Lonesome Man Blues

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1986

Label: BBC Records

From The BBC-TV Series King Of The Ghetto.

All music published by Paternoster Music Ltd

So you have a cracking, gripping, original television serial telling the story of two young whites and their relationship with the bengali community around London's Brick Lane. You´ve firmly rejected the Ravi Shanker approach. But what kind of note do you strike in approaching composers to provide a score for the serial?

The story´s about ordinary people, people struggling with universal problems on the streets and in their homes - housing itself, schooling for their kids, work and ready money, love and sex and friendship, power and organisations, business and big bucks, an identity.

In the end we wanted a people´s music, an idiom that anyone´s heart could be touched by. Few musicians in Britain play and sing blues like they were meant by the pioneers in black America. But Dave Kelly's voice and slide guitar are the real thing, even though they´re English. Put Peter Filleul´s imagination and keyboard alongside and the result is a blues-based score that is by turns gutsy, rocky, cocky, disturbing and deeply affecting. We´re sure we´ve struck the right note: lots of them. (W Stephen Gilbert)