Tiger Tiger

CD reissue. The 1960s were a particularly strange time in popular music. At the beginning of the '60s, for example, pop songs were usually provided to the artist by their management, having been written to order by professionals. Quite often, the bands didn't play on their records either, relying on the skills of session musicians. By the end of the decade, all this had changed. Artists were supposed to write their own material (which some of them actually did) and play on their own recordings. This, of course, led to some of the most talented musicians in Britain deciding to look toward a career move. The two most famous that come to mind are Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones of Led Zepplin, but what of the others? Big Jim Sullivan is undoubtedly one of the legendary guitarists in British music, who, according to those in the know, performed on a round 750 starting singles over his career, including 54 UK #1s from acts as diverse as the Walker Brothers, the Small Faces and John Barry's 'James Bond Theme'. He was referred to as 'Big Jim' because of his size, and another session guitarist working in the same places at the same time - Jimmy Page - was referred to as 'Little Jim'. In the mid-1970s, when Sullivan was in his mid-30s, he began to tire of session work and formed this band alongside vocalist Nicky Moore, one of the most important early heavy metal singers. The band made three records, of which this is the first, before splitting in 1976. When he died in 2012, his obituary in The Guardian singled out the record with Tiger as a 'career highlight' for Big Jim Sullivan.