Tommy Castro Band - Boom Boom Club, Sutton, 16/5/10 – by John Mitchell

Fresh from his four awards at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis the previous week – Band of the Year, B.B. King Entertainer Of The Year, Contemporary Blues Album Of The Year, Contemporary Blues Male Artist Of The Year – Tommy Castro and his outstanding band were undertaking their first club tour of the UK and we were fortunate indeed to see them in Sutton at short notice following the rescheduling of their gig in Exeter – tough luck for fans in the SW but good news for us!

After a short warm-up slot from local band Money Maker, Tommy hit the stage running with the stomping Make It Back To Memphis from the new Alligator CD Hard Believer, a certain crowd pleaser and a great intro for those who had not had the chance to see the TCB before.  The new CD obviously provided a strong focus for the set, with five tunes played, including a lengthy rendition of Backup Plan, the song Tommy co-wrote with Rick Estrin of the Nightcats for the album.

As Tommy said from the stage, he has a large selection of songs and only limited time, but he sensibly included material from across his career, including Nasty Habits and Can’t Keep a Good Man Down from his early Blind Pig CDs, Wake Up Call from 2005’s Soul Shaker and It’s That Time Again from 2007’s Painkiller.

A cover of Serves You Right to Suffer closed the first set and gave Tommy the chance to solo at length while the band took a breather.  Similarly in the second set there were extended solos from all the band, greeted with resounding applause from the audience who were thoroughly enjoying a totally professional performance from one of the world’s top bands.

In the second set an additional amp was found so that Otis Grand could guest on two tunes, notably Sweet Little Angel which afforded an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast the two guitarists in action. Otis with a red Gibson sounding like a young BB King and Tommy coaxing beautifully crafted solos from his Strat.

Mention must be made of the excellent TCB: longtime sax player Keith Crossan, trumpet Tom Poole, keys Tony Stead, drums Ronnie Smith and bass, hats and amazing shoes, Scot Sutherland.  Ronnie also contributed a lot of backing vocals and took the lead on Allan Toussaint’s Victims of the Darkness.

Tommy stated that he plans to be back in the UK before too long and we can only hope that it’s soon.  A great gig from a wonderful band.

Eric Bibb - Huntingdon Hall, Worcester 20/5/10 – by John Phillpott

The originators of the country blues have long gone yet there is no shortage of imitators on this side of the Pond.

Agreed, some are average, a few are very good indeed. Yet the fact remains that riding a freight train to Sidcup somehow doesn’t quite hit the spot… it takes a real, live American to really convey the power of the music that burst forth from the deprivation of the Mississippi delta.

Eric Bibb is therefore your man. To be sure, he looks the part – bluesman’s hat pulled low, rich Kentucky tones that appear to have been marinaded in bourbon and endless packs of Lucky Strikes.

But the fact that he has experienced the places he so eloquently sings about sets him apart from all those Johnny-come-latelys of the acoustic blues world.

His great aunt told him about the great flood of 1927 so he sings about it with a rare authority. A stranger showed him the late great Booker White’s guitar, so that becomes the basis for a song as well.

And Walkin’ Blues is given fresh impetus by this young pretender to the throne in a revitalised interpretation that stays true to the original while conveying a much more modern feel.

Eric Bibb is a rarity among singers because he seems to be always trying to throw the music forward, rather than just settling for what has gone before.

It would be so easy to trade off the past, to present everything as exhibits in a museum. The fact that Eric Bibb avoids this obvious cliché makes him all the more interesting.

Trevor Hodgett landed an interview with Hammond player James Taylor who was playing at the Guinness Blues On The Bay Festival. You can read this very frank article as well as Trevor’s review of the festival. Reviewer Bob Chaffey went to the Boogaloo Weekend at Alvaston Hall in Cheshire and has sent in his report of the festival. It sounds like fun.

We have two e-letters this month. Harmonica player and frontman, Giles Robson and his band The Dirty Aces are touring in July with Mud Morganfield from Chicago, one of Muddy Waters’ sons. Giles has sent in an e-letter to describe how they got together and what to expect. They will be promoting the album Mud and The Dirty Aces: Live, which they recorded in Jersey, where Giles comes from.

Feed Me is a very youthful band from Cumbria, which won the Maryport Battle of the Bands and the right to open the Maryport Festival. In his e-letter, guitarist Jamie Francis introduces the band, which has opened up for visiting artists and is beginning to tour in its own right. The band’s album Blood On the Moon is all ready selling well at gigs.

As we go to press, there is a busy blues weekend coming up and it looks like July will be the same. There are so many festivals that when the press release for the Edinburgh Blues Festival came in, late, there was no room in the gig guide. There are some great artists playing there, including Canned Heat Woodstock Reunited Band , which has three members of the original Canned Heat. More details of that and loads of other festivals are in the Blues News pages.

Make the most of all the wonderful music being played this summer. With the economy as it is, we may not get the opportunity so often from now on. I will be going to the Ealing Festival on 24th July. Perhaps I will see you there.

