SEASICK STEVE

Not all stars bloom at a young age, as the man born Steven Gene Wold has proved.

Seasick Steve is something of an anomaly in the blues world, chiefly because he’s been embraced by the mainstream. People who don’t listen to blues music, not in a concerted way, know who he is. Since his breakthrough performance on Jools Holland’s 2006 Hootenanny TV show, Steve (born Steven Gene Wold) has won a BRIT Award, played Glastonbury and even appeared on Top Gear. He’s famous at a level that much of the contemporary blues scene can only marvel at, yet he’s maintained an ‘aw-shucks’, humble persona that suggests a character who hobos around in railway cars and busks in shop doorways.

It’s fair to suggest that the late-in-life nature of his success, and the trials that preceded it, have helped.

“No one should be allowed to be a rock star till they’re over fifty,” he told Blues magazine in 2015. “Not for the music’s sake, cos I think that it should belong to young people, but it’s not very fair on young people, the music business. It tells them that they’re this and that and then it makes them believe their own nonsense. When you have your whole life gone already, if you don’t know by that time who you are, you ain’t never going to know.”

Before anyone had a clue who he was, the Oakland-born Wold made his way through an amazing list of different lives: backing musician who played with Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and other blues luminaries; busker in Paris; indie producer; trainee paramedic… The fact that some of his back story might not be true scarcely matters. Wold retains the kind of mythic aura rarely seen in these days of 24-hour communication and social media.

In 2004 things changed abruptly when he had a heart attack – a bad one. His wife encouraged him to make music at home while he recovered.

“I made my first record in the kitchen,” he recalls. “A friend of mine in England was calling – I mean, I was nobody – asking about what I was doing, seeing how I was doing physically. And I go: ‘Oh, I’m in the kitchen,’ you know. I was making this little record. He asks me to send it to him. He finds a guy who’s got a record company that only has his girlfriend on it, out of his bedroom. So he’s the only person who wants to put my record out.’”

For the same Covid-19-related reasons afflicting the rest of the musical community, the release of his new album, Love & Peace, has been postponed (it’s now due on 24 July), but the thrillingly raw, frills-free vibe is still writ large in the title-track debut single.

“I like the guitars to be not very good, because it makes them harder to play, so it makes you struggle,” he says. “And I like the struggle. The ones I make are beasts. So when I walk out I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not sure if I’m going to get through the song sometimes. I like that, cos to me it’s a little bit more about rock’n’roll. These instruments make me a little bit crazy.”

You’ve heard The White Stripes and The Black Keys. And if you like that kind of music, chances are you’ve heard the many, many more bluesy twosomes that have emerged since the turn of the century. In recent years the blues rock duo has been generously revisited as a band format, last hitting the mainstream (in a major way at least) with Royal Blood. One could be forgiven for thinking it’s all a bit… well, done by now.

Or is it? Two guys from Oshawa, Canada, are currently defying that notion in style; backed by eclectic roots that take in blues, prog, indigenous history and even a stint in a reggae band.

It all began five years ago, when guitarist/ keyboard player Kevin Comeau returned home from Los Angeles (after studying classical music in school, he’d hitch-hiked there to join said reggae band). He and singer/ drummer Cody Bowles met and became “instant best friends”, bonding over their shared nerdiness and love of Rush.

Since then they’ve developed a sound that marries prog tendencies with the sound of Wolfmother getting freaky with The White Stripes – noisy, woozy blues rock with guitars that slash like sabres, topped with vocal shrieks straight from the trippiest corner of hell. Their influences run the gamut from Elmore James to Duane Allman, Rush and Jack White. It’s not straight-ahead 12-bar stuff by any stretch, but it’s how you imagine the early masters would have wanted their legacy to live on.

“Blues is a more visceral form of music that touches people in a deeper place, whereas prog feels like an intellectualised form of rock,” the band observe. “Both have their place, and we try to strike a balance between thinking and feeling in our music. The idea is to honour where we come from, but not get too caught up with recreating the past.”

“Tombstone Blues by Bob Dylan is such a great distillation of the Chicago blues form,” guitarist Kevin Comeau says. “Mike Bloomfield’s guitar is screaming-hot in the mix. When I was around fourteen I got Muddy Waters’s Hard Again album from my local library. Muddy always called Mike Bloomfield his honorary son. So by way of Dylan, Bloomfield and Muddy Waters, I had discovered the blues. I then discovered BB King through his Live At The Regal album and I was hooked.” Right now Crown Lands are still a relatively unknown quantity. But new album Spit It Out, produced by Dave Cobb (Rival Sons’ go-to guy), looks set to change all that. “Working with Dave Cobb was great!” says Comeau. “He prioritised capturing the spontaneity in our performances, and we feel that it is an accurate representation of who we are as artists.”

This identity is also informed by their own personal roots – Comeau is Jewish, while Bowles’s heritage is half Mi’kmaq, an indigenous tribe from Nova Scotia – which feed into their lyrics. They say their song End Of The Road is a key example.

“The song references the Highway of Tears,” says Comeau, “an infamous highway in North British Columbia where a lot of indigenous women go missing.”

“There’s been no recourse and no follow-up,” Cody adds. There are so many roadblocks that prevent any progress from happening or any reconciliation moving forward, so we’re trying to raise awareness that this is happening in a country that claims to be very progressive and safe for threatened, vulnerable people.”

“Blues is a visceral form of music that touches people

in a deeper place.”

The sound of TTB is the sound of Delta history being immaculately cooked up with great vats of soul, Americana and jam-band spirit, by some of the finest virtuosos in the business. “My dad would take me to see BB King,” says guitarist/Allmans descendent Derek Trucks, “and he’d get chill-bumps on his arm and be like: ‘Look at this!’ That was how he would gauge a show. So from a very early age, that’s what was important.”