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Ash Grunwald.
 Ash Grunwald is not just an Australian singer/songwriter: he's a bona fide blues man. Armed with a steel National guitar, a slide and some pots and pans, he cooks up a blues assault to rival any of his contemporaries - and many of his past heroes. But with all the noise he presents on 'I Don't Believe' I didn't believe one word of the "recorded live" message written in the inside cover. I was wrong.
"It is primarily recorded live, and the tracks that you hear, some tracks I do with a sampler," Grunwald explains to my growing amazement. "I lay down a beat live by hitting my guitar or, in the case of the album, pots and pans and spanners and stuff, and sample them through a mic. Then I play over the top of them; although with some of them, I played into a computer and then looped that and played over the top, so that wasn't strictly speaking 'live' but the performances, the singing and playing, were live.
"I guess the other thing is that I do that live on stage. I don't use those actual tracks [from the CD]; I actually cook it up live in front of the audience."
I ponder for a moment how hard it would be to play the blues in Australia; unless I'm missing something, there isn't exactly a great blues scene in this country. Grunwald insists this has been no barrier. "I don't really play in the blues scene; there is no blues scene as such. In Australia, you just play in venues and festivals - I play folk festivals, rock festivals, jazz festivals, country music festivals! I just think I'm in the mix with all other music. In Australia you just do your thing and if people like it then, well, there you go, you've got a career. Very few people in my audience are hardcore blues fans. There are some, but a lot of them are just fans of music who have gotten into my songs."
In an age where popular music is pretty much divided down the line between 'rock' and 'electronica', how on earth did Grunwald manage to sidestep all of that back to the golden days of 'blues'?
"I stumbled onto it on community radio stations, and I started buying a few CDs. That was from the age of twelve or thirteen. I started researching it, and playing blues. It was a bit of a weird thing, because my parents weren't really into it. My dad gave me a Tom Waits album when I was about twelve. He's a good example to me, because he's his own thing, and I think that's what everyone should be. He uses genres to make his music."
I mention that I believe Waits actually is a genre, all to himself. "He is," Grunwald agrees. "And that's a mark that only a few people in the world have managed."
I innocently mention that twelve-bar blues may have been the beginning of the inspiration for Grunwald's music. Of course, he disagreed absolutely, but the history lesson he gave me was really quite interesting.
"Well, before the twelve-bar - because some of the twelve-bar stuff I find boring myself, these days - there's some stuff I really dig, because it's one chord. It's just a groove all the way through, and the lyrics are sung over this one riff. It's interesting, because in a way it's a bit like electro and a lot of dance and techno, which is usually one chord with no changes in it. So it just sits on a groove all the way through, and various elements within the song are brought in and taken out by the DJ, and there might be a slight chorus as well sometimes, but the groove just keeps on going. And you get in a real trance. That's what the early blues before the twelve-bar was like. When I do that stuff myself, I've noticed that it does get people grooving."
Ben Revi
 | Ash Grunwald plays at the Governor Hindmarsh with Jeff Lang on Fri 18 Feb. |
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