When Seasick Steve introduced CW Stoneking to the stage at the BBC 4’s Folk America festival in London last year he said how he was turned onto him by Charlie Gillett and laughed as he told the audience: “This boy’s lost in the 1920s and 30s. He’s not kind of, he really lost”. What followed was a prime lesson in how to steal a show as CW, along with his band The Primitive Horn Orchestra, proceeded to swing their way through a set of what he calls blues, hokum and jungle music that led the Observer to proclaim “hearing Stoneking perform live is, somehow, like listening to an old 78 recovered from a dusty attic in New Orleans”.
Born in the secluded town of Katherine, Australia to American parents (his father, the author – and occasional screenwriter for TV shows such as Mission Impossible – Billy Marshall Stoneking, emigrated in the 70s – “the bumper stickers said, ‘America, love it or leave it’. So I left.”) and then brought up in the Aboriginal community of Papunya (pop. 299) his love of the blues was nurtured in his teens and his skill as a writer and performer honed in some of themost God-forsaken bars of Australia’s outback before travelling the country solo and then with the band The Blue Tits. His debut album King Hokum – released in 2006 – led to the kind of international acclaim that allowed him extensive tours of the USA and Europe and was followed in 2009 by the release in Australia of Jungle Blues – a record that is now finally to receive an eagerly awaited and long overdue UK release.
CW Stoneking plays live at the Workmans Club this 29th January 2011.
Tickets on sale this Monday 20th September priced €15
