Bringing Back The True Blues

From The Belfast(Ireland) Telegraph, Nov 30, 2007:

Bringing back the true blues

Since the White Stripes brought the primal form of pop back into the modern mainstream, there's been a blues explosion across the UK

Friday, November 30, 2007

By David Sinclair

As Count Basie once said, "There are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues." He was talking about singers and swingers like Billie Holiday and Big Joe Turner. But even if the great bandleader had lived to see the very different ways in which the latest wave of performers are treating the blues, he would have had little cause to revise his opinion.

Ever since the White Stripes suddenly became a mainstream pop phenomenon while still numbering songs such as "Death Letter" by the Mississippi bluesman Son House in their core repertoire, the blues has become, if not fashionable, then a lot more relevant to the modern music mix.

In the wake of the White Stripes, various young groups, many of them duos, have picked up the baton – from Two Gallants and Gallon Drunk to the Black Keys and the Black Diamond Heavies – although they haven't all necessarily ended up running in the same direction with it. Meanwhile, the rise of Seasick Steve, the 66-year-old blues shouter of no fixed abode who has been the toast of this year's UK festival circuit, has signalled a renewed enthusiasm among fans and bands alike for the primal musical form from which all modern pop and rock derives. Somewhere close to the heart of this new blues explosion, is an organisation calling itself

Not The Same Old Blues Crap, which promotes gigs, sells records and runs a website at www.Punk RockBlues.co.uk. The company is run by Rupert Orton and business partner Jim Johnstone, the name comes from a series of sampler albums released by the Fat Possum label based in Oxford, Mississippi.

"We found those albums to be really inspiring music," says Orton, a youthful fortysomething, who also plays guitar in a punkabilly-blues band called the Jim Jones Revue, and is the brother of Beth Orton. "It was blues that didn't owe anything to boring guitar solos, Stevie Ray Vaughan rubbish or things like Eric Clapton. It was quite close to what we understood punk rock to be," Orton says.

Four years ago, unable to get gigs for his previous band, Orton started promoting his own club night at The Windmill in south London, which he called Not The Same Old Blues Crap. The club quickly became bigger than the band and Orton has since become a key mover and shaker on the new blues scene.

As far as Orton is concerned, blues was the original punk music, a realisation that came to him when he saw the Gun Club led by the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce playing in the early 1980s. What grabbed his attention was the way in which Pierce refashioned old Robert Johnson songs along punk-rock lines, a methodology that Orton believes is more in keeping with the original spirit of the blues.

"We call it Not The Same Old Blues Crap, but in no way is it against old blues," Orton says. "On the contrary, we love old blues. Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, all those original country blues players are incredible.

"That's true blues," Orton says. "Where it got mangled in this country was the reliance on virtuoso white guitar playing in the 1960s. Some of it was brilliant, but a lot of it just went up its own backside. I'm not interested in watching a bunch of accountants in their spare time doing Eric Clapton solos on a Sunday. There's no interest in that whatsoever."

This view is echoed by Scott H Biram, a 33-year-old bluesman from Austin, Texas who recently toured the UK in one of Orton's packages. Like Seasick Steve, Biram offers a manic, one-man-band experience, foot pumping away on an amplified block as he steers a course through the furthest reaches of country blues and hillbilly music.

"Blues in the last several decades has kind of lost its way in a lot of musicians," Biram says. "It's kind of been watered down and over-produced. Much as I love BB King, I don't feel he's the roots of the blues as much as Muddy Waters and Lightning Hopkins and Big Joe Williams and Mississippi Fred McDowell. Somewhere the blues turned more into rhythm and blues. I think that was a big change. People like Robert Cray and Keb Mo – it's not that I hate their music. It's just that I'm disappointed when people think that is really the blues. It's a little too safe for me."

But not all blues players on the modern circuit have rejected technical sophistication. Rising stars like Joe Bonamassa, Derek Trucks, Devon Allman (son of Gregg) and Stoney Curtis have clearly been influenced as much by the white, often British blues exponents of the 1960s as they have by the black American originators of the music. And these players certainly have no fear of the extended guitar solo.

Stephen Dale Petit, the guitarist from California whose debut album, Guitararama, is comprised almost entirely of instrumental tracks, was so in thrall to the guitar playing of Clapton and the other stars of the 1960s British blues boom that he moved to England in the 1990s and has been here ever since.

"The British contribution to blues, as we sit here in 2007, is equal in my eyes to what Robert Johnson did, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Charlie Patton, all of those guys all the way through to Muddy Waters," Petit says. How so? "You start with skiffle. The British were fiends for it. And you had for whatever reason musicians in Britain who were as fired up about the blues as you could be about anything. I don't know how to define it. This mysterious Surrey delta where you get all these guitar players. The inventiveness of the British mind. There is a huge, natural, instinctive inventiveness."

Frustrated by various contractual difficulties, Petit became a licensed busker on the London Underground, where he says the incredible response to his music both encouraged and financed the recording of the Guitararama album.

"A lot of times the people there didn't know they were listening to blues at all. It was just a guitar. But when they start to stack up against the wall 10 and 20 deep and listen to you and the song finishes and they're still there, then you know something's up," Petit says.

As well as playing gigs to promote his album, Petit is currently undertaking a "masterclass" tour of universities and colleges throughout Britain, lecturing on the history and legacy of the blues.

"Part of the punk myth is that anybody could do it," he says. "And so lots of people did do it. But then it became that in order to play punk you had to be unlearned. But I'm not so sure about that. Because there are certain things in blues music that you are only going to get through spending time with the instrument, and I don't know that that's a bad thing. I think you just have to have a balance. You want to hone your craft. But you don't want to polish out all the bits that are exciting. I'm not going to pretend I can't play."

'This is Punk Rock Blues Vol 1 is out now on Punk Rock Blues records

www.PunkRockBlues.co.uk