Fran Leslie

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Here’s an online exclusive – an archive interview with Joe from issue #83 in November 2008. Asking the questions – Trevor Hodgett.

American guitar slinger Joe Bonamassa is rightly acclaimed for his virtuosity – but what makes him really exceptional is the creativity, inventiveness and imagination with which he plays.

Bonamassa is modest however about his improvisational talents. “Sometimes I don’t think about anything and it just kind of comes out,” he smiles. “And sometimes I’m thinking about what I want to have for lunch the next day or about random personal events! There’s no rhyme or reason but I think the best nights are where I don’t think about anything, where it’s like a stream of consciousness and you just flow through it and get the emotion of it all.”

Bonamassa believes he is continuing to develop as a player. “In the sense that I think I play less and I think my sound has gotten better and I think my phrasing and some of my playing is a little more original and identifiable.”

Not only a great guitarist, Bonamassa is also an effective singer as is evident on his recent album Sloe Gin. “I think singing has really changed my career,” he reflects. “I don’t think I’d be as successful as I am today without singing. It’s just one of those things that makes you a better musician because it makes you think in different terms as a player – you play different stuff, you play less or you play more depending on the vocal because you’re the one singing. If you’re not the one doing it, it’s a different perspective.”

One of Bonamassa’s great influences has been the legendary, stunningly eclectic Danny Gatton. Well, get this: in 1990 I was in New York and I was sitting in Tramps’ club being blown away by a performance by Gatton – who then announced that he was going to bring on a thirteen year old kid to jam with him. ‘On, no!’ we groaned. ‘We’re here to pay homage to Gatton, not to hear some brat.’ Well, the brat was Bonamassa and he totally electrified the audience. “You were there?” gasps Bonamassa. “Wow. Danny was really important to me because he was the one who said, ‘Listen, kid, you’re pretty good at blues but you don’t know anything about jazz, you don’t know anything about country, you don’t know anything about rockabilly,’ so he was the one who for want of a better phrase turned my life from mono to stereo.”

Note: evidence of Joe’s youthful prowess can be found on YouTube here – Ed.

“And I learned a lot of double stops and a lot on the technical side. I learned how to use my fingers and I still use a lot of the stuff that he taught me.”

Bonamassa happily admits that in his youth he was inspired more by British blues bands than by the American originators of the music. “I just thought the British blues was hipper,” he explains. “I thought it was more rock-oriented, it was heavier, it had the Les Pauls and the Marshalls and you’d see pictures of these young kids singing the blues and that really related to me. It had that swagger to it that I didn’t really get initially when I listened to the originals, the American greats, who I subsequently understood. But I was listening to the English stuff and Irish guys like Gary Moore and Rory Gallagher way before I was into Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and that kind of stuff.”

Bonamassa admits to a particular fondness for Rory Gallagher: “You know what: I grew up in a blue collar town in upstate New York and when I saw pictures of Rory – well, I owned those flannel shirts! And when I listen to his music I hear a guy doing it for the right reasons in the sense that he had no pretence. He just was a guitar player and a performer and he loved blues and he loved rock and he loved to entertain people and he did it for the purest reasons. There was no put-together show: it was just like he walked up there dressed like everybody else in the audience and just killed it and walked off and would have a beer with anybody and talk to anybody. Those are the things I could relate to – well, at fifteen, not having a beer – but in the sense that I grew up with people around me looking and acting like that so that’s why I love Rory Gallagher.”

Another British guitarist that Bonamassa admired was Free’s Paul Kossoff.. “He was a huge influence on me,” he acknowledges. “His playing was extraordinarily simple but unbelievably to the point. It was like a series of lightning bolts. It was pinpoint – he said exactly what he wanted to say which was great.

“I also really dug the playing of Martin Barre of Jethro Tull and even the early stuff of Tull with Mick Abrahams I really dug. All those bands that were English and blues-based I was into.”

One American legend who did influence Bonamassa was BB King. “I’ve known him for eighteen years and he’s definitely one of the most down-to-earth people I know,” he asserts. “If he wasn’t BB King he’d just be a cool guy to hang out with. I’ve noticed that the bigger the people are the more they’re like that. There are exceptions but the ones who have the most confidence in what they’re doing feel like, ‘I’m good at what I do and I know it so why do I have to be larger than life?’ He comes over like a normal guy who just happens to be the best blues singer of all time.”

Another legend with whom Bonamassa has played is John Lee Hooker. “That was really wild,” he chuckles, “because I didn’t know that John didn’t play in any other key except for E, D and A – and I was ready to play in G and A minor, so I had to change my riffs pretty fast. So that was a pretty wild experience.”

Inevitably Bonamassa has felt the ire of blues purists unsympathetic to his blues rock style. “It doesn’t bother me,” he insists. “It’s like, my grandfather is 81 and he’s been driving a car for sixty years and I guarantee you his car now does not look like the 1939 Plymouth that he drove then. The concept of the car is the same, it’s the same horseless carriage, but the car does not look the same. It has evolved. And it’s the same thing with the blues so I don’t understand why people vehemently oppose letting blues evolve from where it was in 1929 to where it is now in 2008. That’s eighty years of evolution. I still love traditional blues but I also understand that the music has to evolve in order to achieve something.”

