Director – Michael Treen – 2023 – UK – Cert. 12a – 90m
***
A look at legendary pianist Nicky Hopkins who played with numerous bands and on numerous records – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 21st
Nicky Hopkins may not exactly be a household name, but anyone who paid attention to credits on rock music albums from the early 1960s through to the early 1990s is likely to have heard of him. Trained as a classical pianist at the Royal Academy of Music, he simultaneously discovered rock and roll and began playing in bands at the start of the sixties as a 16-year-old. The right place at the right time. Up and coming British bands of the early 1960s like The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and The Who – essentially bands consisting of guitars and drums – got him playing piano on their albums to fill out the sound. He was playing with Jeff Beck around the time of the Truth album, which took him to the US, where he became based for the rest of his life, occasionally returning to the UK to work on specific albums.
Narrated by Bob Harris, formerly of BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, this music documentary follows the obvious format of, film a lot of interviews with people who know the subject and intersperse footage of the musician concerned playing live or in recording sessions to break the interviews up a bit. It’s basically a chronology of Hopkins’ career, which bands or musicians he played with and when and on which album, running from the early 1960s up to his untimely death in 1994.
Some of his featured career highlights include She’s a Rainbow (The Rolling Stones, Their Satanic Majesties Request), Revolution (The Beatles) and Jealous Guy (John Lennon, Imagine). The content of a film of this nature is inevitably dictated, at least in part, by what material is available and how possible or otherwise it is to licence that material. I personally was sorry there was very little included here about The Who, as Hopkins’ terrific work on their album Who’s Next is the work of his with which I’m most familiar.
Archive interview of Hopkins himself is deployed, complemented by an impressive array of interviews with musicians or others who knew him which were conducted specifically for this film, among them Bill Wyman, Keith Richards, Chuck Leavell (all of The Rolling Stones), Harry Shearer (of spoof band Spinal Tap), producer Glyn Johns, and top session drummer Jim Keltner, all of whom get a fair bit of screen time. Others featured to a lesser degree include Mick Jagger (the Rolling Stones), Dave Davies (The Kinks), Nils Lofgren, Graham Parker and Helen O’Hara (from Dexy’s Midnight Runners).
Actual footage of Hopkins playing music is thinner on the ground than you might expect, and there is some great footage which is rather irritatingly edited in such a way that interview subjects talk over the top of it. It’s possible this is contractual, and that only a certain amount of the recordings are allowed to be shown. Nonetheless, it is very annoying when, for example, you’re watching footage of the recording of John Lennon’s Imagine album and the words of interviewees are drowning out the music. You want to listen to the music, then hear the interviewees, but not both at once. (A smart solution would be to release a DVD or Blu-ray where you can switch between music track, verbal track or complete track: Canadian and US DVDs have been released, although I have no idea if they include this feature. And this wouldn’t help in terms of a cinema screening anyway.)
The film touches on Hopkins’ health problems, with Sarah Sleet (CEO of Crohn’s & Colitis UK) on hand to explain something about Crohn’s disease, of which Nicky was a lifelong sufferer and which put him out of action as a musician from time to time. (I personally would have liked to have heard a lot more about this disease, and Hopkins’ struggle with it.)
The documentary’s greatest asset turns out, unexpectedly, to be interview footage with Hopkins’ surviving wife Moira. She’s actually his second wife: his first wife and he both went into rehab following problems with drugs and alcohol abuse, but where he stuck to the programme afterwards, she did not, and they ended up going their separate ways. Moira, from what you can tell, was exactly what Nicky needed, and clearly adored him.
The first time Moira met Nicky, her impression was of a kindly man – something borne out by many of the interviews here – and she said to a friend that if she was ever to marry anyone, it would be someone like that. She is clearly grateful for the years of marriage they had together. She is also full of surprising insights: for example, that after Nicky was auditioned and turned down for Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles band Wings, that it might have been down to Paul’s then wife Linda’s insecurity as the band’s keyboard player.
If you know nothing about Hopkins, the whole thing provides a helpful overview of his career and musical contribution.
The film’s producer / director Mike Treen sadly passed in April 2025.
The Session Man is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, November 21st.
Trailer: