Musician Phil Huband could be described as car-razy about jazz and hot rod cars. His band, the re-formed Bluesmakers will be performing at the Bridgetown Blues festival.
BRIDGETOWN’S Phil Huband has two major passions in life – cars and playing the blues.
Phil, who grew up in England long enough ago that he still has his ration book, bought his first bass guitar at the age of 19.
“I was lucky enough to have a very accomplished jazz musician take me under his wing,” Phil said.
Phil joined a band named Jazmin, with which he played three summer seasons at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay.
“The Monty Python team stayed there and John Cleese stayed on and wrote Fawlty Towers,” Phil said. “The owner was a retired navy commander who hated guests — he made Basil Fawlty look mild!” he said.
When the gig came to an end, Phil left the band. “I wanted a change from what I was doing,” he said.
Phil was heavily into custom cars at the time, and soon after, built his first race car.
He moved to Canada in 1977, living for a time in a mining town with only one radio station. “They played two sorts of music,” Phil said, “country and western.”
When he came to Australia in 1983, he began to listen to music again.
Phil moved to Bridgetown 10 years ago. There he began talking to guitarist Simon Harrington who asked: “Why don’t you buy a bass guitar and get back into it?”
Phil then bumped into an old friend who had a looseknit band. “We played at the pub for a jam,” Phil said. “That’s when I met Paddy Alcock and he asked me if I’d play some music with him.
“ I felt honoured and nervous – he’s a very accomplished musician. We’ve been best friends ever since.”
Phil said that Paddy, who had recently moved to Bridgetown, had a band in Perth called the Bluesmakers.
“He thought he’d like to reform the band,” he said.
Drummer Graham Johnson, who had previously played in a band with Paddy and also recently moved to Bridgetown, joined them.
Phil said that the name “Bluesmakers” was Paddy’s tribute to John Mayall’s band the Bluesbreakers.
“That was the second band Eric Clapton was in,” he said.“Paddy was a big fan of John Mayall, and so have I been; we started playing a lot of their music.”
Phil said that people have come and gone from the band.
“We had an excellent keyboard player, Kevin Jamieson, who’s now living in America and singer and guitarist Mike Stone, who moved to Perth.”
Mike will be a special guest of the band during the upcoming Bridgetown Blues Festival.
Other band members include Pete Thompson playing the harmonica and flute, and Honey Bidwell on keyboard and vocals.
“This year we decided that rather than just play covers, we’d write our own material,” Phil said.
The band has collectively recorded a dozen songs, which it hopes to put on a CD in time for a Blues Festival debut.“It’s at the rocky-jazzy end of the blues spectrum,” Phil said. “Our motto is nobody sleeps while we’re on.”
As middle-class white Australians, it was hard for band members to identify with music that was essentially black American from 75 years ago.
So they have written songs about contemporary life, Phil said.
“We’ve got The Airline Blues, The Odd Socks Blues, The Liquid Lunchtime Blues, The Over-Government Blues – and a song called Going Country, which is the story Paddy wrote of coming to live in Bridgetown and how good it is,” he said.
“We’ve tried to steer away from the standard 12-bar blues, to keep it up-tempo and change things.”
Bluesmakers will be playing a set from their new CD at the Festival Club on the Saturday of the Bridgetown Blues Festival, from 12.30 to 1.30pm, and other venues to be confirmed.
Meanwhile, Phil still maintains his other passion for hot rods, American cars, chrome and customising cars – from his current set of wheels to the fondly remembered HT Monaro with a fuel-injected 460 cubic inch Chevy V8, taking methanol for fuel, that could do 140 miles an hour in a quarter mile from a standing start.
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