Ian Siegal & Quimby at Scala

Ladies and Gentlemen: Ian Siegal has entered the building. If you know the name, but not the game, it’s high time you made his acquaintance. He’s the multiple British Blues Awards winner, the European Blues Awards winner, the Blues Music Awards nominee and the hot tip of everyone from Mojo to Classic Rock.

With his latest album Candy Store Kid hitting the top spot in the iTunes UK blues chart and collecting best album and best song awards, nobody would deny this modern songwriter is at the top of his game; but don’t expect him to dine out on his press cuttings or sit polishing his trophies. For Siegal, it’s all about the next show, the next song and the next great record.

For 2014 he has assembled a new band, recruited from Holland. These musicians represent some of Europe’s hottest young blues-playing talent. In fact, they’re so good they have a recording contract in their own right but they jumped at the chance of touring with Ian Siegal.

He’s known as a bluesman, but it’s just one shade in the palette of an artist who slips between continents, eras and expectations. He came of musical age in the Eighties via a love of nascent rock ‘n’ rollers like Little Richard and Elvis, alongside the Stones songs that played on the family stereo. By the Nineties, he’d fallen into a blues obsession fuelled by titans like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Charlie Patton, marinated in the experimentalism of Tom Waits.

This musical molotov cocktail soon changed Siegal’s trajectory, luring him away from art college to an apprenticeship busking across Germany. And it was here, eyeball-to-eyeball with a transient Berlin public, that he honed both his musicality – the spit-and-grit vocal and the masterful slide-guitar – and the stage skills that fuel his incendiary shows to this day.