Widely considered one of the finest multi-racial, jazz rock/funk bands to emerge from what became known as ‘the Suffolk scene’ in 1975, Hot Nuts was the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Cliff Leek.

Following the break up of blues-based jazzers Loose Cannon, Framlingham-born Leek put Hot Nuts together after a chance meeting with Gambian hairdresser Edi ‘Eddie’ Momodu.

Having persuaded Momodu to give up his salon, the pair recruited Ipswich-born drummer Chris Meritt and, with the addition of the notoriously violent Terry ‘Plucky’ Timms on bass, the band was up and running.

Heavily influenced by Sun Ra, John McLaughlin, Funkadelic and West Coast psychedelia, Leek and Momodu blazed a trail through jazz-rock that set the standard for what was to come.

Jeff Beck saw the band in their early days…

“Cliff was amazing. He played something like 70 or 80 instruments. Some of them quite badly… and the others not that well. I always thought he spread himself too thin but… to have that versatility… incredible.”

LEEK: We took elements of jazz and bits of rock and roll, you know, and kind of fused them together.

ROLLING STONE: You say you took elements but…you didn’t always take the best bits, did you?

LEEK:  Well, you have to remember that Miles and Jimi and a lot of other people had been taking bits and crossing things over so… by the time we came on the scene there really wasn’t much left. We were picking at the carcass, really. And I think that really comes across on the records.

Their breakthrough debut, ‘A Big Bag… of Hot Nuts,’ was a wild, eclectic fusion of the influences the young Leek had absorbed and was quickly followed up by the game-changing, ‘Slap It!’. Not so much an extraordinary collision of styles and ideas, more a minor traffic accident of impossible time signatures and alarming chord progressions, ‘Slap It!’ was described by one critic as ‘Coltrane and Hendrix beating the shit out of a one-man band.’

After the frankly disappointing ‘Third Nut from the Sun’, tensions developed within the band, with hairdresser Momodu in particular, having not learnt an instrument, growing unhappy, and indeed uncertain, as to his role.

Leek eventually split the band and, after briefly forming The Cliff Leek Preparation, went on to front a series of short-lived outfits, including Clench, Shitting the Atom and Cramped Passage, before a chronic bowel condition forced him to retire from the business.

next…