Fink

Coffee table collections be damned: on SundayNight BluesClub,Vol.1, shape-shifting singer-songwriter Fink is making modern blues without the tacky veneer

Contemporary blues is a tag often slapped like market stall brut on music undeserving of the description, but what would a genuinely contemporary blues record sound like? This is the question Fin Greenall – aka singer-songwriter Fink – first found himself asking while creating new project Sunday Night Blues Club. The answer is more what it should not be…

“A lot of contemporary blues is total bollocks, let’s be honest,” Fin tells TG. “The new stuff isn’t cutting it. It feels like money – the guttural side of it is gone – and artists like Eric Clapton, bless him, have got a little bit to answer for on that one; for this slick white, late-70s blues fan stuff. It’s the absolute anthesis of a sweaty dive in the 50s where everyone’s doing drugs and dancing and sweating.”

Fin is in a good position to comment. He started as a DJ and electronic music producer, before longtime label partners Ninja Tune sagely requested he don the singer-songwriter mantle. He has a DJ’s love of the club room, the deep-catalogue obsession of an electronic producer and the observant nature of a songwriter in equal measure. When facing the selfimposed challenge of creating a modern blues record, Fin’s first step was to immerse himself – digging through the record shop racks near his adopted home in Berlin, burning through biographies at night and toying with lyrical fragments by day. “I just got totally addicted to it,” he tells TG. “With blues, you can go to the studio and by the end of the day you might have a track in your pocket. You channel the right emotion and you don’t sit for a week writing lyrics, you sit for 20 minutes and it’s all about the delivery.”

The key to the process was striking a balance between the feel and the other elements still relevant to a modern audience, without falling into what Fin describes as “the whole ‘I’m a wanderin’ hobo on the trains’ approach”.

“[For instance], on those old blues records, the lead artist recorded with a pick-up band and often they were done in a day, so I wanted to keep that energy,” he explains. “When I would reach out for a session from David Shirley, who’s the drummer from New Orleans I used on a couple of tracks, I’d just drop [the results] over the track and the job was done.”

Describing Fin’s collaborators as a pick-up band is something of a stretch, given it includes the likes of horn/wind extraordinaire Colin Stetson (Arcade Fire/Bon Iver) on the record’s stunning vocal centre-piece She Was Right, slide maestro Martin Harley and fret-tapping wizard Mike Dawes. However, it’s mercifully light on unnecessarily flash fingering, favouring stripped-back arrangements and leaving the tunings – many of which were sourced from an old ‘teach yourself blues’ book – to do the talking. “I’d retune my guitar to whatever crazy Robert Johnson or Lightnin’ Hopkins tuning they mentioned in this book, but it would sound completely new to me,” says Fin. “A lot of these are G Major configurations, but it means that you’ve got to feel your way around. You keep it tight, keep it aggressive and you start to realise how the old guys did it.”

Acoustic duties were predominantly entrusted to a hand-crafted Brady III nylonstring and an appropriately embattled 1984 Martin D-28, nicknamed The Orwell. “That Martin really fought me tooth and nail for its first three or four tours,” explains Fink. “It had been sat in a living room stand for the last 30 years and it was perfectly happy. Then I get it and it’s in a case and on tour for a year and it really was pissed off about that. Now, instead of being a diva, it wants to work, it wants to play.”

Fortunately, the resulting record is better grounded. There are classic traits aplenty, but contemporary influences pull them apart as fast as you can identify them. Little Bump tackles addiction through space-y sub-Saharan desert blues echoes, Cold Feet pulls in squelching drones and bass-y vocals to craft a haunting, 21st century spiritual and She

Was Right flips the ‘woman done wronged me’ formula on its head.

“I’m trying to write songs that are a little more interesting than, ‘Oh, I miss my girlfriend’,” concludes Fin. “There’s so much to write about and so much economy in the writing – that balance between being vague and precise is quite a delicious little game. I thought I would struggle for subject matter, but honestly, with the blues, that’s not a problem.” SundayNightBluesClub,Vol.1 is out now on Fink’s R’COUP’D label