Siegal Electric Band at The Borderline

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 and hot tip of everyone from Mojo to Classic Rock. He’s the songwriter whose recent CD releases sound like career peaks, but are only the start. From one night to the next, he might be a solo acoustic performer or a blood-and-thunder bandleader.

Siegal is known as a bluesman, but it’s just one shade in the palette of an artist who slips between continents, eras and expectations. They say you can’t sing the blues until you’ve lived the life, and when Ian Siegal steps up to the mic, you can hear the slings and arrows. Recent years have seen the songwriter catch fire, with British Blues Awards raining down and consecutive nominations in 2012 & 2013 for Contemporary Album of The Year in the Blues Music Awards - in effect, the Grammys of the Blues.

Siegal came of musical age 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 has produced a modern-day songwriter at the top of his game. But don’t expect him to dine out on his press cuttings or sit polishing his trophies. On his November tour he is playing with a new group of musicians, which he has coined “The Siegal Electric Band”. They hail from Holland, where they’re collectively known as The Rhythm Chiefs. Get ready to be infused with a serious dose of rhythm & Blues.