Seeing Blue

When Shaun Kirk first started playing music in his late teens, he absolutely hated the blues. He was a folk singer back then, and had picked up the guitar for the first time after an injured ankle kept him from playing sport for a while. He wrote his first song in the hospital and began his career playing open mic nights in pubs around Melbourne. This was the unfortunate setting in which he first heard people play the blues. “They were unpaid musicians with long solos and bad singing and all that,” he explains. “So I hated blues at that time.”

Fortunately, mum knew better. A fan of the genre, Mrs Kirk decided to take her son to blues gigs where the musicians got paid. Kirk's opinions started to change. There was a Clapton concert in particular that stuck in his mind. “I think from that point on I started to get a little bit intrigued by blues and its history and started looking at Clapton's influences, and other guys' influences and just started building the amount of blues music I was listening to,” says Kirk.

Blues began to seep into Kirk's playing style. It's an old, time-worn genre, but he sees it as something timeless, the seemingly restrictive structures of the genre simply materials to work with.

“Blues to me is all about feel,” he says. “People always try and stress the fact that blues is all about playing to 12 bars and sticking to those rules, but all the best blues musicians, they were always so unpredictable, their bands had to be so good behind them. Because they didn't necessarily rehearse to strict structures in their songs, it was all about just watching the frontman.”

These days, he is a rapidly rising addition to the genre, with two albums released and a third about to land this month. The first two, Cruisin and Thank You for Giving Me the Blues were recorded fairly simply – the first in a backyard studio at a mate's mum's place, and the second in a friend's bedroom. His most recent one, however – The Wick Sessions, due for release on Thursday 14 March – were more complicated. Recorded at Wick Studios in Melbourne, The Wick Sessions is a live album with a DVD to go with it.

“These days, the industry seems to be very much about the visual aspect as well,” Kirk says. “You know, YouTube and stuff is massive, and people wanna watch stuff as well as listen to it. So I got a film crew in there to film it all as well so it would have that visual aspect to it.”

But even with no crowd – apart from the crew of course – the odd mistake can be found in the footage. In one song, for example, Kirk noticed upon listening back that he had sung the wrong lyric. It bothered him at first, but then he thought about it.

“Some of the CDs that I'm influenced by, by guys like Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf and all that, there are mistakes in there... there are gazillions of Muddy Waters songs where you hear him say the wrong thing,” Kirk explains. “So I just went, 'Nah leave it there, that's cool'. Keep it raw and real in a day and age where people are so obsessed with editing things to the finest minute degree and getting it perfect, where music's not meant to be perfect. It's meant to be real and, like I said earlier, it's all about feel. If you stuff things up, so what? No one's perfect. Nothing's perfect.”

Shaun Kirk will be playing the following dates:

Friday 15 to Sunday 17 March - Blue Mountains Music Festival, Katoomba NSW
Tuesday 19 March - Charles Hotel, Perth WA
Wednesday 20 March - Indi Bar, Scarborough WA
Thursday 21 March - Quindanning Inne, Quindanning WA
Friday 22 March - Snook's Music Club, Denmark WA
Saturday 23 March - Settler's Tavern, Margaret River WA
Sunday 24 March - Redcliffe On The Murray, Pinjarra WA
Thursday 28 to Saturday 30 March - Bluesfest, Byron Bay NSW
Thursday 4 April - Republic Bar, Hobart TAS
Friday 5 April - Tapas Lounge Bar, Devonport TAS
Saturday 6 April - Royal Oak Hotel, Launceston TAS
Thursday 11 April - Beav's Bar, Geelong VIC
Friday 12 April - The Old Hepburn Hotel, Hepburn VIC
Saturday 13 April - Rubys Lounge, Belgrave VIC
Sunday 14 April - Westernport, San Remo VIC
Thursday 18 April - Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC
Friday 19 April - Babushka Lounge, Ballarat VIC
Saturday 20 April - Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton SA
Sunday 21 April - Glenelg Surf Lifesaving Club, Glenelg SA
Wednesday 24 April - The Front, Canberra ACT
Thursday 25 April - The Gumball Festival NSW
Friday 26 April - Entertainment Centre, Darwin NT
Saturday 27 April - Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle NSW
Friday 3 May - The Brewery, Mudgee NSW
Saturday 4 May - The Cat & Fiddle, Sydney NSW
Sunday 5 May - Grand Junction Hotel, Maitland NSW
Thursday 9 May - Aztec, Forster NSW