A few days into the new year and decade, a managerial decision was taken to record Free onstage for a subsequent live album. In-concert recordings were starting to circulate on bootleg vinyl albums, changing hands at large prices. The fact that they were strictly illegal made them more collectable still, but for the artists who didn’t receive any royalties, were annoyed with the poor audio quality and felt their music was being presented in an unfavourable light, they were bad news. In January, Island brought the Pye mobile studio to record part of a show played before an ecstatic crowd at Sunderland, to be kept for release at a suitable time.
Most of the songs captured had appeared on the first two albums, but the Rodgers/Fraser team had constantly been hard at work coming up with new material to keep the live set fresh. Among the most recent additions to the repertoire were four that would feature on the third album, and were gradually beginning to take shape – ‘Mr Big’, ‘Remember’ and ‘Oh I Wept’. The one that was about to transform their standing at a stroke was ‘All Right Now’.
The saga of how the song came about depends on whose version is considered the most accurate. According to Simon, they came offstage after one dreadful gig in the north – probably around the closing few weeks of 1969 – to only the sound of their own footsteps. In the dressing room, it hit them that they needed an instant song that the hordes would readily get up and dance to. A Paul Rodgers interview some years later contradicted this to some extent. As he pointed out, they’d had the sure-fire crowd-pleasing last song in their set for most of their history: namely ‘The Hunter’.
What is beyond doubt is they needed another number with that same instantly infectious spirit, and preferably one they’d written themselves. One of the prerequisites was to have a really catchy memorable chorus, and either Paul or Andy, not surprisingly, started singing ‘All right now, baby it’s all right now’. A couple of chords were added and the song grew from that, with Paul supplying the narrative beginning with a girl being eyed up in the street. The musical inspiration could’ve come from any number of sources – not least the Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ with its ‘But it’s all right now’ chorus phrase, or the feel of ‘Honky Tonk Women’, with its basic chord foundation. Instinctively, they knew they had a winner. At one gig, they played it at the start almost without rehearsing. Towards the end of the show, Paul asked the audience if there were any requests during the short time left, or did they want them to play anything again. Almost as one, the audience called out for another performance of ‘that first one you did’. That, they knew, was enough to confirm that the song was making an immediate impact.
Later in January, they returned to Morgan Studios to begin work on album three. Neither Guy Stevens nor Chris Blackwell were around, and an overworked Andy Johns was present when they arrived at the studio with their gear. He told his assistant he’d been working very long days non-stop for several months and needed a rest, so he left them to it. As he pretended not to be there, they spent a few hours playing and trying things with the assistant, before leaving. Their next destination was Trident Studios with the young new engineer Roy Thomas Baker. This would be their home from home for the next two months until the second week in March. Whenever they had a break in their touring schedule, they returned there to record, eventually putting down seven new numbers. ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’ would long be associated with an amusing memory. It was a son