One early blues song that Bonamassa has recorded is Charlie Patton’s High Water Everywhere. “I do these seminars arguing that blues is just as relevant today as it was eighty years ago,” he explains, “so I needed something to prove that. So when we had that big hurricane up in New Orleans and the floods and everything that [song] proved my point that blues is just as relevant today as it was eighty years ago. That was my whole reason for recording it. Plus, it’s a cool song!”

Bonamassa maintains a ferocious international touring schedule. “I’m used to working every day – but it’s not getting any easier,” he concedes. “But I’m very honoured that the music has spread out and I’m very honoured that the music has touched people in a certain way so that it’s given me the opportunity to play, this year, in Mumbai in India, in Belfast, in Moscow, in Tokyo … All my work has paid off because I have a fan base all over the world and I think that’s really great.”

Joe’s web site.

Check Joe out at Amazon UK and Amazon US

Popa Chubby is coming back for more dates in June. The last time he came to London, I met up with him in his Bayswater hotel and he told me about his latest album The Fight Is On. He will be playing at Blues On The Farm this month.

Solo artist Patrick Sweany is also playing at Blues On The Farm. We have yet to meet, so Patrick sent Blues In Britain an e-letter to explain what we will get when we see him. Blues On The Farm sounds like something to look forward to, so many great musicians are playing there.

Dr Blue & The Prescription is a London based band. The band plays at Ain’t Nothing But and Charlotte Street Blues and is appearing at The Kerry Blues Festival in Ireland this month. Mike Mckeon, alias Dr Blue, sent in his e-letter to fill us in on the band.

Also in this issue have festival reports from Swanage and from the New Orleans Jazz Fest plus regular reviews of gigs and CDs. The summer brings the rainy season but we are not to be deterred from going to as many outdoor events as possible. Take a brolly and take notes and photographs so you can send in a review. Thank you every one who contributes! Please keep them coming in, I can’t do it by myself.

Fran Leslie

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Another visiting American is Tommy Castro from California. Although he was touring, Tommy found a moment to send us an e-letter to introduce himself to new Blues In Britain readers. He is doing six dates in the UK as part of his European tour, including his only Scottish date at The Ferry in Glasgow. His latest album, Hard Believer, has been nominated for Contemporary Blues Album of the Year and his band is short-listed for the Band of The Year award, in the Blues Awards; the results are announced in Memphis in May.

The Pete Harris Blues Band, based in the South of England, has recorded a live album, Goin’ Away. Bob Long interviewed Pete Harris, for Blues In Britain, just before he went on tour in New Zealand with Mike Garner. You can see Pete and Mike playing together on YouTube.

One of the many up and coming young players is Jack Blackman. He plays solo acoustic blues and writes his own songs. He already has a six-track CD out called Just A Game. He too sent in an e-letter, taking time off from his GCSE studies and playing guitar in the garden shed to write it. Jack will be playing at festivals and support gigs for visiting artists this summer and is working on an album. Who says the blues is old people’s music!

This month we have an election. Remember, when we are approached by people wanting our vote, we must ask what their candidate will do to support live music. The Live Music Bill will be re-presented to Parliament after the election. We have to make sure it is passed into law. Music is an important part of our cultural life and our economy; blues is important to us. Let’s keep the blues alive!

Fran Leslie

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This month’s magazine puts the spotlight on Earl Jackson who will be playing at The Big Blues Weekend in Torquay in May, alongside US guitarist Buddy Whittington and legendary UK band The Producers. I went to meet Earl at Boogaloo House and you can read some of what he told me about his music and his guitars.

The Internet is a useful tool. I could not pop over to Baton Rouge to interview singer-songwriter and guitarist Larry Garner, so I sent guitarist Norman Beaker questions and he, with Larry’s help, emailed in the answers. Larry Garner is touring here, with The Norman Beaker Band, in April and May. They have recorded an album Live At The Tivoli.

I was also rescued by e-technology when my recorder broke down during an interview with guitarist, singer and songwriter Sam Hare and the spare one turned out to be off the premises. Sam and I discussed the questions and he emailed in the answers. His band, Sam Hare’s Soul Junction, has a new album out, called Down To The Sea, which was launched in March.

We have several more e-letters. One is from a very impressive young band, Virgil & The Accelerators, whom I have seen supporting The Hoax. The second e-letter is from veteran acoustic blues man Dick Wardell, who has two new CDs out, and plays solo gigs as Kid Wardell and duo gigs with Fish Feathers MacTeeth as High Steppin’ Papas. Then there is an e-letter from London based band Little Devils (my capitals); though I have read it several times, I can’t understand it but maybe you can fathom it out.

We also have a Blues Venue piece on The Anchor, home of Blues With A Bottle in Sevenoaks in Kent, and a review of The Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise. Thanks to everyone who sends in reviews and photographs. May the blues be with us all!

Fran Leslie

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Fran: How did you two start to play together?

