James George Tomkins (14 February 1941 – 2 October 2012), known professionally as Big Jim Sullivan, was an English musician whose career started in 1958. He was best known as a session guitarist. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was one of the most in-demand studio musicians in the UK, and performed on around 750 charting singles over his career, including 54 UK number one hits.
Sullivan was born in Uxbridge, West London. He attended Woodfield Secondary School in Cranford, Middlesex. At the age of 14, he began learning the guitar and gravitated towards the Soho haunts of skiffle and rock'n'roll and within two years had turned professional. He played with Sid Gilbert and the Clay County Boys, a Western swing group, Johnny Duncan's Blue Grass Boys, Vince Taylor & the Playboys, Janice Peters & the Playboys, and the Vince Eager Band. Sullivan gave guitar lessons to near-neighbour Ritchie Blackmore.
In 1958, at The 2i's Coffee Bar, he met Marty Wilde and was invited to become a member of his backing group, the Wildcats. Wilde bought Sullivan a Gibson Les Paul guitar, reputedly the first to be played in Britain, which he had bought from Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Sullivan then replaced this with a cherry-red Gibson ES-345 guitar, sold to him by the guitarist Ivor Mairants for £300. Sullivan, Ritchie Blackmore and Pete Townshend persuaded Jim Marshall to make better and more affordable amplifiers. In 1960, as well as playing with the Wildcats Sullivan also recorded with and fellow guitarist Joe Brown joined the British tour of the American rock stars Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Although the tour ended in tragedy when Cochran was killed in a car crash, the young British players had by then learned the secrets of the authentic rock'n'roll style from him, including how to restring their guitars to achieve the Cochran sound. This was to stand Sullivan in good stead when he was introduced to the session world by Jack Good, producer of the Oh Boy! television show, on which Wilde and his group were frequent guests.
As well as playing with the Wild Cats , Sullivan found chart success in 1961 with the Krew Kats and had a UK Top 40 hit with the instrumental "Trambone". Sullivan became one of the most sought-after guitarists throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, in part because of his flexibility in playing different styles of music. He was often referred to as "Big Jim" both for his physical appearance and as he was usually first choice to play guitar on sessions for major musicians and bands.
Another session musician at the time, and at some of the same sessions, Jimmy Page, was referred to as "Little Jim." Sullivan played on around 750 UK chart entries, and averaged three recording sessions a day. Sullivan was a pioneer of guitar technologies such as the wah-wah pedal, the fuzzbox and the talkbox, and later recalled that the older generation of musicians, schooled in the style of the dance bands, called him the Electric Monster, "because I made the guitar scream and groan when I bent and pulled the strings". He played on the first records in the UK to use a wah-wah effect – Michael Cox's 1961 "Sweet Little Sixteen" and Dave Berry's 1964 hit "The Crying Game" used a DeArmond Tone and Volume pedal. He played on the first record in the UK to use a fuzzbox, which he had borrowed from session guitarist Eric Ford, on P.J. Proby's 1964 hit "Hold Me".
The other chart-topping records with which Sullivan was associated ranged from Frankie Vaughan's Tower of Strength in 1961 to January by Pilot in 1975. In between came hits by Dusty Springfield (You Don't Have to Say You Love Me), Tom Jones (Green, Green Grass of Home), Engelbert Humperdinck (The Last Waltz), Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg (Je T'aime … Moi Non Plus) and even Benny Hill (Ernie). Sullivan continued to play on a succession of hit records including those by The Walker Brothers, Jonathan King, Donovan and David Bowie for whom he played banjo, guitar and sitar on Bowie's first album which was published in 1967.
In 1968 he played on George Harrison's Wonderwall. For more than a decade, Sullivan played three three-hour sessions a day at studios in London. He claimed he didn't have a Christmas at home for 10 years and calculated that about 1,000 tracks on which he played had entered the British charts.
Between 1969 and 1974, Sullivan combined session work with membership of Tom Jones's band, playing in Las Vegas and featuring in Jones's popular ITV series. When he left Jones, session work was less plentiful and Sullivan formed a record company, Retreat, with the producer Derek Lawrence. He recorded some solo albums, including two on which he played the sitar, and a vocal effort that was, he said, "the greatest embarrassment of my life". More enjoyable were three albums with the group Tiger and a brief spell as producer of the American rock band Angel.
After this, Sullivan took a well-paid job with the James Last Orchestra, which lasted from 1978 to 1987. also touring with Olivia Newton-John after her success with Grease. In 1987, he began composing music for films and jingles. Big Jim later formed a duo with guitarist/singer/songwriter Duncan McKenzie and they played together for many years. He subsequently retired from touring, instead playing local gigs in small venues near his home in Billingshurst, West Sussex, but in his latter days his state of health forced him to give up performing live.
Sullivan died at his home on 2 October 2012, aged 71 due to complications from heart disease and diabetes.
