Mike Cooper

Though Mike Cooper, an influential British guitarist, earns primary recognition as a folk-blues performer and singer/songwriter, the breadth of his output resists straightforward categorization. He also stands out as a celebrated improviser and electronic musician. Beyond these activities, he produces sound installations and radio art, works as a videographer, journalist, and music historian, and composes scores for silent films.

Born in Reading, England, in 1942, Cooper took up the guitar at age sixteen. Early inspiration from New Orleans and Dixieland jazz led him to perform in skiffle groups throughout the late 1950s. A pivotal shift occurred in 1961 after he witnessed Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee at Reading’s town hall and later saw James Cotton alongside Chris Barber at a local music festival. These encounters prompted him to add harmonica to his guitar playing.

He co-founded the Blues Committee, an R&B ensemble modeled on the approach of Alexis Korner. At the same time, he pursued folk-blues as a solo act in folk clubs. His debut studio session yielded the independently released four-track EP Out of the Shades, recorded with guitarist Derek Hall and named after a key Reading folk club. Fellow performers at that venue included John Renbourn, Bert Jansch, Al Stewart, and Davy Graham. Cooper soon began supporting numerous touring American blues artists as well as prominent British figures of the period. In 1967 he met fellow folk-blues musician Ian A. Anderson; together they cut three four-track EPs for the SayDisc label. The pair later compiled those tracks with additional material into the album The Inverted World, assembled in early 1968 yet not issued until 1970. By then Cooper’s technique had advanced markedly, absorbing a range of Delta and country approaches while incorporating bottleneck slide and lap steel. His travels across England brought encounters with British players such as Michael Chapman, John Martyn, Ralph McTell, and Roy Harper, alongside American visitors including Stefan Grossman, Dave Van Ronk, and “Spider” John Koerner.

National acclaim secured a contract with Pye Records in 1969, resulting that year in Oh Really!?, the first of five key albums issued on the label and its Dawn and Fresh Air imprints; the record appeared in November. Even as folk-blues retained audiences, Cooper and many contemporaries expanded their scope while retaining the roots traditions that had shaped them. Do I Know You? followed on Dawn in 1970 and stands apart for its integration of field recordings alongside the jazz bass work of South African expatriate Harry Miller. That collaboration broadened Cooper’s thinking about improvisation, ideas first applied on Trout Steel, one of his most lasting and influential releases. Recorded and issued in 1970, the album featured Miller, Grossman, and musicians from Mike Westbrook’s band, with pianist John Taylor contributing to one track. Cooper’s jazz explorations did not entail abandoning blues; instead, he moved fluidly across genre boundaries and frequently merged them.

Intended as a double album titled Places I Know, the project was planned to juxtapose his folk material with an improvisational jazz-rock side. Dawn released it as a single album in 1971 under the name Mike Cooper & the Machine Gun Co. (named after Peter Brötzmann’s group) plus Michael Gibbs. The companion album, credited to The Machine Gun Company with Mike Cooper, appeared a year and a half later. His final session for the label group, issued under the Fresh Air imprint as Life & Death in Paradise in 1974, included another South African expatriate, Louis Moholo, on drums. Apart from the live Country Blues Guitar Festival featuring Cooper, Grossman, Son House, and Sam Mitchell, no further recordings from that decade emerged. Cooper remained active, however, performing live, improvising in ensembles, collaborating with other artists, and touring Europe. The live album ’Ave They Started Yet, drawn from a continuous four-and-a-half-hour performance with dancer Joanna Pyne, appeared on Matchless in 1981 and typified an era in which he alternated country blues projects with more experimental jazz outings, among them Johnny Rondo Duo Plus Mike Cooper alongside Lol Coxhill and Dave Holland, and The Continuous Preaching Blues with Anderson. The era’s landmark release was the 1987 10" LP Aveklei Uptowns Hawaiians, recorded with French slide guitarist Cyrille Lefebvre and featuring Coxhill, Steve Beresford, and Max Eastley; the set reflected Cooper’s deepening engagement with Polynesian music, an interest that would shape his playing and writing for decades, especially regarding slack key guitar styles.

During the 1990s Cooper immersed himself further in Hawaiian music. The duo album Avant Roots with Viv Dogan Corringham appeared in 1993, followed by the ensemble project Island Songs in 1996. The fusion of Polynesian elements, blues, and avant-garde approaches placed him in a singular position, culminating in the genre he termed ambient electronic exotica. This aesthetic surfaced on the acclaimed Rayon Hula, released in 2004, which converted the floral patterns of aloha shirts—his characteristic attire—into looped samples of famed Hawaiian vibraphone player Arthur Lyman to create a dynamic avant form of exotica, and continued on later recordings such as the large-band Beach Crossings/Pacific Footprints in 2006 and Oceanic Feeling-Like in 2008 with Chris Abrahams.

Improvisations and songs, some blues-inflected, appeared on the limited-edition Radio Paradise: Mike Cooper in Beirut in 2011 and the 2013 CD-R Right (H)ear Side by Side, which set his electronics and slide guitar against Yan-Chiu Leung’s traditional sheng playing. That same year, White Shadows in the South Seas, issued on Lawrence English’s Room40 label, offered a fully solo realization of his ambient electronic exotica. It was followed by the global and electronic experimentalism of New Globe Notes in 2014, accompanied by liner notes from David Toop. In June of that year, Paradise of Bachelors released deluxe, remastered, and artist-sanctioned editions of Trout Steel and the recombined Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. as originally conceived. These were succeeded a week later by Cantos de Lisboa, a duet recording with guitarist Steve Gunn captured in Lisbon at Rafael Toral’s studio and released on RVNG Intl as part of its Frkwys series. In 2015 the Italian label Backwards issued Light on a Wall, a limited LP drawn from a live session Cooper recorded for Radio Beirut in Lebanon. He returned to Room40 later that year with Fratello Mare, another collection of experimental exotica, and the following year Discrepant reissued the 1999 Hipshot CD-R Kiribati on vinyl LP. Cooper released a vinyl edition of the limited-edition 2010 CD-R Blue Guitar in 2017, the same year Discrepant issued a vinyl LP version of the Hipshot CD-R Reluctant Swimmer/Virtual Surfer. A comparable vinyl reissue of Rayon Hula arrived in 2019 to mark the album’s fifteenth anniversary.