Marcus: It started when I moved back down to London. I was living in Liverpool for about six years and I moved into a house with Paddy. We’d met a couple of times at social events and gigs but we ended up living in the same house together for about six, seven months.
I depped a gig for Paddy’s guitarist in Paddy’s own band. From there, we got involved in the Earl Thomas project.
Paddy: I met Marcus initially through mutual friends. There were eight of us in the same house. It was after college and university, the first house that everyone lived in London; it was a great vibe, eight musicians.
Marcus: Brilliant! Not a lot of sleeping got done.
Paddy: Constant music and good times really.

Fran: Was that Paddy Milner and The Big Sounds then?

Paddy: Yeah, it was put together after the first album was released, a while ago. In fact we lived with some of the other guys from The Big Sounds: Scott Wiber on bass and Randall Breneman on guitar, handy for rehearsals.
We had worked together on a few other non-blues projects as well.
Marcus: And we’ve done quite a few sessions together and stuff. We did a bit of work together with Sandi Thom. We were in a transition, as I was leaving Paddy was joining. So we had a few gigs together. Then we did some stuff with Tim Daniel, a support tour with Take That and stuff.
We spent a lot of time in splitter vans together. You can’t help but be good mates with people if you spend twelve hours in a splitter van with them.

Fran: Or you end up hating them!

Paddy: One thing we are both lucky to have (is) everyone we work with, especially in The Big Sounds, they are all amazing people. There’re never any big problems. If there are any problems, they get resolved. It’s never come to blows.
Marcus: Or even a raised voice.

Fran: They are a fun bunch of people. Do some of The Big Sounds play on Marcus’ album? Obviously you do, Paddy, and Scott (Wiber) the bass player.

Marcus: Yeah and Alex (Reeves) the drummer; basically it’s very incestuous. My stuff, as your stuff is now (on Paddy’s album in progress), is stripped down and kind of simple, instrumentation wise. You’ve got baritone sax as well.
Paddy: Both our new albums don’t have the big instrumentation like I’ve done before and the stuff we’ve done with Earl Thomas. Marcus’ band is a three piece with Alex Reeves and Scott Wiber, who also play with me and in The Big Sounds with Earl Thomas as well.
Marcus: When you find a group of musicians who are that competent at what they do in an incredible way, like the people we work with, sometimes you look at the stage and think, ‘Wow there’re some amazing players in this band!’. (They are) some of the best players I have ever met. Like Paddy says as well, such lovely people. You find this group of people and you constantly want to work with them because you know what you are going to get out of them. It is just fantastic playing and intuitive thinking towards your stuff. Alex Reeves is a real thinker, isn’t he?
Paddy: Yeah! Everyone in the band, they are very musical about what they do. Despite the fact that they have all got amazing chops and are great players, they work towards the whole and do what is best for the music.
Marcus: Yeah, no one sees it as a showcase or anything; it’s a band.
Paddy: They are all into lots of music as well as blues. I think that is something that our music reflects as well. Although we are rooted in the blues and have always loved it and played it, there’s a lot of other stuff as well and we always try to involve it all.

Fran: Jazz musicians think a blues is a twelve-bar format, whereas I think that blues is about the feeling. There is nothing that you play that is devoid of an emotional feel. Everything you do is a blues in that sense, whatever the rhythm.

Marcus: I feel the same way. As long as it is coming from the soul, with some sort of emotion behind it, you’re not playing with your head but with your heart, that’s the blues.
Paddy: It annoys me at a jazz gig when people say, ‘We’re going to do such and such a tune. It’s OK, nothing complicated, it’s just a blues!’ It’s not just a blues.
Marcus: A lot of the stuff you like best is the stuff that isn’t twelve-bar, like the old Muddy Waters stuff and Robert Johnson. There’s no twelve-bar about it!
Paddy: It’s just so free and everyone flies…

Fran: Marcus, how did you become a permanent member of the Big Sounds?

Marcus: I just turned up and they never asked me to leave. (Laughter)
Paddy: That was when we first started working with Earl Thomas, or he first started working with us. It was 2007, when I first met Earl in America. Then he came across and did a one off gig with our friend Todd Sharpville. Scott Wiber the bass player was on that gig as well. Earl got talking to Scott and found that he played with me. Earl needed a band; he was booked for Burnley Blues Festival, as Earl Thomas, and for the Paul Jones’ (show on Radio 2) broadcast. He gave me and Scott a call to put the thing together and it just made sense to get the whole band together. We had a warm up thing together at Dover Street (Wine Bar). Originally Randall Breneman, who always plays with me in the big band, couldn’t do it. We asked Marcus to dep for him but, at the last minute, Randall could do the gig but rather than tell Marcus to have an early night, we said, ‘Why not? Just come and join in as well!’ and it worked really, really well. Randall and Marcus, they’ve known each other a long time.
Marcus: We went to university together. Usually, if he couldn’t do a gig, I would be the dep for it, so we never really got to work together on anything. So it was great that we had a project like this.

Fran: Did everything start happening after that?

