The American
custom-built Firebirds and Les Pauls, guitar-fact fans!). Petit’s new album The Crave shows up some of his wider influences. California is a cover of the Tupac Shakur/Dr Dre track California Love, but as he says the song is coming full circle: “That riff started on a Joe Cocker record, Woman to Woman. A rap band called Zapp sampled that, then a couple of people from Zapp were involved with the Dr Dre production. I just thought it was a stonking, killer groove and I liked the idea of bringing it back full circle. All roads lead back to the blues, and to spiritual music – what you’d call gospel – which often had the same songs, just with different lyrics.” He’s no slavish copier of old traditions, aiming at his own version of the blues. Certainly his cover of Robert Johnson’s Cross Road Blues is different, with unexpected, epic strings. Who did the arrangement, I asked. Chris Elliott, who’s worked with Mark Ronson on Amy Winehouse’s Rehab and Back To Black among many others. (Incidentally Petit’s accent is extraordinarily like Ronson’s – perhaps not so surprising given both of their transatlantic backgrounds.) The idea was to come up with a fresh approach to a song that is generally played in a traditional Robert Johnson style, or the Cream way, Petit says, but even Robert Johnson didn’t restrict himself to a particular form of the blues. He played Broadway show tunes, what would now be called vaudeville numbers. Only later, when the music collectors in the 1950s went to the south, was blues pigeonholed into a particular sound. “The world doesn’t need another blues album that has nothing new to say”, says Petit. He has no interest in preaching to the converted. His first album, Guitarama, was more straightahead blues. This time around he wanted to make something accessible
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to non-blues fans while still being true to his passion for blues music. It works. Aside from the hip hop roots of California, the album’s opener, Three Gunslingers, is in the early ’70s British electric blues tradition, Let There Be More Light has country elements while Gun Song has a Howlin’ Wolf vibe, all with a distinct, hard edge. Petit gets his influences from the original American bluesmen - he played with two of the Kings – Albert and BB – but also from the British blues players. It was the Brits that hooked him into the blues, he says, from The Beatles, The Stones and The Animals through Hendrix – he includes Jimi in the British sphere as Hendrix would not have happened in the States. They led him back to Chuck Berry, who was on Chess records, which also recorded Muddy Waters and so on. The influences they quoted led him back to Son House and Charlie Patton. But he also saw The Clash, who were influenced by the MC5 and Iggy Pop, who in turn went back to the blues. Many people think of the blues as “down in the dumps, woke up this morning, my woman left last week, my dog won’t speak to me, I ain’t got a job and the water’s been cut off” kind of music” says Petit, “and that’s part of it. The blues was a music forged in
horrific conditions, in a certain time in American history so I won’t trivialise that for a second, but it was also always Saturday night music: let’s have a party, ain’t it great to be alive, and damn the rest of it. Petit came to London in the early 1990s, drawn by the music, and made a few pounds busking. It’s said he ‘fell in with‘ Eric Clapton, Dave Gilmour, Ringo Starr and Joe Strummer. Is that just music biz myth? Not exactly he says. He went to an Eric Burdon gig as a kind of pilgrimage. Someone he knew invited him backstage where he met Phil May, singer from The Pretty Things, who hit it off with him and invited him to sit in with a friends’ band. Imagine Petit’s surprise when he turned up on stage at the small club, plugged his guitar in, looked up and saw Dave Gilmour standing next to him. “May hadn’t mentioned who his friends were!” Petit deadpans. “Blues is a magic music”, says Petit. “It’s the motherlode”. By getting immersed in it you can make your own, contemporary blues. And what five words, I wondered, would Stephen Dale Petit choose to describe his own version? He takes the question seriously: “Fresh, provocative, powerful, intense… and touching.” H