Home   News   Article

Obituary: John George Sutherland





John 'Fats' Sutherland led a succession of ground-breaking blues-inspired bands for more than 40 years.
John 'Fats' Sutherland led a succession of ground-breaking blues-inspired bands for more than 40 years.

JOHN Sutherland, who died in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary on December 8, two days after a sudden heart attack at his Dunnet Head Lighthouse Cottages home, was the most influential electric blues and rock guitarist that the Highlands has produced.

Known by the stage names “Johnny Fats”, or simply “J. Fats”, Sutherland led a succession of ground-breaking blues-inspired bands on stage in England, Europe and North America as well as in his native Scotland for over 40 years.

In the early 1990s, he converted redundant (on automation) the lighthouse keepers’ cottages at Dunnet Head into a comfortable home for his family and a recording studio with live “house” performance space attracting, amongst others, internationally-renowned blues, rock and folk musicians.

The QPQ Productions facility now has 64-track capability and his 31-year-old musician son, Isaac, is its production manager.

A multi-instrumentalist and songwriter with a powerful on-stage voice, Sutherland had a deserved Scotland-wide reputation as an outstanding mentor, facilitator and instructor to successive generations of young musicians, some of whom have since sustained lengthy careers.

Tributes have poured in from many musicians, including Scots Benny Gallagher (of Gallagher & Lyle), triple UK 1980s top 20 singer Jim Diamond ,and from America players Paul Barrere and Fred Tackett, of seminal US band Little Feat, who played at a Dunnet Head house party with Johnny and Isaac in 2008 in the lighthouse’s former engine room.

Sutherland was brought up at the Glebe housing estate in Thurso. Neighbour and Stroma Island native the late Ian Simpson, a World War Two Royal Navyman and Scrabster-based fishing-boat skipper, introduced the young schoolboy to guitar. Simpson had bought the instrument while ashore in Canada to cheer himself up during dangerous North Atlantic crossings on merchant-ship convoy escort duties.

On leaving Thurso High, young Sutherland embarked on a short-lived scientific career at Dounreay, leaving to embark on a lifetime’s professional music career.

Sutherland, who took his music seriously throughout his life, was an eager, inquisitive learner of electric-guitar techniques. As leader of local 1960s backing groups such as The Federals and Aktual Fakts, he picked up playing tips from aces such as Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.

His forefathers had been forced to quit Assynt during the 19th-century Highland Clearances so he took an early semi-pro band to Lochinver to give teenagers in his ancestral west Sutherland homeland their first taste of live beat music.

Keeping music live became a lifelong passion; he felt empathy for American black bluesmen descended from servitude, a background which he considered to resemble the lot of pre-emancipation Highland crofters, liable to be evicted on a whim.

By the mid-1960s his horizons had broadened and he took his playing to Aberdeen and Edinburgh and then, with mainly young North musicians whom he often had helped to train, to Europe – first Switzerland and then on a US bases tour of Germany.

There he accepted an invitation from a soon-to-be demobbed musician GI to come and join his New England-based rock-band. After six months, Uncle Sam bid him farewell, so he hot-tailed it over the border to Canada.

The late 1960s saw a highlight of his young professional career when he played on stage with Arlo Guthrie, son of the legendary American folkster Woody Guthrie.

It was while living in Quebec that he met a young Caroline Lockerbie, who shared his birthday. She kept in touch as Sutherland married primary school teacher Christine and brought up their young family of three in Caithness – Isaac, Edward and daughter Christina.

As Church of Scotland minister the Rev Dr Lockerbie, of St Christopher’s Kirk, Craigentinny, Edinburgh, she officiated at his well-attended funeral service on December 15 at Ormlie Lodge Service Rooms in Thurso, talking about his “spirituality, honesty and passion” before his interment at the town’s cemetery.

She acceded to his “no hymns” request and the many mourners were treated to recordings of two of John’s compositions. Christina delivered an appropriate poem, while Isaac talked about his loving father being “passionate”, not only about music but the causes he believed in.

In the mid-1970s, Sutherland teamed up with tin-whistle player the late Bobby Murray, then a pensioner, with John playing a variety of instruments on their recordings.

They played the round of Scottish folk festivals as a duo. More recently he recorded his boyhood mentor’s brother, Stroma’s owner 80-year-old Jimmy Simpson, playing guitar and singing the songs of his youth as performed in the pre-TV era around peat fires in homes of the now uninhabited island.

Sutherland had been a long-term musical collaborator with Martin Stephenson, the County Durham-born former The Daintees leader. He and multi-instrumentalist son Isaac recorded several albums at Dunnet Head with Stephenson.

Sutherland was a true “wizard of the fretboard” on his beloved Gibson instrument.

As a finale of his shows in the 1960s and 1970s he played it first behind his head and then with his teeth, the latter a feat few, if any, British players could match.

At one festive-season late 1960s show at Stornoway, a girl in the audience stood first entranced, then leapt upwards shouting “Jimi Hendrix”, before collapsing in a cold faint!

Sutherland campaigned for the legalisation of cannabis for most of his adult life.

This, and cultivating herbal plants, sometimes brought him in conflict with authority and, on occasions, actual incarceration.

In the mid-1990s, High Court judge Lord Maclean passed sentence, suspended for two years, for growing marijuana plants.

Later the high court judge enquired what he’d been doing with his life during the interval. Sutherland said that he’d written 13 new songs for his forthcoming album, without revealing the CD included his numbers “Free the Weed” and “Smoke up the Ganja”.

In the run-up to the general election of 2005, BBC 2 TV’s front man Jeremy Vine embarked on an end-to-end odyssey to take the political pulse of Britain, setting off from John O’Groats and travelling to Land’s End via Dunnet Head.

Sutherland delivered the closest to a nationwide TV party political broadcast that the Legalise Cannabis Campaign has ever had.

He strongly believed that smoking spliffs was far less harmful than the alcohol abuse that he observed wrecking so many Highland lives and families.

But he actively campaiged against the spread northwards of the addictive drug, heroin, which he saw as an even more evil curse, certain to be accompanied by an addicts’ crime wave of theft and robbery.

At the funeral, when the minister described Sutherland as “a larger-than-life character”, most of the congregation would have agreed with her.

Sutherland always asked to be judged by his music, saying that members of the public could “take it or leave it”.

His tastes and styles were broad, including jazz, country, Scottish as well as rock and blues.

As well as his family, memories of his legendary lifestyle status and stage shows, plus the enhanced abilities of so many musicians whose skills he honed, Sutherland leaves behind a lengthy back catalogue of his recorded material. At least one memorial concert is planned.

B.M.


Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.


This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies - Learn More