The Ealing Saturday Blues

As I mentioned the other day, the Ealing Summer festival has a lot of music events going on right now. I attended bits and pieces of the Blues festival yesterday. No top-tier acts, but it was a lot of fun (and when entry is only a quid you can’t really moan).

The first act we caught was the Dani Wilde Band. Only 21 (and her band looked younger than that), Dani’s a singer and guitar player. She plays an unpolished blues, though her singing style is more soul. Her original songs were predictable but delivered with guts. Her voice was powerful enough to be engaging. Her band laid down the requisite groove (in fact, her brother’s harmonica was a highlight). A couple of the covers were safe bets but classics – Muddy Waters’s “Hoochie Coochie Man” and John Lee Hooker’s “In the Mood”. Shemekia Copeland’s “Ghetto Child” was different, and quite good.

We watched the Soul Britannia Band (a spinoff from the BBC TV series of the same name, I’m told) for a while. Their musicianship was a step up and it was great just listening to them groove. The singing wasn’t as spectacular and it was sometimes hard to tell which blues standard they were funking through. Great head-bopping tunes, though.

After leaving the festival park for a meal we returned to catch the last few songs of Ray Stubbs & His Amazing One Man Blues Band. And Ray was amazing. Wailing harmonica, great guitar, unshakable kick-drum beat, and whatever else he could fit in (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kazoosaphone before). Ray was feeling it, and so were we. He was sweating a river by the end. Check out Ray on YouTube. I’ve got to catch him again: the real deal.

The last ones we caught were Downliners Sect. I’d never heard of these guys before. This is surprising because they’ve been together since 1963, and started out as R&B bands just like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. Maybe it’s not surprising, though, because – unlike those bands – they never had a UK hit. And despite some forays into rock and country they pretty much ended up back at good-time singalong rhythm and blues. It certainly looked like all the originals still in the band. They were fun for a few songs but then it stayed pretty same-y.