Sharks
Rainbow Theatre
London, UK 3/31/73

Andy Fraser- bass, keyboards, b-vox
Snips-lead vocals
Chris Spedding- guitar
Marty Simon: drums

Source/Lineage: reseed of a BBC In Concert broadcast recorded on unknown equipment> Audacity> TLH > DIME


1-Snakes and Swallowtails 5:19
2-BBC show break 0:19
3-Follow Me 3:15
4-BBC again 0:12
5-Old Jelly Roll 3:44
6-BBC band intros 0:27
7-Colours 3:39
8-BBC final show break 0:33
9-World Park Junkies 3:34


This short Sharks set is being seeded now to honor a recent request to bring it back. It last ran in tribute to bassist Andy Fraser, when he passed away in 2015. It had originally been up here via chappo in 2011, and I believe that's when and how I got a copy. Thanks to the original taper (from long ago) and to chappo.
I started playing bass in about 1970, and Andy Fraser was "my guy". I loved Free, and even though Chris Squire, Dave Pegg, Clive Chaman, Alan Spenner, and John Wetton were all contenders for the "my guy" title by the time Sharks were born, I was still happy to hear where Andy might go after he'd left Free.
This was Andy's initial post-Free project, and he he only stayed with for one album, First Water. Fellow Free members Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke were on to Bad Company, and Paul Kossoff was trying to get it together again in Back Street Crawler.
Sharks seemed promising enough through including Chris Spedding, who I knew from Jack Bruce albums. I now realize he had also worked with early versions of Ian Carr's Nucleus. Despite Spedding's leanings in those progressive directions, and Andy's adventurous and creative bass playing, Sharks was very much a "meat and potatoes" rock band with a heavy drummer and a singer who sounded like a more raw version of Spooky Tooth's Mike Harrison. Andy Fraser had increasingly appeared on piano on the later Free albums, and that carried over into Sharks. He's on piano on 2 of the 5 songs here.
As to Andy's tenure in the band, there was a "Shark-mobile" (think Bat-mobile, but with a shark motif), and that car was involved in an accident in which Andy got hurt seriously enough to bow out of the band. Sharks soldiered on to release a 2nd album with bassist Busta Cherry Jones, and work on a 3rd with him prior to folding. I actually saw the Busta Cherry Sharks version opening for Gentle Giant in the NYC area in 74 or 75.
There are some changes in this share from this show's last run. First of all, I now know of the dimebot archive which allows me to credit chappo, and to share his info that this came from a BBC program called Golder's Green, and a suggestion that the Hippodrome, and not The Rainbow may have been the venue. Secondly, I now routinely use Audacity for various things in my shares. In this case, I've tracked this differently from 2015 by separating out the various BBC DJ show breaks. EQ and Mastering tools were also used to spruce this up to the extent you'll hear in the comments below.
Finally, chappo had mentioned a Chris Spedding website in his notes. I took a look at that today, and found that Cherry Red/Esoteric are actually releasing a 3 disc Sharks set in January 2025. It will include the 2 albums they released, along with music for a 3rd that was actually produced by John Entwhistle. There will be a few live things included, but not this particular BBC Golder's Green set.