By David O’Neill
Having had the pleasure of interviewing Walter Trout on our #SmallStagesBigSounds podcast recently, this was too good an opportunity to miss. When I told my brother, (a longtime Trout fan), he was in too! So much so, when I picked him up, he was wearing a Walter Trout T shirt from the 1995 tour in Birmingham!
First up was the inimitable Cam Cole. The one man band has spent the best part of the past three years since I first saw him in Tiny Rebel in Cardiff touring the USA and Australia as well as appearing at Glastonbury last year. Settling himself astride his battered metal trunk with his guitar and drum footstool in place dressed in an embroidered jacket and mad hatter style top hat many in the crowd were unaware what to expect.
However, from the minute his fingers started picking and sliding that bottleneck up and down his fretboard you could see the jaws drop to his unusual musical style of deep southern blues/bluegrass sound. Normally a solo artist he was joined at various points by an equally unusually dressed compatriot on drums/percussion and backing vocals. This was an excellent set of seriously different blues/roots music that is unfortunately unlikely to make a mainstream impact due to the lyrical content within the songs in this woke socially conscious times. Nevertheless, there were about 800 people present who enjoyed it, myself and older brother included.
Looking around the room, it was obvious from the age and gender majority that they were present for one man only, the blues/rock guitar legend Walter Trout. His entry onto the stage as the first band member was greeted by the almost capacity crowd with some serious cheers and whistling. Once the remainder of the band (Michael Leisure, drums, Teddy Andreadis, keys, and the ice cool John Avila, bass) they kicked off with an incredible introductory guitar riff from the Bo Diddly track ‘I Can Tell’. From that point on he had the crowd eating from the palm of his finger picking right hand, (and the left contributed a bit too!)
The story about his recovery from liver transplant 11 years ago was inspirational and a good time to encourage the audience to sign up to the organ donor register too!
With ‘Courage In The Dark’ from the latest album ‘Broken’ receiving another great response Walter became quite a solid reflective raconteur, with stories continuing throughout the night, but the personal highlight for me was the ‘Say Goodbye To The Blues’ tribute to John Mayall. Introducing the song, Trout recounts an incident involving his former bandmates Mick Taylor and John McVie (from Fleetwood Mac) where Mr McVie, who seemed to be unconscious, suddenly woke up and expressed a preference for music other than Stevie Nicks’.
‘I Saw My Mamma Crying’ continued to display the ability of Walter to make his guitar sing.
‘Broken’ is Walter’s 31st album but before completion, Michael Leisure apparently said that despite playing with John Lee Hooker and others that they had never written a boogie woogie song and so ‘Bleed’ was born! He was joined on harmonica by Will Wilde on stage extolled by Walter as the best harmonica player in the world today.
Throughout the two hour set he was joined on stage at intervals by Brett Smith Daniels, a very good blues guitarist, but there was a superb reaction to the addition of James Oliver to join him on stage to duet.
This was an exceptional evening’s musical journey for me. If you get the chance if you have (or haven’t) seen Walter Trout live then I would recommend you get along to one of his future shows the next time he visits these shores!
- All photos © Bandtogs/Über Rock.