There’s a great charity gig at Lymestone Brewery on Saturday night (31st May) featuring the cream of Stone’s musical talent – Cobalt, The Ben Owen Trio and The Blueshounds. Here’s a great preview by Andy MacDonald featuring interviews with two of the bands…
Stone’s bursting at the seams at the moment with top musical talent, and three of the best bands we have are all performing at Lymestone Brewery to raise money for the ‘Have a Heart’ charity.
Ben Owen has been causing a stir for a few years now. He’s just topped 4,000 fans on his YouTube channel and has a new EP out soon.
Here’s The Ben Owen Trio performing ‘Be My Baby’ at The Sugarmill last year…
He’s performing at the gig on Saturday again as The Ben Owen Trio, so how does he find that different from performing individually, as he’s done for years?
Ben said: “Performing with a backing band is really good fun, I mean I couldn’t possibly pick between solo gigs or band gigs. Both have a completely different feel. Obviously with a band you get a bigger sound, right now I’ve been working hard on rehearsals with these guys and it’s sounding really cool!”
What can we expect to hear from you on Saturday?
“At this particular gig, I’m mostly playing my own recent material that’ll be available on the upcoming Dirty Little Secret EP. We’ve got some covers in there too of some of my favourite artists/bands, some Stray Cats, David Bowie, White Stripes.”
Do you miss performing your earlier material, like Famous?
“I don’t miss the old material because I feel like as a musician you constantly progress. Certain songs stand the test of time and become a regular part of set lists, yet other songs come and go. I really feel like right now though, the new stuff I’m writing is the happiest I’ve been with any of my past work. I’m just excited for people to hear my new songs.”
You do some great cover versions too.
“With covers I like to work with friends and do collaborations. Especially on YouTube because it’s available to a worldwide audience. I like to slightly alter covers, sometimes strip them right back, other times rock them up in a completely different way.”
How long does it take you to do your hair!?
“Haha, it depends what hairstyle I’m going for that day! Straight, curly, big or natural… I do probably spend far too long on my hair. It’s all come from my favourite bands like Mötley Crue, Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row & a lot of the 1980’s hard rock fashion. I got into all of that when I was about 13, I don’t know why but it just appealed to me so much. But yeah, I feel like everything we’re influenced by all combined together kind of creates who we are.”
Moving on to The Blueshounds, I asked Al Lee, lead guitarist, what we can expect to hear from them at the gig on Saturday, and whether they were looking to move into other musical genres…
Al said: “The Blueshounds, as you may know, are a Stone-based blues-rock band – ‘Electric rhythm and blues’, it says on all of the posters and business cards (I know, I did ‘em!), and we think this is a concise and perfect summation of what is on offer. We base our sound and style on a modern American blues, but with a few twists of rock, and a large helping of soul. Our typical set list is a healthy melange of cover versions and originals, of different styles, varying intensities, and of contrasting musical textures. Despite our music being grounded and built on blues foundations, we are always looking to vary the mellifluous, musical landscape ahead of us by trying new songs and new approaches.
So, to answer your question about ‘moving into other genres’, I would say that would we aim to incorporate certain elements of different musical genres into our existing methodology. For example, I would try and integrate a few jazz or rock guitar licks into one of our songs, whilst still retaining the essence of what we are as a group. Rather this, than we just ‘do a jazz song’ or ‘do a folk song’.
As for musical specifics for this event; our set will constitute – at the time of writing – nine songs, of which just four will be cover versions, and the remaining pieces original songs created by the various members of the intrepid Hounds. This is quite exciting for us, as looking to the future, we do intend to incorporate more original material in our live sets. And interestingly enough, even the covers that we perform are approached from our own unique perspective.”
Cobalt are a fantastic ‘bottleneck blues’ band featuring gig organiser Lainy Davies on drums. She also plays drums in The Ben Owen Trio, so she’s in for a busy night!
Hope you can make the gig on Saturday at Lymestone Brewery – it’s going to be a fantastic night. All the details you need are in the poster at the top of this article.
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