Patrick Campbell-Lyons on Swoop’s World Primetime

Patrick Campbell-Lyons

Our guest Wednesday March 9, 2011 @ 8pm/PST is Patrick Campbell-Lyons a composer and musician who is one half of the cult symphonic-rock band, Nirvana – formed in London in 1967 and still sporadically active in 2006.

Campbell-Lyons was part of the West London music scene from the early 1960s playing in several bands. He was the vocalist and a founder member of a locally-popular R&B band Second Thoughts .

In early 1967 he formed Nirvana with Greek musician Alex Spyropolous. The duo (augmented in the studio and live by a floating line-up of session musicians) created a series of critically-acclaimed baroque, orchestrated albums before disbanding in the early 1970s.

Campbell-Lyons then pursued a career in the music business as an A&R executive and producer – while continuing to occasionally record solo albums including Me & My Friend, The Electric Plough and The Hero I Might Have Been.

In July 2008 he started to write some songs about his life and times in 1960’s London and beyond, something happened which he describes as “crystal karma vision.” He was remembering in great detail those “psychedelic days” of forty years before when he navigated his way on a voyage of music, freedom, adventure and self discovery.

The past had no distance and he was living it all over again. Thrill’s and pill’s rhythm and blues, the legendary Ealing Club, Island Records, Chris Blackwell Nirvana in Tin Pan Alley, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Guy Stevens, Mickie Most, Paris with Salvador Dali, Rio De Janeiro with Jimmy Cliff, The Star Club in Hamburg, Stockholm, Belguim, Tangiers and the “happenings.” When I stopped writing four months later I had a book. He had been there and lived to tell the story!