Tom Rodwell and his band Storehouse kick off our FREE December Music Programme this Thursday 13 Dec at 9pm in Lounge with 'wonderful hypnotic boogie'. Expect great tunes, world class acts and sweet as drinks.
Tom Rodwell's music is based in hard blues minimalism, but filtered through an improvisatory, no-fixed arrangements approach. As influences from free improvisation, spirituals, calypso and West African Juju music have filtered into his style, this flexible approach has made his guitar playing harder to categorise, yet more suggestive and resonant for younger, bohemian audiences.
Similarly, Rodwellʼs vocals and song choice - usually half-remembered fragments of traditional spirituals or bizarre calypso tales - have deliberately mixed messages, with the sacred and profane competing for space on the dancefloor. “The feeling is the only content of this music,” he is fond of saying, focussing attention on subtext, accentuation, and social function.
Rodwellʼs reinvention of blues as a dance form, (the raucous Storehouse live show has appeared in hundreds of clubs, festivals, galleries, rent parties and dive bars internationally since 2003), upsets purists, but also those who see this apparently ʻeasyʼ music as one-dimensional and static. It is instead, he insists, music that is still mutating into new shapes, away from the modern gaze, somewhere where rock nʼ roll never happened.
