. We got on well and our business arrangement soon became a friendship.
I will always have happy memories of spending time with him at art shows, backstage at concerts, in his painting studio and having lunch with him and his wife Nicky. We are going to miss him so much.
*****
And here’s a piece I wrote about how Gilson’s successful battle with alcohol addiction and drug abuse eventually led to him acquiring a new set of teeth and establishing a second career as painter. It was published in 2013.
There was a great turnout for the opening night of the new exhibition of paintings by my good friend, drummer-turned-portrait-artist Gilson Lavis, at the weekend. Self-taught painter Gilson specialises in black and white acrylic studies of many of the famous musicians he plays with in the Jools Holland Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. Painted backstage, in hotel rooms and at his home studio, the works on show feature some great performers – Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, B.B. King, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Paul Weller, Doctor John, The Rolling Stones, the list goes on.
Many of the musicians he paints have become his friends. Others have exerted a profound influence on a career that dates back more than 40 years to his days before he finding fame with Squeeze when he played for everyone from Chuck Berry to variety artists like Tommy Cooper, Bruce Forsythe and Bob Monkhouse. The exhibition is called Portraits: Gilson Lavis in Black & White and is at the Hatch Gallery in Christchurch, Dorset, until Friday October 4. Find out more and find out why Gilson chose to stage the show in a small town Dorset venue in my piece below which was originally published in Dorset magazine 12 years ago.
He’s one of the best and most versatile drummers in the world. Whether it’s rock, blues, R&B, soul, jazz or big band boogie, Gilson Lavis plays like a dream. Yet, at the age of 62, Gilson has decided that it might be an idea to add another string to his bow. Something to fall back on in his old age when the constant touring and punishing effects of his nightly virtuoso drum solos become too much.
For the past few years he’s been quietly developing a second career as a portrait painter. His black and white acrylic studies focus on the musicians he has worked with or been inspired by. Many of the paintings have been snapped-up by their subjects. Others are on sale though his own personal website. Now Gilson is planning to officially launch his career as an artist with a late summer exhibition in Dorset. The show which opens at Hatch Gallery in Christchurch on September 6 and runs until October 4 will hopefully be the first of a series of shows around the country.
Christchurch – home to what is officially the oldest population in England and Wales. Town motto: ‘Where time is pleasant’ – might seem a strange choice of location for a musician who has graduated with honours from the wild-man school of rock. After all his hard-boozing, dope-fuelled antics back in the days when he was with Squeeze got him sacked not once but twice. Gilson, however has been sober for years and is happy to embrace the quiet life these days. He admits that he’s constantly on the road and doesn’t often get a chance to stop and take stock of the English countryside. Dorset is different. He knows the county well not only from the annual gigs he plays with Jools at the Bournemouth International Centre but also because his wife Nicky was born and brought up in Swanage and went to school at the old Boscombe Convent.
The pair met when Nicky was working as Jools Holland’s PA – their romance sparked by “flirting over the typewriter” she says. For the past 20 years home has been a beautiful old Lincolnshire farmhouse lovingly renovated by Gilson as part of his ongoing commitment to sobriety. But family holidays with Nicky have often been spent in Dorset watching their son (also Gilson and now a strapping 17-year-old) playing on Swanage beach. There are also the happy memories of performing summer concerts in the Larmer Tree Gardens. “I love Dorset, it’s a beautiful part of the world so it seems appropriate to launch my exhibition at Hatch Gallery. It’s absolutely perfect, a small independent gallery in a part of the country I love. What could be better?”
Amazingly Gilson is an entirely self-taught artist. He says he discovered that he could draw and paint purely by accident. In a curious twist of fate it was the legacy of his drink and drug addled past that provided the opportunity to discover this latent talent. “You very rarely see an alcoholic with a nice smile and I’m afraid my teeth were in a shocking state,” he explains. “Eventually about five years ago they became so painful and infected that I had to get them fixed.” Gilson flew to Budapest for dental treatment only to discover that the rather pleasant sounding flat that he had booked on-line was little more than a squat. There were long days to fill as his remaining teeth were extracted and he waited for implants. “It was horrible,” he recalls. “There was nothing in the place except a TV showing endless programmes in Hungarian and a radio station that played nothing but European and American pop.
“I was bored and fed up but then I found a pen and some paper and started to sketch. “I really enjoyed it and I couldn’t believe how good the results were. First I copied a picture that was on the wall – a kind of knight on horseback and then I found a photograph on my laptop of our tour manager Steve so I drew that too. It was incredible I had no idea I could draw so well. “At school I had a bit of a reputation for drawing ladies’ breasts in my exercise book. The other kids always thought they were really good but apart from that and trying to copy pictures from a few comics I never paid much attention to art. It certainly never occurred to me that I had any real artistic talent.”
When he got home Nicky and his Jools Holland bandmates were equally surprised and impressed by this hitherto untapped talent. “That was it,” says Gilson. “From that moment on I was sketching the band, the crew, in fact anyone who would stand still for five minutes. I suppose that went on for a couple of years and then someone suggested I try painting. I wasn’t sure. I remember thinking that was a big step. I mean painting, that’s proper art.” Once again Gilson surprised himself, graduating first to brush-pens and then acrylics.
He soon established a signature style with vibrant monochrome portraits. His subjects are drawn mainly from the many people he has worked with.
The day I visited his studio the walls were hung with recent paintings of Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Van Morrison, Roland Gift, Paloma Faith, Amy Winehouse, Chris Rea, Andy Fairweather Low, Paul McCartney and many more. There were stories and anecdotes to go with each one. Just one of the reasons Gilson loves painting
Surveying the works and executing a few finishing touches to Eric Clapton, he told me: “Sketching and painting make me feel really focused. It’s a meditative process. I can lose myself in a painting and just for a while this head of mine, which normally spins like a washing machine, is still. It really is a wonderful thing.”
He gets particular pleasure from painting portraits of the musicians he has worked with. “I love painting faces. There’s a story in a face, real depths to explore. There’s youth in the smile, warmth in the eyes and experience in the wrinkles. There’s stuff going on! But for it to work I have to have known that person, however fleetingly. Give me a photograph of someone I don’t know or haven’t got a clue about and I have no interest in painting them at all.”
