Steve Miller Band

One of America's most reliable and enduringly popular rock acts, the Steve Miller Band have sustained a loyal following over four decades, although they'll always be most affectionately associated with the classic 1973 track and album, The Joker. Steve Miller grew up in a musical family; his mother was a singer and his father was a friend of the seminal guitarist Les Paul, who gave Steve lessons in his early years. His parents' friends included jazz great Charles Mingus and blues icon T-Bone Walker and Miller absorbed a wide variety of musical styles before forming his first band, The Marksmen, when he was only 12. At college in Madison, Wisconsin, heformed a new band The Ardells that included Boz Scaggs and Miller eventually gravitated to the buoyant blues scene in Chicago, forming the Goldberg-Miller Blues Band with keyboard player Barry Goldberg. He then moved to San Francisco and formed the Steve Miller Band who backed Chuck Berry and released their first blues-psychedelia album Children Of The Future in 1968. A series of solid rock albums followed before they hit gold with The Joker - a Number 1 in both the US and UK - as they moved in a poppier direction. They never repeated the success but, despite constant personnel changes, continued to be a compelling live act, and in 2010 released a brand new album, Bingo!