Paddy: Yes, through the recording for Paul Jones, Earl loved our vibe, we loved what he brought to the band. When we did the recording for the BBC, we thought, ‘This sounds great! Why don’t we record a few more songs and put it out as an album?’ Then we thought, ‘No, keep the BBC things for another time and just let’s just do a new album.’
Marcus: Yeah; it was great fun recording that!
Paddy: It was awesome fun. We all brought songs to the table, so it rapidly became rather than Earl with a backing band, much more of a collaborative thing. Randall brought three songs, I’ve got a couple on there, Earl brought some, everyone brought their own arrangement ideas.
Marcus: It was very quick, within about four days, two days rehearsing, two days recording, we had an album.

Fran: Some of the songs are so emotional; your Right To Your Soul, Paddy and Earl’s It’s Better To Have Loved and Lost. It’s a dream band. In Earl Thomas, you’ve got this gorgeous bloke who can really sing and is an incredible front man and not just a backing band but an array of talents, all of you out there, not so much starring but the whole combination is incredibly good. Earl’s lucky to have you. Your band is a lot of individual characters, who are all creating the whole.

Paddy: A lot of people say similar things, that it is something very special, something they haven’t seen for a long time.
Marcus: We always say when we go on tour it’s just like going on holiday with your mates really. We all go together, have a great time, play some great music, then, at the end of it, you get paid! (Laughter) The money seems like a bonus at the end; brilliant!

Fran: So the Earl Thomas with Paddy Milner & The Big Sounds album came out in 2009.

Paddy: Yes, although it never actually had a proper release. Essentially it’s been something we have been selling at gigs; selling quite a few actually. That’s where the strength of it is.

Fran: This is a really good example of what you do live.

Marcus: I think we really replicate that quite well, with that extra excitement that you get from a live gig. When I listen to that, I still feel it’s an exciting record. It was done live, all nine of us in the studio together playing our arses off.
Paddy: There were quite a few literally spontaneous arrangements, quite a few first take of things we’d only talked through on the day in the studio.

Fran: That’s the way to make a blues album. You could just sit in a bar and make one.

Marcus: That’s how the old Alan Lomax recordings were made. They would record a guy wherever they could find somewhere quiet enough to do it. They’d just stick a mic in front of him and it’s some of the most beautiful music that’s ever been recorded.

Fran: Someone was telling me that Freddie King would walk into the studio and put his amp down next to the vocal mic; when the producer protested that they would get leakage, Freddie said, ‘Yeah!’ That’s what it sounds like live.

Paddy: We do a version of “Pack It Up”, a Freddie King song. We did a blues festival this summer, in Spain in Antequera (near Malaga) and we played it. At the end of the night, this guy came up and it turned out to be (record producer) Mike Vernon. He said, ‘It’s good to hear “Pack It Up”. I produced that track with Freddie King!’
Marcus: I’m glad I knew that afterwards, not before. (laughter)

Fran: Did you have an A&R Man or producer for your album, Marcus?

Marcus: My label was very good. They just seemed to leave me to get on with it. They seem to be supportive of what I do.

Fran: I really like your voice or voices. On the first track, you sound like a tuneful Tom Waits and on a couple of songs, Don’t Wanna Come Home and What Good Am I To You, you sound like Eric Bibb.

Marcus: I love Tom Waits, thank you! Someone once said to me (that) I was Tom Waits and Van Morrison’s love child! (Laughing!) I think he meant I have a gravely voice.
I do like Eric Bibb. I have been to see him live a couple of times. Eric Bibb sounds really folky to me, lot of the time. That version of “Angel” the Jimi Hendrix song he does on Painting Signs album, I saw him do it live. It was just him and a piano, no guitar on it and it was just one of those things that moves you to tears, just beautiful.

Fran: Your harmonica playing on God Only Knows makes it like Stone Fox Chase.

Marcus: Yeah, I am a very functional harmonica player. I’m not very good but I get a good rhythm out of it.

Fran: It has that raw quality to it that is spot on.

Paddy: Yeah! It’s all about the vibe. I think that track has a great vibe, great lyrics!
Marcus: …and a good groove to it.

Fran: There is a great variety of material on the album, an eclectic mix. Why did you choose these songs?

Marcus: I wrote them all after finishing the first record. It just reflects where I was going. I was doing a lot of travelling, playing around the place and a lot of solo gigs. When I look down the list, I can pinpoint one and say ‘That’s what that was about. I must have written that song about such and such an event,’ but only after the fact; I never know while I am writing them. Like Paddy said, we both listen to a hell of a lot of music. Obviously, we always listen to blues but other stuff that we are into stretches right out. We want to put those influences into the music we play, to make it something that is ours.

Fran: So it’s an anthology of your songs rather than a concept album.

Marcus: I suppose the concept is I just want it to sound like me.

Fran: Well, your singing with three different voices is unique to you. Did you do singing when you were at LIPA? (Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts)

Marcus: Singing was one of the reasons I left LIPA. I didn’t have any money and I had a band but we didn’t have any vocal tunes so we couldn’t get any gigs; we just played instrumental stuff. It was all well and good but no one really wanted to hear it. I decided to sing out of necessity so we could get some gigs and earn some money and eat food.

