Crowning glory
Britain’s King King brings raw blues to the capital,
North America has been invaded many times by musicians from the United Kingdom, but not too many of them wear a red kilt on stage and hammer out a blues guitar like Alan Nimmo.
His band, King King, was rated the best in British blues in 2012. Having conquered Britain, the talented Scot from Glasgow has his axe pointed directly at Ottawa.
The band is named after a wellknown Los Angeles nightclub and a couple of blues heroes — B.B. and Freddie — and was put together about four years ago as a side project. Nimmo is also in another band led by older brother Stephen and, let’s face it, he felt the need to get out on his own.
With his buddy, bassist Lindsay Coulson, they “put this little project together, which is, to be honest, the way we looked at it in the beginning.” Not any longer “Very quickly people started taking interest.” And so they took the next step and recorded a CD, Take My Hand, which won them some awards. More interest followed. So this March they recorded a second album, Standing in the Shadows (Manhaton Records/Conveyor Canada). “That’s when lots and lots of people started showing interest in the band. It’s been a jump up the scale.”
Nimmo’s hometown can be a pretty hardscrabble city. It’s an industrial, working-class place that likes its music hard driving and basic.
It’s not much of a surprise that Nimmo favours bands like Bad Company and Thin Lizzie. And he looks back on the great U.K. bluesmen of the past like Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac (before Stevie Nicks et al), Eric Clapton and John Mayall.
“Music like this stands the test of time and has been here for a long time and will be here after the fads will pass.”
But if there is one influence above all others, it’s the band Free with lead singer Paul Rodgers and guitar man Paul Kossoff, who died in 1976. “Free just blew my mind.” The band only lasted a few years, but it was enough to hook Nimmo. He says he favours “big vocals and great guitars.
“I would never portray myself as a technical wizard. I’m just an honest player. The things that I play, I mean them all and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t play them.”
The band can’t wait to perform in North America, Nimmo said. They have gigs in Toronto, Montreal and at the Mont Tremblant Blues Festival before closing at Bluesfest on July 13 and 14.
“I just want to get out there and spread the music into as many communities as possible. I’m very sort of precious about the band and I’m always pushing the songwriting and the performance. I’m very, very interested to see the reaction of people from a different continent and a different culture.
“I want to see if what I’m trying to say is coming across and if people can understand where I’m coming from. And if they can see the honesty in what I do. I’m not trying to fool anyone, I’m not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. I just perform because I have to. It’s who I am, it’s inside me and it needs to get out some way. I hope that will come across.”
It’s not that he hasn’t ever been in North America. Last year he was part of a recording in Austin, Tex., with his brother.
“We worked with some great players over there and they had kind of a country background. We noticed a definite difference in how things are played and in attitude. Things are more relaxed. No one was expecting me to shine their shoes or something. It was just a bunch of musicians in a room looking forward to creating.”
British blues tends to be very urban, very crisp and very clean, he says. “Dare I say polished.” He says he wanted a bit more of a North American feel to the new album. “We wanted the new album to be sort of messy, not perfect and not pristine. It’s got that raw emotion in it.”
On stage, Nimmo wears a bright red kilt with a traditional Stuart tartan. It looks good in the lights.
Just in case you’re wondering, there isn’t a Nimmo tartan. The family is originally French and arrived in Scotland in the 15th century. That’s as far back as he has been able to uncover.
There are Nimmos in Canada, he says, “apparently there are a lot of RCMP officers named Nimmo.”