Wicked Grin have been around a while now. Picking up blues music awards aplenty along the way. Why the need to advertise concerts as Murray Kinsley & Wicked Grin?
We’ve been around quite a long time yeah. We’ve been, well, The Wicked Grin I guess since about 2001, and now ‘Murray Kinsley and Wicked Grin’. What happened was, we started touring a lot as a three-piece because of the finances of touring, and some places would say it’s not the band that’s on the poster! Well, see, in Ontario which is where we’re from in Canada, we’re close to home so we quite often tour as a quartet. we have a harmonica player from Ottawa who’s on most of our records. But then we have another harmonica player in Southern Ontario who plays with us on the road because the harmonica player in Ottawa doesn’t want to travel!We do a lot of touring as a three-piece, like, we tour most of the time in the US as a three-piece.
This is the first show in Germany for a while.
Yeah, I was here in 2017 with a different band at the time from the present one. At that time it was just the bass player and I came over and we played with local drummers and harmonica players. But this time the three of us came, as we were already booked in England and then we got booked late by the Eutin Festival promoter who we met at the Maple Blues Awards (Canada’s premier Blues Awards). He had an opening, so I stretched our British Tour by adding a couple of dates in Europe that Kirsten managed to arrange for us at short notice including this one tonight. (Bonn sound-engineer Kirsten Gorham) to sort of cover expenses leading up to the Festival. Then we’re going home after that. There were a couple of other places that were interested, but we couldn’t fit them into a schedule. When you’re booking, especially from overseas, you have to book like months and months and months in advance to get it all to fit. it’s quite time-consuming.
2018 was the last CD you made?
We’re in the process of doing one right now. We’re in the mixing stage in fact. We want to get home and get it mixed because we’re playing the Ottawa Blues Fest in early July and we want to have it ready by then.
This covid really slowed us down. As it did everybody I guess. But I was a writer who wasn’t motivated by covid to write anything I guess (laughs)…
Many musicians have said that they were motivated to write about the loneliness and isolation from people and events during lockdown. (As a side note, Rockpalast managed to continue, somewhat bizarrely I thought, with Laura Cox for example playing at the Harmonie with no audience).
Well, our drummer at the time didn’t want to do that. he said no! I’m not playing covid gigs. So we just sort of shut down, and like I say, I didn’t start writing again until after we were back on the road.
And now you have that new material?
Yeah, there’s new material coming out. That’s the way it’s working right now. Also, I wasn’t really motivated to do another record because of the nature of the music industry. We make no money making records. It’s a very expensive business right now.
A lot of musicians are crowd-funding future releases via GoFundMe etc.
Well, I’ve never done any of that crowd-funding or anything like that. I just figure ‘We should be able to do it on our own…’ so we’re going to. It’s just really tough right now though.
Let’s get onto a more cheerful topic. Who are your personal musical heroes and inspirations? From Muddy Waters to Joe Bonamassa and beyond.
Well, that’s the trouble you know. I like them all. I must admit though that when I first started playing Blues music I wasn’t really into the old blues guys. Then, through numerous iterations of rock bands and then RnB bands, I finally came back to the blues base – which is where Wicked Grin are. We’re blues but we don’t do old Chicago Blues. I always figured, when I started listening to the old stuff that it’s really cool because they’re writing about their experience it’s true, it’s real, you know? And to me – I can’t relate to their lives, so we write our own blues.
So you concentrate on your own material?
Well, the next record coming out has a Chicago Blues on it. There’s a big horn section on it. And I play some cigar box guitar. But it’s from our experience and our lives. Which is what Blues is all about. And it makes you feel good to play it!
And you’ve been playing it a long time now
Yeah, a long time (laughs)
What keeps you playing?
I find it real. It means something to us. I like the freedom of the blues. I like jamming, and in the blues genre, as we play it, there’s always room to experiment. Whereas if you’re doing Prog Rock or something like that you’re pretty much locked into doing what you do every night.
The music is genuine. And also the majority of the musicians playing it, that’s my experience.
Well, I agree. The blues community is really supportive. Very few blues musicians are competitive. A lot of us for instance get together at the International Blues Challenge, which is in itself all about competition amongst blues people. But most of the bands don’t take it as a competition – they take it as “Let’s go meet some people. Let’s go hang out” As an example: we were in the semi-finals of a blues challenge in Memphis and jammed with a New York bluesman named Tas Cru. As a result, my bass player at the time and I ended up touring with him for three years! I learned a lot doing that. Being a side-man basically.
So, due to the Corona Virus, your Wicked Grin website largely ends in 2018…
Yes, Covid. And afterwards it was difficult to tour. Just to step across the border into the USA costs me 2000 dollars. The UK and Europe isn’t so expensive to just enter at least.
A lot of bands rely on selling merchandise to make tours pay off…
Unfortunately, our CD’s are all stuck somewhere at Heathrow…! As a matter of fact, I’d better get backstage and decide what I’m going to wear because most of my clothes are also in a suitcase at Heathrow. My fault because my suitcase was just underweight but then I bought a bottle of whisky and had to take some things out of my hand luggage… I also have to try and put my cigar box guitar back together because it comes to pieces.
Ah, the life of a modern bluesman…