Record review - John Fairhurst

JOHN FAIRHURST

Hungry Blues EP

John Fairhurst Music CD

Fairhurst can sound as mellow as John Martyn or as wild as Captain Beefheart growling at his most deranged – mellifluous as warm golden honey one minute and then dark as the most menacing of thunderstorms the next. But he really does his talking with his guitar, and he sure as hell is one mean picker of the six-string – boy, does he know how to make that guitar sing! 

With some mind-blowing electric blues predominating his latest collection of songs, such as the finger-blistering ‘Up On The Hill’, or the foreboding ‘The Snow Lies Deep’, he’s more than versatile and still finds time to throw in a more traditional sounding number, the shantyish ‘I Don’t Know’.

Fairhurst has to be one of the most charismatic characters on the blues circuit right now and certainly one of the most talented. As such he definitely merits further investigation.

Rich Deakin