ANDY Fairweather Low is playing guitar onstage with Eric Clapton when he looks up and thinks, "How did I get here?" The sometime heart-throb singer with chart toppers Amen Corner, Fairweather Low is the fan who ended up getting the gig with someone he idolised, not once but many times. Bill Wyman, George Harrison, Emmylou Harris, Stevie Nicks, David Crosby, Van Morrison – the list goes on.

A wonderfully engaging, self-effacing storyteller, he has a palpable enthusiasm for the music that shaped him and this makes him the ideal candidate to anchor the Chuck Berry tribute that kicks off the Southern Fried 2017 festival of Americana in Perth this weekend.

“Chuck Berry,” he says in a way that somehow captures both the awe and the wariness that the late poet of rock ‘n’ roll inspires in him. “I can’t express in words the effect hearing that opening guitar line to Johnny B Goode for the first time had on me. Or Memphis Tennessee – I was in the kitchen when that came on the radio and I was playing guitar myself by then but I was thinking, what is this? Who’s doing what? It was just magical, and it still is.”

Fairweather Low had been moved to learn to play guitar after seeing the Rolling Stones in his hometown, Cardiff, in 1964. His powers of recall are sharp, although he’s since had his memory of their opening number being their take on Berry’s I’m Talkin’ About You confirmed by the arch historian Bill Wyman.

The Stones’ original bassist kept everything from his years with the band and years later, with Fairweather Low by this time playing with Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, he showed Fairweather Low the scrap of paper that had the Cardiff gig’s set-list scribbled on it. Playing Route 66, the Bobby Troup classic, which the Stones learned from Berry, onstage with Wyman is another memory that brings out the fan in Fairweather Low.

When he put Amen Corner together, Fairweather Low hired Neil Jones and Clive Taylor, the guitarist and bassist from another Cardiff group, the Dekkas, and promptly did himself out of a job. He was looking for guys who could produce the kind of grooves that Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn were creating for Otis Redding and Booker T, and Jones and Taylor had those covered. So Fairweather Low “just sang” – a considerable understatement, bearing in mind his version of Gin House Blues from those days.

For ten years, with Amen Corner, then Fairweather and as a solo artist, Fairweather Low enjoyed chart success. Then in 1978, with punk rock changing the industry, his career fell apart. A seven album deal with Warner Brothers was cancelled after one album and he became, as he says, "available for hire".

“Glyn Jones, the Eagles-Dylan – you name them – producer who had produced three of my albums, put people on to me,” he says. “The funny thing is, people refer to me as a session musician. I’m not. A session guitarist has to be able to play anything and everything. I can’t do that. I can only be me.”

And with that we’re off on tales of how Fairweather Low toured with former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters for twenty-four years, often to his bandmates’ doubts about him being hired to “play like that”. Of Eric Clapton telling Fairweather Low to forget about the time he saw Clapton in Cardiff and just have a normal conversation. Of George Harrison announcing during a band dinner that Fairweather Low had been the seventh choice for the tour, with the seventh choice sitting crestfallen until his favourite Beatle added: “But you were the right choice.” And of the sessions with guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani where, from three feet away, Fairweather Low was hearing guitar lines that happened faster than he could think but the simple but effective rhythm parts he was hired to provide were delivered first take (“I just had to go ‘boom’ and I could manage that!”).

For the Southern Fried Chuck Berry tribute, festival director Andy Shearer has pitched Fairweather Low’s band, Hi Riders in with a cast including Nova Scotian soul star Cyndi Cain, Kentucky country singer Angaleena Presley, Tennessean country blues and gospel wonder Amethyst Kiah and British veterans, former Average White Band singer Hamish Stuart and Brummie rocker Steve Gibbons.

“There are certain songs, all in that familiar rhythm, that have to be included,” he says. “But there’s more to Chuck Berry than that signature groove of his that he seemed able to reproduce in limitless variations. He was like Hank Williams in the way he could write conversational lyrics, just tell you something and at the same time create fantastic images. Promised Land isn’t Shakespeare, but it is poetry, and yes, his attitudes were, well, they were his attitudes – but his guitar sound, what he created with those big hands, his guitar and an amp, is uppermost in what I do to this day.”

Rock ‘n’ Roll Music: The Songs of Chuck Berry is at Perth Concert Hall tomorrow.