Fran: Did your family sing?

Marcus: My dad was a singer in church. He does like great singers. He would play me John Lennon, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Geno Washington and people like that. He would tell me that these are good singers. This is what you want to do if you want to do music.

Fran: Lots of people, who have had guitar lessons, never have singing lessons. They imagine that you only have lessons if there is something wrong with your voice. Singing in the wrong way can damage your vocal cords.

Marcus: A lot of people don’t realise that singing lessons are not to try and change your voice; it’s to make sure you can carry on singing like you do, forever.
When I got to LIPA, it was great for my personal development because I had only been playing guitar for a couple of years. To see the talent that was there, and there are some really talented people, at our college, when you go there you’re surrounded by all these people who are incredible in so many different ways, it really does make you up your game. You look around and go, ‘OK, these guys are my contemporaries and are way better than me. I’ve got to work hard here!
It’s the way you approach it; you could go ‘Right, make me a star!’ or you could go to any college really and go, ‘OK what can I learn from the people who are around me?’ That’s something we have always taken to musical situations any way. Working with The Big Sounds, the amount I’ve learnt, in the two years I have been with them, far outweighs anything I have learnt there, in Liverpool.

Fran: Paddy, when you were at uni, was there any emphasis on performance?

Paddy: I went to Kings College, in London. It was very different from LIPA, much more academic course, based on western classical music. I was into loads of different music, very contemporary as well, so looking at lots of concepts in music, philosophy and theory and politics and how it fits into musical life. There was performance, which was taught at the Royal Academy of Music, so you had lessons there. I chose to take jazz lessons there, develop that side of my playing. More than anything, it made me listen to all sorts of weird and wonderful music, some really odd things and open my ears to loads of stuff that I would never have come across before. I can’t say that a lot of that has gone into the albums I make, or the songs that I write, but it has made me aware of this other world of music.
I have been giging since the age of thirteen. It’s something I have always done and something I was always going to continue to do. It was a bit difficult sometimes, like when I was on tour with Eugene “Hideaway” Bridges or Eddie Martin, Todd Sharpville and played with Big Joe Turner for a bit. I’d often go away for a couple of weeks and have to come up with excuses for the tutors. Being the classical professors that they were, they just did not approve of me missing college to play blues. Had I been on tour with an orchestra, it may have been different.

Fran: You turned out all right; I am sure you are a credit to them.

Marcus: Damn right, you can play the arse off any classical piece as well! (Laughter!)
There is nothing that says you have to stay the full three years. If you go there and think, ‘I’ve learnt a lot from this place. I’ve got what I need,’ and I’ve met Scott Wiber and Randall Breneman, who I still work with to this day. So it was always important but I didn’t need a degree. My mum needed the degree. My parents came to my graduation. I played at it but I didn’t graduate. They hired my band.
I reckon we both knew what we wanted to do, pretty early on. As soon as I touched the guitar, I was like, ‘That’s it now!’

Fran: How’s your next album coming on, Paddy? Is it still a work in progress?

Paddy: Well, it’s being mixed at the moment. It’s all recorded. The core idea is built round piano, percussion and voice. A lot of the piano parts that I write have a very busy right hand, coming from the old boogie tradition. I have often found electric bass conflicts a bit with the left hand, so I wanted to do something that has the punchiness of the drum kit but has bottom end. It was really fun, it was Alex Reeves, again, part of the family, who played not so much a drum kit but percussive drums. He had a really old a 1920s bass drum, which was tuned really low down so it’s got this bottom end that sits nicely under the left hand of the piano. It’s just a slightly different sound, rather quirky, not the traditional sound. There are a few tracks where perhaps it needed to bit more bottom end, so I added some tuba to it. A good friend of mine, Reuben Crowther, who I was at school with, he’s a great tuba player and he’s played in lots of New Orleans funk bands with tuba and bass.
Marcus: It’s brilliant with the tuba; a lovely, lovely little touch.
Paddy: I guess it’s a bit of a nod to the old New Orleans sound. There is definitely a New Orleans influence on quite a lot of tracks, a rolling piano sound. It’s quite an eclectic mix; a few covers, Muddy Waters’ “Louisiana Blues”, I just love the song. Robert Johnson’s “Come On In My Kitchen”, which I have taken apart and put back together in what I hope is a complimentary way but has its own sound. Doing covers, you either have to be bringing something new to it or be as faithful as possible; I hope I’ve brought something new that works. There’re horns on a few tracks and a cello. That will be out sometime in 2010.
Marcus: I have heard the rough mixes and it’s a real treat.

Fran: What else are you doing?

