‘Everybody seems to be dazed’ (From The Northern Echo)

‘Everybody seems to be dazed’

6:07pm Thursday 2nd February 2012 in Music By Matt Westcott

Matt Westcott speaks to blues singer and guitarist Walter Trout ahead of his gig at the O2 Academy in Newcastle on March 7.

His new album, Blues for the Modern Daze, is out in April.

WHEN Walter Trout started writing songs, his then girlfriend told him blues music had only two themes, and he should steer clear of them at all costs.

One involved being unlucky in love and the other well, the other is not suitable to mention in a family newspaper. Now, one of the world’s foremost guitarists, Trout has, in the main, heeded that advice.

His latest album, Blues for the Modern Daze, is typically untypical.

“It’s pretty self-explanatory,” says the former stalwart of the John Mayall Band when asked about the title. “If you take a look at the world right now, everybody seems to be in a daze. It’s a concept album with different takes on the blues form – 15 originals based on my thoughts on modern life.

“There’s a lot on there about income inequality, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, corporations are running things and governments are almost an anachronism.”

He then quotes from the track Money Rules The World. “It goes ‘Politicians bought and sold, but they’re doing just what they’re told,” he says.

“They’re pretending that they’ve got our backs, but they really belong to Exxon and Goldman Sachs.

They’re standing with their flag unfurled, but it’s money that rules the world,”

Trout, who lives in Huntington Beach, California, is clearly a political being.

“Something has to happen,” he says. “Over here, ever since the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, this country is getting more and more screwed up.

“It is becoming the Corporate States of America.

I hope it’s going to be able to be turned around because it’s a little frightening the thought of what we are going to leave to our children here.”

Airing your beliefs so overtly is not always advisable in the US – just ask the Dixie Chicks – but Trout feels he is on the right side of public opinion.

“The second verse of that song is ‘They are trying to say to me and you that corporations are people too, but the way that it seems to be they are trying to steal our democracy’.”

TROUT, who grew up studying the blues pioneers, believes today’s musicians have a duty to innovate rather than simply replicate. In short, the blues must move with the times.

“I think it has to. I think any kind of art form has to. If you look at painting you can’t deny the genius of Michelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci, but that doesn’t mean that Picasso shouldn’t have done what he did,” he said. “It has to move on, it has to grow. There has to be experimentation. I am not saying that I am any sort of innovator, I just believe that if all you do is come out and imitate guys from the past then the thing will die a painful death.

“It’s then in its death throes and it becomes a museum piece. It becomes nostalgia, becomes a novelty.

It’s like lounge acts in Vegas that come out and do Doo Wop music. It’s fun to hear it and they can do it real well, but if that’s all there is then it is nostalgia.

“I immersed myself in that tradition when I was a kid. I studied all those guys. I learned how they played and I can pick them out on records immediately, who is playing what. But I am not interested in just rehashing that and mimicking them.

“Blues music didn’t stop in 1955. If Muddy Waters had felt like that he never would have put a drum and an electric guitar into it. He would have stayed one man, one guitar and that’s what the blues would have been. But when he came out in the early Fifties and started putting drums and electric guitars and a piano in it, that was a revolutionary step at that time,” says Trout.

Like his mentor Mayall, Trout has no intentions of packing his guitar away anytime soon.

“I am getting to live the dream of my childhood, he says. “There are some times that the travelling gets to me. I am going to be 61 in a month-and-a-half.

That can kind of get me a little bit physically. But if I get out on the stage and I have an enthused crowd that is showing a response to what I do, and they give me that energy, I feel like I am 17 up there.

“It is one of the most beautiful and spiritual experiences you can have. John Lee Hooker did a gig two days before he died and he was 85, I have done a couple of gigs with BB King recently and he is 86.

“I can’t imagine not wanting to do it, I am one of the lucky few.”

• Tickets: £17.50. O2academynewcastle.co.uk