Tom Rodwell' critically acclaimed debut album 'Live Humble' (Fireplace GB-RPP-10-001) follows years of extensive touring in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, the US, Switzerland and Holland. Rodwell and his band 'Storehouse' are now an established independent club and festival act, and have supported Leon Russell, Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi, Otis Taylor, Son of Dave and psychedelic reggae pioneers Trinity Roots.
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, Rodwell's 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.
Rodwell's 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.
NME: Tom Rodwell is Sheffield's answer to Lightnin' Hopkins.
