Danny Bryant
The British blueser heads out for dates, some with his Big Band.
Once declared “a national blues treasure” in Classic Rock, Cambridgeshire’s Danny Bryant checks in ahead of a tour for his latest album Means Of Escape.
You last spoke to Classic Rock a year ago for your biggest ever tour, promoting your tenth album, Revelation. Did the step up, which included a date at London’s Islington Academy, go as planned? Yeah, but I didn’t really feel at home at Islington, so we booked the Borderline for this tour, which then closed down. So now I’m at Dingwalls. It’s where Stevie Ray Vaughan played his first London gig, and that’s good enough for me [laughs].
Do you no longer aspire to play mid-sized venues such as the Islington Academy? Of course you want to keep moving upwards, but I’ve always been happy to make a living from what I do. The size of the halls that I play really isn’t that important.
Are you bringing the Big Band, with you this time? For certain shows, yeah. But taking a nine-piece band on the road is expensive, so some are as a four-piece, which allows me to jam much more, and others with larger stages are with the Big Band. I enjoy both formats equally.
Your previous album, Revelation, was deeply affected by the loss of your father, and that subject resurfaces on the new record, Means Of Escape, as a poignant acoustic tribute called Skin And Bone. Another track, Where The River Ends, also taps that same emotion. Yeah, but I don’t think of Means Of Escape as a sad album. After such a very personal record, this one needed to be more upbeat, and if anything it taps into a feeling of redemption. It’s about the joy of making music. Tired Of Trying was written in honour of your friend and mentor, Walter Trout. Almost as a joke, I decided to do a track that was completely in Walter’s style. When I sent it to him it gave him a good chuckle. It was done in just two takes. Like the entire album, it was cut as closely to live as possible.
2019 marks your twentieth anniversary as a professional musician. Why not make a thing of that? I hadn’t realised that till you mentioned it [laughs]. I will probably say I got serious about things in 2000, and next year can be a twentieth anniversary tour.
“The size of the halls that I play really isn’t that
important.”
Having been around the block a bit, are you called upon to do mentoring yourself? I tried to help out Laurence Jones when he was thirteen or fourteen, and I give opening gigs to younger artists like The Mentulls and Tom Killner, but I’m not quite ready for administering a guiding hand in the same way that Walter did with me, though maybe in the future?
The last date is on October 19.