Paddy: I’m a regular member of the Ronnie Scott’s Blues Experience, with Tony Remy, which started a monthly Monday residency at the club in 2009. We’ve had some great nights, always sold out, with special guests including Jack Bruce, Earl Thomas, Matt Schofield, Earl Green, Eddie Martin, Todd Sharpville. Marcus will be guesting with us in 2010 and there’s talk of some blues legends sitting in with the band over the next few months, so it should be an exciting year for the blues at Ronnie’s.
Also Marcus and I are looking to doing some more work together, just the two of us.
Marcus: We tried it out at The Ramsbottom Festival. That was good fun.
Paddy: A lot of fun! We come from the same direction but, I guess, express it in slightly different ways.
Marcus: It works well with piano and guitar and we both do a bit of percussion and vocals. It was a really good sound that we got.

Fran: It always is, every which way!

Marcus Bonfanti: What Good Am I To You? (P3MCD025 2009)
Marcus Bonfanti: Hard Times (Guitar Label 2009)
www.marcusbonfanti.com
www.theguitarlabel.com

Earl Thomas with Paddy Milner & The Big Sounds: Earl Thomas with Paddy Milner & The Big Sounds (IX) (ETPMBS01)
Paddy Milner: Old, New, Borrowed, Blue (a working title) will be out in 2010
www.paddymilner.com
www.bigsoundsmusic.com
www.earlthomasmusic.com

What does your bill aim to achieve?

Firstly, we want to resurrect the ‘two-in-a-bar’ exemption. We think it should be limited to unamplified and minimally amplified music. We want to introduce, secondly, the exemption for venues with a capacity of up to two hundred. Thirdly, and this has nothing to do with alcohol licensing, we want to allow schools and hospitals, where they have music playing, to be used as a venue but no alcohol being served.

There is a lot of confusion as to what is covered and what isn’t. Apparently, if it’s a private performance, in a school or a hospital, that’s fine but say for instance you invite your next door neighbour or it’s a charity fund raiser, that then turns it, possibly, into a public performance. The trouble is that the temporary event notices are not really fit for purposes either because you are limited in the number of them. Also, if for instance your local authority is too busy, it may take the view that you haven’t applied in time. Again, for a small event where you just want a few people, we don’t think the current law is adequate. We think that this bill would actually create a great flourishing of live music. Let’s face it; a lot of people have got their first breaks in small venues. When you look back at people like The Rolling Stones, The Who, that’s exactly what happened to them. It’s true of some modern artists, but probably a diminishing number, like people like Corinne Bailey Rae.

The government encourages people to get fit and play sport, which is good, but some young people want to play music instead, so they should be encouraged.

Absolutely! They want to sing and they want to dance and play music; they don’t all want to play sport. I quite agree.

What can we do?

My theory is that politicians spend more time in pubs when the election is on. So if musicians and pub owners and music fans really get to grips with this issue, in the next three or four months, there could be a fantastic impact on all those new MPs being elected, when they come back into the House of Commons after May. There are going to be a huge number of new ones. I think in order to get a majority, the Tories have to get another 130 or 140. In addition to that, they’ve got great swathes of MPs, probably forty or fifty resigning because of expenses problems and retirement and all that stuff. So you could be talking about two hundred new Tory MPs alone. I haven’t worked it out for Labour, but it does mean, by making something an election issue, getting a petition going, during an election, questions whenever someone turns up at a pub with their canvassing rosette or whatever it happens to be, such as, ‘Do you support live music?’ That’s a hell of a way of sensitising people to it.

Does a new parliament mean the issue will be back to square one?

Not necessarily! My Bill may be back to square one but the government may have changed. There will be different views as to whether a (capacity of) 100 will be adequate in terms of the proposal by government – the legislative reform order they’re proposing – and the Tories back my bill and have said so in the House of Lords. Who knows, the Lib-Dems may hold the balance of power and may say the price for our agreement will be to back my Live Music Bill, though I doubt that will be quite the deal.

May be it will be in the package! I recall that the Swedes delayed European Union copyright legislation because they relied on the youth vote to keep the government of the day in power. Young people want to have free downloads and so on. If you want to capture the votes of young people, you have got to be seen to be doing something for them.

Absolutely and this is a very popular policy. I can’t tell you the amount of traffic that we’ve had via the internet; on things like Guardian Online, whenever we’ve had a piece on there and the general response has been fantastic actually.

I don’t recall it was a problem before, having two musicians in a bar, and it was more flexible getting a music license before. Why was this legislation brought in, in the first place; was it to combat problems at raves?

Funnily enough, I’ve looked back and nobody really understands quite why ‘two-in-a-bar’ should be done away with. Everybody thought, I think, that there was a logical exemption under the original 2003 Bill and it just turned out to be fresh air. That’s the weird thing. There’s a section called 177, which on the face of it looks as though it’s going to be an exemption but it’s never been invoked. So that’s really the answer. We fought quite hard to keep ‘two-in-a-bar’ and the government said, ‘Oh no, no, no; here’s much better provision!’ and I think we were all sold a pup really.

Because the music license is tied in with the alcohol license, I have heard that publicans who might want to have the occasional music night have had to make blanket applications to have music in their pubs. This has caused friction with the pubs and their neighbours who put up objections fearing that the pub intends to turn into a seven-day-a-week rock music venue.

