Reading those books fuelled an extra dimension to my interest in the Blues: it wasn’t just about the music, but also about the people and the history. I’m an inveterate reader who studied English Literature at university, enjoyed history at school, and have always been interested in learning about stuff - and here was a whole new territory to delve into. Over the years I’ve read biographies of Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, Etta James, the Rolling Stones, Wilko Johnson and others; I’ve read Robert Palmer’s historical survey Deep Blues, Greil Marcus’s overwritten but
Reading the blues - with one of the greats |
Meanwhile, a couple of months after that 2013 Mississippi holiday, I made a serendipitous discovery. Browsing around the WH Smith newsagents in Newcastle Central Station one afternoon, killing time before my train home to Edinburgh, I stumbled across The Blues Magazine. It was evidently a sister magazine to Classic Rock, of which I had been an irregular reader for years, and a properly professional, glossy publication. It was Issue 9, with the cover pushing a feature about the making of Howlin’ Wolf’s London Sessions album, and I reckoned it would do very nicely to keep me company for the journey home.
The feature on the recording of the Howlin’ Wolf album referenced familiar big names who had guested on the sessions, like Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. Then there were articles about other artists I knew, like Bonamassa, North Mississippi Allstars, and Sammy Hagar. But there were also pieces about people who were entirely new to me, like Aynsley Lister, Samantha Fish and Joanne Shaw Taylor. There were pages of album reviews, of both new stuff and reissues, and gig listings that revealed there were lots of bands touring the country, many of them playing small venues that didn’t ring many bells with me. All in all it was like travelling back in time to when I was a teenager, and would pore over a copy of Sounds, my weekly music paper of choice back in the days when the “inkies” were required reading for music fans.
The Blues Magazine became a regular buy from then on, not least for the covermount CD that came with each issue. Through those CDs I was able to get an earful of a range of new artists, such as the aforementioned Samantha Fish and Joanne Shaw Taylor, but also King King, Walter Trout, Mike Zito, JJ Grey & Mofro, and The Temperance Movement, to name just a few. Some of these artists obviously had more impact than others, but the magazine revealed enough
decent contemporary blues music and blues-rock to further reinvigorate my love of music, and show it was possible to see artists play live in venues more intimate than an arena – rather like the hard rock bands I’d seen in a club setting back in my late teens, at the Porterhouse in Retford, Nottinghamshire, where I lived for a few years back then.
Different shades of The Blues Magazine |
I followed up on the inception of the Edinburgh Blues Club, which looked like a carefully thought through venture. Membership could be obtained through a subscription of £10 a month, which would provide the club with a stable base of funding with which to promote shows and pay artists, augmented by ticket sales to non-members. That sounded pretty good to me, so along with my better half I signed up, and in early 2014 we attended the launch event, which included sets by some excellent Scottish artists I hadn't encountered before, like Jed Potts & The Hillman Hunters (pictured below). Over the coming years the club would provide exposure for many more local musicians, but also touring artists from Britain and further afield – Ireland, the States, Denmark and Australia, for example – including some of the artists I was reading about in The Blues Magazine. It was an unfolding treasure trove, if you like, an opportunity to see some greats artists up and close and personal, and a pathway to seeing artists in other venues in Scotland and beyond. And of course I was buying albums by many of these artists, exposing myself to the whole landscape of blues music, its sister soul music, funk, roots music generally, and of course blues-rock – which you might say is where I came in.
As the months passed by in 2014, I began to feel an itch to write about this contemporary blues scene in some way. This desire went back a long way, to when I was in my teens and an avid reader of the “inkies”, Britain’s weekly music papers. My favourite was Sounds, which always catered pretty well to fans of hard rock and metal, but I would regularly dip into Melody Maker,
Jed Potts & The Hillman Hunters - Edinburgh Blues Club launch artists Pic by Mark Holloway |
I submitted a couple of live reviews, but got no response. Maybe the artists weren’t of interest, maybe the writing wasn’t great, or maybe they didn’t fit with the print deadlines, who knows? Whatever, having started to put metaphorical pen to paper, I decided to have a go at writing a blog about blues music for a while, in the absence of an outlet elsewhere. (I’d tried my hand at writing a music blog titled A New Day Yesterday a few years previously, but ran out of steam after a few months.) So on 28 November 2014 I posted the first introductory piece, Journey To The Blues #1, and the next day my first live review, of London-based Detroiter Marcus Malone and his band playing in Edinburgh – and very good they were too, though the review was pretty perfunctory. Still, the blog was now up and running.
I still hadn’t given up on The Blues Magazine though. Having got no traction with live reviews, I submitted brief pieces on a couple of recent releases to the Reviews Editor, Henry Yates – one of Heavy Love by Duke Garwood, and the other of Modern Blues by The Waterboys. And hey, I got a reply! Henry said he couldn’t use them, as I really didn’t seem to like the Garwood album, and he felt the Waterboys’ album wasn’t bluesy enough.* But he said he’d add me to his reviewers list, and get in touch again in the near future, which sounded promising. In the meantime, I reworked the Duke Garwood and Waterboys reviews for the blog, to keep up the momentum with it.
Newly discovered gem Curtis Salgado |
For the next year and a bit I continued to have one or more reviews published in each issue, often of artists I’d never heard of, some of them bang average, but some of them gems, like Malcolm Holcombe and Curtis Salgado. But it was all positive, in a minor way, encouraging me to the point that I successfully pitched a ‘Bluesbreakers’ profile of promising Edinburgh semi-acoustic trio The Rising Souls, which was published in December 2015. Hell, I even got paid! (Though not a lot.)
Sadly though, The Blues Magazine came to a sudden halt in after Issue 31 was published in July 2016, when the owners went bust. After that I did stints reviewing albums for Blues Matters and the American online magazine Blues Rock Review, but one way and another it wasn’t quite the same. I’d been keeping Blues Enthused on the go throughout though, and as I was now receiving press releases and review copies directly from publicists, record labels and independent artists there was plenty of material to generate album reviews, live reviews, interviews and other features.
So now here we are, ten whole years down the line from the start of Blues Enthused, and even longer since I first started to pursue my interest in the Blues. It was a project really, to satisfy my curiosity about the origins of a lot of the music I loved, and it’s been a fascinating tour around the many different rooms in the House of Blues.
*Henry was dead right about the Duke Garwood album – that was really the point of the review. I’d bought it on the strength of a positive write-up in the Guardian, and it was so downright depressing that I wanted to offer my own assessment. He was probably also right that the Waterboys album wasn’t really blues in nature – but it’s a bloody good album all the same.
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