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Mike Cooper is a British guitar player, singer and songwriter. Born in 1942 in Reading, Berkshire, UK, Cooper started playing guitar shortly after leaving school in 1958. In 1962, as a singer and harmonica player, he co-founded an R&B band The Blues Committee, with guitarist Paul Manning, guitarist Dicky Reeves and drummer Eddie Page. They played alongside many visiting American blues players in their home town: John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Howling Wolf and others as well as British r&b and blues bands such as Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated.

At the same time Cooper was playing and singing folk and country blues as a solo artist in local folk clubs. In 1966, together with singer/guitarist Derek Hall, they recorded their first record, a 7inch four track independent release, titled "Out Of The Shades". The title referred to the coffee house where Cooper and Hall played regularly during that period.

From the mid until the late sixties Cooper was one of the handful of players who pioneered the acoustic British blues Boom, playing with and alongside other British players such as Jo Ann Kelly, Dave Kelly, Tony McPhee and Ian A. Anderson and others, as well as with visiting blues legends such as Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Bukka White. His 1969 l.p. "Oh Really!?" on Pye Records is widely acclaimed as one of the best acoustic blues albums of the period.

In the early 1970s, working with producer Peter Eden for Pye/Dawn Records, he recorded four solo albums which chronicle, through his own songwriting, a fascinating shift from pure blues through to free jazz. Collaborating with jazz, improvising and avant-garde musicians, in particular South Africans Dudu Pukwana, Harry Miller, Louis Moholo and Mongezi Feza, Zimbabwean composer and arranger Mike Gibbs and British saxophonist Mike Osborne he produced perhaps some of the first and finest rogue folk. For the last of these albums he formed the band Machine Gun Company with Geoff Hawkins on sax, Alan Cook on keyboards, Les Calvert on bass and Tim Richardson on drums. A group that mixed rock, folk and free jazz. Cooper moved to live in Spain briefly before returning to the UK to record a fifth l.p. "Life and Death In Paradise" with Harry Miller, Mike Osbourne and Louise Moholo for Tony Hall's short lived Fresh Air label. He moved to live in Germany, Spain and France shortly after its release. 30 years later these recordings, along with those by Wizz Jones, Roy Harper, The Incredible String Band and Davy Graham have inspired the recent 'New Weird America' or 'Free Folk' explosion in the U.S., with Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke from Sonic Youth and the No-Neck Blues Band confessing to be fans.

Returning to the UK in the late 1970s he began to develop a parallel career and establish himself on the avant-garde and free-improvised music scene, working initially with members of the London Musicians Collective, such as Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, David Toop, Steve Beresford, Max Eastley, Paul Burwell, dancer Jo-Anna Pyne, and vocalist Viv Corringham. With saxophonist Lol Coxhill and drummer Roger Turner, they formed The Recedents, a free improvising trio now in its third decade.

01. Death Letter
02. Bad Luck Blues
03. Maggie Campbell
04. Leadhearted Blues
05. Four Ways
06. Poor Little Annie
07. Tadpole Blues
08. Divinity Blues
09. You're Gonna Be Sorry
10. Electric Chair
11. Crow Jane
12. Paper Rag
13. Saturday Blues