Album Notes

Blue Trash

With “Blue Trash” the Spikedrivers have taken all of their many and highly diverse influences and blended them into something that is uniquely their own. With their roots still firmly in the delta they have managed to create a sound that is traditional, very contemporary and unlike anything you’ve heard before.

The fourteen original tracks showcase their considerable abilities as musicians, songwriters and arrangers. The atmospheric title track consists of no more than vocals, guitar, udu drum and washboard while tractor-driven “The Massey Ferguson Blues” is the other end of the scale. An in-your-face out and out slide guitar stomper.

Guitarist Ben Tyzack is the main vocalist and songwriter but bassist Constance Redgrave and drummer/percussionist Maurice McElroy share lead vocal and song writing duties. Constance with the torchy “You Don’t Care” and “Grampa Was A Moonshiner”, an angry take on her family’s experience of the Depression, and Maurice’s light-hearted takes on modern life, “Where Did The Money Go?” and “Junk Mail Blues”.

Tyzack’s exceptional slide and finger picking guitar work is complemented perfectly by the rock-solid rhythm section of Redgrave and McElroy. These guys have paid their dues and it shows. At the same time they never let the playing get in the way of the songs.

The album was recorded at the Helioscentric studio in East Sussex, UK. An old fashioned 16 track analogue studio with the original desk that Island Records used to record Bob Marley and John Martyn on in the seventies. Their co-producer and sound engineer, Phill Brown, is a legend in his own right having been the Island house engineer during that time and who has recorded just about everybody from the early Rolling Stones to Dido.

“…the atmosphere the band is able to create around its music is nothing less than remarkable.”
Blues Revue USA

"...The Spikedrivers have the unique ability to conjure a presence, a sense of place, from a sound..."
Blues In Britain UK

"...excellent new album!".
Paul Jones - BBC Radio2

"A great sounding, traditional feeling record that colors outside the lines".
Bass Player Magazine USA