I've heard all of them live and they can play.

Yes me too, and they can all play rock/blues to a professional standard on stage but all things are relative.
If you think that bands don't use session players then you need to do more research.

Always thought Mark King was a superb guitarist

The Voice of Reason In An Otherwise Mediocre World

Dude. In a live performance you only hear it once. You don't really notice mistakes. In the studio for a number of reasons they might use session players. That doesn't necessarily mean the artist can't play but perhaps not the really tricky bits or sometimes it's just that they are not "available". On live albums most are overdubbed to fix the mistakes and fluff it up a bit. Trust me on this.

Just to clarify. No one has said that Clapton or Hendrix can't play. It's just that there are many much better players that I'm sure you have never heard of.

Edited by Hrolf The Ganger (31 Dec 2015 12.29pm)

Hrolf is right, session musicians often fill in and take lead in recording sessions, for any number of reasons and the process of recording can be very different than playing live.

Also there is a financial element - The art of a good session musician is the ability to get it right first time or second time. Where as people I know who are in bands are terrible 'fiddlers' of music when they're recording their own stuff. From a record companies perspective you don't want a band to be 'fiddling around' with tracks when you're paying for studio time - and a good session musician will hear a song once, be able to play it back perfectly, whilst the writer is still mastering the song.

Of course by the time they go on tour, you've probably mastered the song entirely anyhow.

Hrolf is probably right, that session musicians often rank among the unknown heroes of music, along with producers, and their talent goes unnoticed - if not unrewarded (hell some professional musicians). Sometimes, they even form bands themselves (If I remember rightly Garbage were formed from session musicians and production staff members, and I think Led Zeppelin might have met that way - Page was a session musician firstly).

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Apparently, he played the lead guitar on The Who's I Can't Explain coz Pete couldn't suss it (despite writing it!)

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31 May to 3 June 2017

John McIntosh Arts Centre
London Oratory School
SW6 1RX

with Superfly in the chorus
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