Harry Manx

Given his open-minded approach to music, mixing traditions as diverse as American blues and Hindustani classical music, it comes as no surprise that Harry Manx is an approachable and engaging interview subject. Nevertheless, with the media demands placed on any touring and recording artist nowadays, it is a surprise just how friendly and willing to talk about any subject he is.

Despite his openness and often hippie-friendly language, however, he insists that he's not an idealist; "you know, I'm sure I have my ideals, but I don't tend to live by ideas or ideals at all, I'm pretty flexible that way."

Manx is also very flexible about his touring line-up - look at the listing for his gig at The Gov and you'll find that it reads "Harry Manx & Friends", largely because he didn't actually know who he would be playing with when he booked the gig. "I have been doing these collaborations with other players for the last couple of years - before Kevin [Breit, the guitar player with whom he recorded an album last year,] I was playing with a jazz piano player and before that a harmonica player, and I've actually been playing solo for the last 6 months or so... I started out this tour solo, and it just sort of grows itself after a while - musicians find me and away we go on another track." The musicians joining him on this trek are percussionist Yeshe Reiners and James Haselwood, who also plays bass with The Dissociatives and Mia Dyson.

Immediately after this tour, Manx will be playing at The Montreal Jazz Festival with an Indian singer called Samidha Joglejkar, but the constant ensemble changes don't bother him overly. "If the other guys are sort of familiar with my music then it works really well, and that's all it takes - they need to be familiar with what I'm doing and then it's pretty easy. I pretty much just do my own thing and I let these guys work around it ... It keeps it interesting for me, and the bottom line is if nothing else is going on, I go solo."

With the current touring line-up, Manx will tackle songs from all of his albums as well as previewing several that have yet to be recorded, including one that he's particularly proud of. "The one song is called Nine Summers Lost, and I wrote that song on a National Steel - it's the first song I wrote on a National and it's got a lot of blues to it, you know. The song itself is about when I was in Toronto doing a live album and I was looking at the paper and I realised that nine kids had been gunned down in that month just from gang violence, all under the age of 15, so I just sort of put pen to paper and I wrote Nine Summers Lost. When I have an inspiration that strong, usually I can get the emotion into the tune and when people hear the tune, they hear something that makes them wake up and listen, and that song has caught some of that vibe and it's working well for me."

The topic of National Guitars leads our conversation onto one of their greatest modern day exponents, Bob Brozman, who was on the bill at the Woodford Folk Festival over New Year's with Manx the last time he was in the country. Manx refers to him as "a strange character," but it's his reaction to Brozman's music that's most telling, and given the cyclical nature of the Indian ragas that Manx is so fond of, it's appropriate that it leads us back to the topic of his own idealism.

"Our approaches are very different to music in general I think, as our approaches probably are very different to life in general. I find his approach is very intellectual and good on him because he does a wonderful job at what he does, but I prefer matters of the heart, and I write about matters of the heart, and I want to play notes that point towards that, too. I never go out of my way to try and dazzle my audience, and that might be one of Bob's specialties... I just had this inclination about his music - not enough heart in it for me, too much speed and smoke and flash. My approach is I would love to inspire people - I don't care if they're impressed by me or they think I'm some amazing musician, but I would love to inspire them, I would love for them to go away from my show a little more enriched, or having felt something that was moving, that's my goal."

Alexis Buxton-Collins

Harry Manx plays at the Governor Hindmarsh on Thurs 19 June.