Northeast Music Guide

Keeping British Blues Alive For a band, after 4 decades to be able to comfortably fill the Cluny with fans, you have to have a quality live product. Nine Below Zero have been delivering this quality since they reformed for their 10 th anniversary in 1990. The crowd clearly loved the band and Dennis Greaves (lead vocals, guitar) provided much cockney banter to fill the gaps between the perfectly-performed blues numbers. It’s amazing (to a novice like me) that a band can manage to have such a diverse repertoire while still working within the Anglo-American blues style. No plodding blues, everything coloured with the individual talents of the band members. They stormed through such numbers as “Can I Get A Witness”, “Homework” and “Got my Mojo Working” with such enthusiasm, you wonder how they keep it going after so many years, and miles of touring. Mark Feltham, a very much in-demand master of the harmonica played a blinder of a gig tonight. How he made the sounds he ...

Sweet Music at the D&P Alphabetti Spaghetti Theatre are about comedy, music and performance in the perfectly bijoux surroundings of the Dog and Parrot . Tonight was about music, some astoundingly high quality music. Meghann Clancy’s performance prompted a tweet to Tom Robinson, a beautiful voice and confident stage presence of a maturity well beyond her actual age. I live her song “Touch Ground” inspired by a bullied friend, and her rendition of Miranda Lambert’s country masterpiece   “Gunpowder and Lead” a song about a jailbird’s getting ready for his return, with a shotgun, is spot-on. She started with her recent single, "Neck of the Woods", and quickly brought a fairly party-minded audience into her worlds of teenage romantic longing, nostalgia for one's childhood and everyday struggles and triumphs. "Give Me Everything" , quite suggestive for a young lady with a guitar, but still lovely! Sinead Livingston played a combination of folk and...

London blues-influenced band Nine Below Zero fresh from another successful tour of Europe and a string of dates along the south coast of England head north to play the Arc in Stockton-On-Tees on Friday May 17 and the Cluny in Newcastle on Saturday May 18. Nine Below Zero built an almost obsessive following in the early 1980 with their take on American blues, while maintaining the energy of punk in their live performances. It was captured in their first album, Live At The Marquee, which was re-released towards the end of 2012. Frontman and founding member Dennis Greaves said: “We decided to put it out again after Universal found some film from the night that we didn’t know still existed. They also found the encores we did, which were not on the original album. In those days, you couldn’t get much more than about 50 minutes on a album. So this will be of great interest to our fans.” Nine Below’s success continued to build during the 1980s. They performed their single 11+1...

Blues Punk Noir When Burning Condors sent me these songs, I had no idea what to expect. I hadn't heard of the band, I hadn't heard their music. Some shocking musical oversight by me.     Their debut album "Round Our Way" was recorded in Nashville  in the Shack Shakers's  double bassist, Mark Robertson's studio. He was highly impressed with the Condors when they supported the Shakers on a run of gigs last year. Injury (a collapsed lung) for Marcus "Tommy" Thompson the vocalist threatened the completion of the album. The incident happened at a gig at the legendary 12 Bar Club and necessitated surgery immediately after the gig. I must see them live...how intense must that gig have been? But, stuff staying in the UK and recuperating, there was an album to record in Nashville Tennessee. So off they went, the mad buggers! And it's fortunate they did as the album features performances by session legend Dave Roe (double bassist for Johnny Cash’s band...