Carl Dixon: Strange Way To Live

Outa hand.

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The singer and guitarist with Canadian rockers Coney Hatch, Carl Dixon should not be around to tell his tale, having seriously mangled himself in a car crash in 2008 that left him in a coma.

But his survival instincts proved stronger than his attempts to jeopardise his own recovery by getting out of bed despite two broken legs and still attached to numerous tubes. It’s a recurring theme to Dixon’s story.

There’s no sex (he married young), no drugs (he didn’t do them), but plenty of rock’n’roll as he climbs the ladder with Coney Hatch in the early 80s before they were “unprioritised” by their record company. Then he tries to breathe new life into the Guess Who and April Wine with mixed results.

He’s a good songwriter and frontman, but his blind ambition is fraught with self-inflicted wounds, even before he starts driving on the wrong side of the road./o:p

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Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.