Musical Chairs

#65 Accidental Genius

The history of music is littered with happy accidents - missed trains, last minute call-ups and good old-fashioned coincidences.

Creation Records supremo Alan McGee famously only saw Oasis at Glasgow's King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in 1993 because he missed an evening train from Queen Street station. Some Might Say it was all part of The Masterplan.

And there's a similar story around Black Sabbath where Vertigo label boss Olaf Wyper headed to Birmingham for a meeting but on the wrong day. With time to kill, he stumbled across Ozzy Osbourne and Co in full flight and quickly signed them.

Two of the most famous duos ever met purely by chance. Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe just happened to be in the same queue at the same time in a London hi-fi shop in 1981. And Daryl Hall and John Oates met in a lift as they escaped a mass brawl between two rival high school gangs.

You may have heard the Rumours, but band leader Mick Fleetwood was only looking for a guitarist when he recruited Lindsey Buckingham in late 1974 - Buckingham insisted that his romantic and musical partner Stevie Nicks was part of the deal and the rest is freeway cruising, multimillion selling history.

They may not have been waitresses in a cocktail bar, but teenagers Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley - neither of them musicians - were approached by The Human League singer Phil Oakey on a nightclub dancefloor in 1980. Both are still in the band. Violent Femmes were discovered by The Pretenders busking in Milwaukee in 1981 - they were invited to support them the very same night. And Bow Wow Wow singer Annabella Lwin was spotted in a London laundrette by a Malcolm McLaren A&R man.

Then there are the clouds with silver linings - Doves only exist because of a studio fire which destroyed all of (original band) Sub Sub's equipment. And Ozzy Osbourne's loss was Slade's gain in 1980. Two days before the Reading Rock Festival, Ozzy decided his new band Blizzard of Ozz weren't ready for a third on the bill slot - an ailing Slade got the call-up, went down a storm and effectively resurrected their career.

The history of heavy rock could have sounded very different too. One of the genre's most iconic instrumentals wasn't intended for Van Halen's debut album, but when producer Ted Templeman overheard guitarist Eddie Van Halen letting rip on Eruption in a studio side room, it was quickly added to the record.

Thin Lizzy's pioneering twin guitar sound was also the result of an accident, as guitarist Scott Gorham explained to the Australian Rock Show: "If I'm gonna be totally honest, the harmony guitar thing was really more of an accident than anything else. We were in the studio, and I think Brian Robertson had gone out just to record a single line. And the engineer had kind of a multi-second tape delay on his guitar. So when we heard it back, it fed back on itself in harmony. I quickly learned the harmony to it, went out and did the harmony line, came back and listened to it, and thought, 'You know, that sounds really cool. I've got another guitar line. Why don't we try that same thing on that line also?' So it just kind of went from there."

All of which goes to show that for all the planning and promotion that powers it, sometimes the music industry is just a law unto itself. Long may that continue.