Patto

The Arc of Patto

The pivots — what forced Patto to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Vertigo Spiral

   Between 1970 and 1971, the band cut Patto and Hold Your Fire as four guys playing live off the floor with zero studio trickery. Halsall was inventing whole-tone legato shredding before anyone had a name for it, while Mike Patto battered his vocal cords over intricate, rapid-fire arrangements. The records sounded like a drunken bar brawl colliding with a conservatory recital. Nobody bought them, but the sheer velocity captured on those early sides remains a benchmark for raw, unvarnished British musicianship.

2. 02

   The Boozy Unraveling

   By 1972's Roll 'em Smoke 'em Put Another Line Out, the band was visibly fracturing under industry apathy and sheer exhaustion. They leaned hard into pub humor, loose boogie, and self-deprecating parody to mask the frustration of playing empty rooms. Halsall started taking up keyboards and piano as much as guitar, which stripped away some of the lightning attack that defined their early sets. The chops were still lethal when they bothered to show them, but the record was a desperate, funny, and bittersweet goodbye note.

3. 03

   The Lost Shelved Epilogue

   In 1973 they went in to record Monkey's Bum, only for Halsall to walk out before the sessions wrapped. Mike Patto tried to salvage the material by handling guitar parts himself, leaving the tapes unfinished and completely unreleased at the time. Island saw no commercial angle and tossed it in the vault until it finally surfaced decades later in 2002. It documents a brilliant group running on fumes, caught in amber right at the point of total collapse.

Influences

• Django Reinhardt — Ollie Halsall constantly cited Django as his primary guitar hero and structural guide. You hear it in the acoustic runs and the fluid, hyper-fast arpeggio fingerings all over Hold Your Fire. It made his rock playing swing instead of just stomp.
• John Coltrane — The band openly lifted the sheets-of-sound harmonic density and modal approach from mid-sixties Coltrane records. Halsall transposed sax lines directly onto the fretboard, trading standard blues-box licks for blistering whole-tone runs on songs like 'Hold Your Fire.' Mike Patto approached singing with that same relentless, unhinged physical attack.
• Ray Charles — Mike Patto built his entire vocal identity on the gritty, raspy shouting style of Charles's late fifties Atlantic sides. You can hear that strained, soul-drenched gravel on the debut's 'The Man.' It kept the band rooted in earthy rhythm and blues no matter how dizzying the time signatures got.
• The Beatles — Before forming Patto, the core lineup cut their teeth in Timebox playing tightly arranged 1960s pop indebted to the McCartney school of melody. You hear those vocal harmonies and quirky English pop chord movements creeping through the cracks on 'Singing the Blues on Reds.' Beneath the fusion muscle, they were always guys who understood concise melodic songwriting.
• Chuck Berry — Halsey's drum patterns and the band's underlying rhythm section drew straight from classic American rock and roll grooves. Even when Halsall went into orbit, the beat on tracks like 'San Antone' stayed locked in a barroom shuffle. It kept their most eccentric work sounding like real rock music instead of sterile jazz theory.