ROCKING ROGER is still busting out

With a music career that’s lasted more than 50 years Roger James is still rocking on, as David Clayton reports.

- David Clayton

I HAVE A vivid, if not embarrassing, a memory of my days as a mobile disco DJ. We were supporting a band called Crow around several East Anglian venues in 1972 and a crowd had piled into Wells Town Hall – a nice enough venue but with a stage built of trestle tables.

Fine for the band, who were brilliant and very loud, lousy for me as any movement on the makeshift platform bounced the needles out of the record grooves. Thank goodness they’d really come to see the band because I was hopeless. No sooner had a record started than it bounced straight to the end!

Crow’s frontman then was Roger James, who remarkably is still fronting a band to this day. Over the years he’s never compromised his love of loud, crowd-pleasing rock and blues. The band he fronts now is called Buster James and, in his early 70s, Roger shows no signs of giving up.

A decade before I worked with him, he was playing with a group called The Good Goods in Gloucestershire, where he was born.

“I started singing with them when I was 16,” he recalls. And they must have been good: “We had a chance to tour with Chuck Berry when I was 17.”

Roger remembers they rehearsed a lot and, despite not turning fully professional, they traveled all over the country fitting in gigs between work.