I quite agree. That’s the beauty of having a reasonably worded exemption for small venues. Two hundred, I think, is relatively modest, although some people say, ‘Two Hundred? That is outrageous!’ and others say we should have more and others say let’s split the difference.

A lot of small venues and clubs would be very happy if they got anywhere near two hundred people turn up. A lot of blues gigs they would be happy to have forty to sixty people turning up mid-week. They would consider they had done quite well. I suppose if you ask for exemptions of venues with a capacity of up to 200 people, you might get exemption for 100.

Precisely! It’s intended to wind up people as well, so they actually bother to engage to get what they really want.

Now, you’ve been a businessman most of your working life and you must have a cultural interest as you are the Liberal Democrat spokesman for culture, media and sport. What’s your main interest?

I’ve always been a believer in the arts, theatre and music and so on. I have fairly catholic tastes but I listened to Lightnin’ Hopkins in my youth, along with the best of them. In terms of relating to your readership, that kind of music was what I was brought up with. That and soul music in the early sixties and then of course we had all the British bands as well, the Stones and so on. The blues and soul music was absolutely core to what we were all listening to in those days.

I like going to informal gigs, more, in many ways, than going to the big events. It’s all very well going to the Wembley Arena or the O2, but actually one of the most pleasurable things is going along to a place when people are jamming. We want people to be free to experiment and not be so formal that they have to get licenses every time they want to perform.

I have an interest in it obviously as it is part of my political job, so to speak, to do it. One of the reasons I do the job is because I find it very enjoyable and I like fighting on behalf of performers and artists.

There are other jobs I do. I do quite a lot working on the visas situation, for visiting performers, which is terrible at the moment. A lot of festivals find it very frustrating. They invite foreign artists and they cannot get them into the country. Ridiculous restrictions! At the moment, we have this rather weird approach to culture in this country, particularly when it involves small festivals and small events, which is quite disproportionate.

When I went to the All-Party Parliamentary Jazz awards, I was interested to see which of the Parliamentarians were at the event. Most of the others were in the bar watching football.

That’s a classic example because you know you don’t need a license if you show live football in a pub. You do if you have music in the same pub. That is the ludicrous nature of the act.

Yes I find the idea that an audience of blues fans needs more regulation than a crowd of football fans quite amusing. They are almost never any trouble.

Yes, the implication is absurd.

When I asked Tessa Jowell (who was then the Minister for Culture, Media & Sport) why there should be more legislation for fans of live music in a pub than for football fans, watching a match on screen in the same pub, she offered no explanation at all.

I bet she didn’t!

Is there anything else that can be done?

I hope that all your readers will find the Number 10 web site petition on live music. It’s number 11 at the moment and we’ve got nearly fourteen thousand signatures. I would love to get to fifty thousand signatures or something like that. It has until July 27th to get there. They can also write to their local MPs and accost politicians during the election campaign and ask them what they are going to support the live music bill. Then they should make an impact.

Explanation of the petition:
Under the Licensing Act, a performance by one musician in a bar, restaurant, school or hospital not licensed for live music could lead to a criminal prosecution of those organising the event. Even a piano may count as a licensable ‘entertainment facility’. By contrast, amplified big screen broadcast entertainment is exempt. The government says the Act is necessary to control noise nuisance, crime, disorder and public safety, even though other laws already deal with those risks. Musicians warned the Act would harm small events. About 50% of bars and 75% of restaurants have no live music permission. Obtaining permission for the mildest live music remains costly and time-consuming. In May 2009, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee recommended exemptions for venues up to 200 capacity and for unamplified performance by one or two musicians. The government said no. But those exemptions would restore some fairness in the regulation of live music and encourage grassroots venues.

Sign the petition here.

The Blue Devils is collaboration between the fine guitarist Richard Studholme and bass player Jim Leverton. They are also involved in the Mojo Music Weekends in Kent. Michael Prince fills us in on the details.

Australian Tommy Emmanuel is a guitar virtuoso who plays with skill and fire. He is on tour currently but he found time to send in an e-letter to tell us about the new show he is doing with The Frank Vignola Trio and the album they have recorded together.

Singer and bass player Fran McGillivray and guitarist Mike Burke are known to many as part of So Long Angel. They have been on the UK blues scene seemingly forever. They have just released an album as a duo, The Road That You Believe In and Fran has written an e-letter to tell us about that and about Mike and her.

Lord Clement-Jones, Tim to his friends, is a Liberal Democrat peer with responsibility for Culture, Media & Sport. He is championing a new bill through Parliament, which aims to restore music to small venues without the need for an expensive and punitive licence. This is a cross-party matter rather than a party political one. He took time to call me up to explain the aim of the bill and strategies we can adopt to help it get passed. It is due to go to the House of Commons for a second reading on Friday 12th of March. You can email your MP and ask him or her to support it and you can sign the petition on the Number 10 web site. If someone tries to solicit your vote, in the run up to the election, ask what the candidate is doing to support the bill. Read the full interview with Lord Clement-Jones here.

Fran Leslie

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Find part 2 here.