It's life in the fast lane for Illegal Eagle Phil
SUPPORT slots do not come easy for The Illegal Eagles.
With a two-hour show packed with original Eagles hits, most bands wouldn’t fancy having them as support, drummer and founder-member Phil Aldridge explained.
And there is another reason.
"No matter who we are supporting, we always have better songs than they have!" he declared.
It’s hard to argue with the sheer singalongability of hits such as Hotel California, Take It Easy, Desperado, Life in the Fast Lane, Take it to the Limit and Lyin’ Eyes.
But Phil revealed that the tribute act very nearly didn’t happen after an early wobble about the idea shortly after seeing The Eagles in Wembley in 1994 after their 14-year break.
Phil said: "We didn’t know if they were going to last after that or whether it was going to be a one-off.
"But my initial feeling was that they were so brilliant, so incredible, that I wouldn’t be able to get anybody to do it! So I put it on hold for a little while — and then decided not to put a show together at all."
But hearing a bad performance of Lyin’ Eyes changed his mind, he revealed.
"Among the things I was doing at the time was playing with a blues band in Essex and one night we were playing in this pub when a guy got up and asked ‘Can I do Lying Eyes?’
"I thought ‘Here we go!’ cos it’s always awful in that situation.
"And sure enough, he put in a dreadful rendition.
"But the audience went mental and loved it!
"And at that point, I immediately got back on the phone to all the musicians I’d already met and said ‘We’re off!’.
The Illegal Eagles are still going strong some 17 years later, and when he’s not on the road with the band, Phil is working on the first-ever UK tribute show, The Carpenters Story, as well as running his own recording centre in Lincolnshire, Tabby Road Studios.
It’s all a long way for Phil’s ambitions when he set out as a keen student at Trinity College of Music in London for a career in music.
"I only ever went to college because I wanted to be Ringo Starr," he laughed.
"But in those days you couldn’t go to a proper music college and study drums — you had to do percussion. But they didn’t even take THAT that seriously, so you had to do piano first and join it with percussion.
"So that’s what I did. By the time I finished, I liked the orchestral world equally, but as I was just coming to the end of the course, a professor of mine said: ‘Take whatever job comes up first’. There were apparently 47 professional orchestra positions for percussion and there is never more than one a year that becomes available.
"So about three days later I passed an audition for a pop group called Whisky Mac and we had a six nights a week residency for over a year — which is unheard of nowadays — in Mecca clubs in what was the height of the disco season, so I was playing disco music for the first year."
Wanting to learn to arrange music and further his drum tuition, Phil headed for America.
"I went to a jazz college at Berklee — and that was an incredible experience. Musicians of the highest order were playing in bars — Dizzy Gillespie’s backing band were playing in pubs because Dizzy was having a holiday. Every night of the week there was incredible music."
Back in the UK, Phil started working as a "fixer" and musical director for shows with American soul legends including Ben E. King, co-composer and singer of Stand By Me, who died recently.
Phil remembered: "He was a fantastic guy, one of the kindest men that I ever worked with. I’ve had some real hard people to work with! But he was one of the gentlemen."
And when Phil saw The Supremes show come over — with young, stand-in singers singing a tribute to the music — he got his first idea to create The Carpenters’ Story.
"With the Illegal Eagles I just wanted to get away from the girl thing and do something that was just guys and guitars where I could still use my skills as an arranger," he explained.
"We did 47 vocal rehearsals before we even got the guitars out because the vocals are the thing.
"What people want is to hear the single they bought in the first place. We have the same two-hour core and we tend to get complaints if we miss any of them out! The Eagles do shorter tours so they can do shows of three hours 10 minutes.
"We can’t do that because we’re doing more shows. We’d have no voices left!"
On August 22nd, Phil sees the eighth Tabbyfest and he’ll be appearing in both the Illegal Eagles and The Carpenters’ Story, though there will also be a younger Aldridge on the line-up — Phil’s eight-year-old son Christian also seems to share his dad’s drummer dream!
• The Illegal Eagles appear at The Ironworks, Inverness, on Friday 15th May.
