IS there any cure at all, at all, for the Harvest Time Blues? Probably not. Subtitled the Monaghan Jazz & Blues Festival, the 6th Heineken Harvest Time Blues event is not only the best yet, but the best blues line up in Ireland in recent memory. The stellar supporting cast alone - a list that includes Stan Tracey, Guitar Shorty, Jordan Patterson, Chris Smither, Claire Martin, and Phil Guy - would be enough to entice the most discerning blues/jazz fan to Monaghan town. Yet this year there is a bigger and, perhaps, better reason to visit - Peter Green.
Green is a white blues practitioner of the highest quality - considered by many to be at least as expressive and distinctive as Eric Clapton - but you'd be forgiven if you had thought he was a name from the past, because to all intents and purposes he was. He left the hugely successful blues based Fleetwood Mac in 1970, musical differences combining in no small part with his overuse of psychoactive drugs. From then on, he has lived an intermittently reclusive life, recording irregular low key albums between bouts of mental instability. Mick Fleetwood, a friend then and now, later recalled: "Pete should never have taken acid. He was charming, amusing, a wonderful person, but off he went and never came back."
Until now, that is. The band that Peter Green brings to Monaghan, The Splinter Group, is generally recognised as his most realistic stab at continuing creativity since those early Fleetwood Mac days. Nostalgists will have their dreams come true with several classic Mac songs. The rest of us will wait and see if the spark is still there.