Inspired by the original Delta Blues masters, Lady Valiant formed in Georgia, United States in 2015, and have been based in Far North QLD since relocating in 2016. I caught up with Lady Valiant guitarist Marty Dryden Brown for a chat ahead of their Panda Room gig on the 3rd of Sept and had to ask.. What inspired a country lad from victoria to want to play Delta Blues?
I’d always had an underlying love for the blues since I was a teenager but I’d never fully immersed myself in it. Most of my teenage years were spent listening to a lot of hard rock and metal. Metallica, Pantera, AC/DC, RATM etc… so it wasn’t until Glenna and I went to the US to visit her family that it really got me. She grew up in the Southern States and her dad lived in Georgia so we were down in the thick of it. One trip over we did a road trip through the deep south and Delta region. The Smokey Mountains, Memphis, New Orleans, Alabama and spent a week in Clarkesdale, the home of the blues. I became pretty obsessed after that and we ended up coming home with an extra suitcase of old blues records. There’s nothing better than sitting around playing acoustic blues on my resonator but for our Lady Valiant original music and festival shows I guess you could say it’s a mix of that Delta blues inspiration and my love of heavy music.
Your 2018 Backroads album made it to number 13 in the Australian Blues and Roots charts, has your music changed much since then?
Yeah that took us by suprise. It got a lot of airplay around Australia which was great. I’d say the music has progressed lyrically and dynamically quite a bit. The stories within the songs are a bit more diverse and there will be a lot more time spent on the arrangement side of things this time around. I have some baritone sax, harmonica and Hammond organ parts I’d like to add in here and there and see how they sound. As it stands, we have enough tracks for a new album and hope to get it finished this year if everything goes to plan, which it rarely does. Time gets away so quick. I have a never ending library of riffs, guitar parts and lyric snippets to sort through so there is always something in our back pocket but we have also talked about changing it up sometime in the near future and doing an acoustic style album or even re-arranging/recording some of our current songs and a few covers into a Lady Valiant interpreted delta blues style format.
I’ve been pulled up a few times by the other guys for bringing some pretty heavy stuff to the table, I get excited and go too far. I read or heard somewhere that ‘a guitar solo comes and goes but riffs last forever’ and it stuck in my head. I love heavy riffage. Or the chug as we call it hahaha.
Well, nothing wrong with a bit of riffage, it’s one of the main food groups.. Can you tell me a bit about your favourite piece of music making gear?
My Lady Valiant work horse guitar is Frank, a $300 mash up of a Fender Tele, Gibson Les Paul and Fender acoustic. It’s a beast. It’s tone has a lot to do with the hand wound P90’s in it. They can be hard to control but totally worth it for the sound they produce. Paired up with a simple pedal board (boost, dirt, delay, octave) I usually signal split into an amp and direct to get the sound I like. Oh and volume. Heaps of it.
Nice. You guys are pretty well ensconced in the local festival scene, I know a lot of Cairns locals that can’t get away to festivals are looking forward to seeing you for the first time at The Panda Room on the 3rd of Sept, what can the uninitiated expect of Lady Valiant Live?
Loud noises haha. A cranked heavy rhythm section trying to keep up with a kick arse front woman bringing some serious soul to the table. Glenna’s vocal inspiration comes from the legends. Janis, Koko Taylor, Big Mama Thornton to name a few. She eats pretty pop singers for breakfast haha.
Lady Valiant play “Splendour In The Boatyard” at The Panda Room on 3rd of Sept along with The Brazilians, Forest, Heffa Lump, The Katie Richards Band and Bigfoot Mafia. More info and Tix HERE.
https://www.ladyvaliant.com/home
Todd Macalpine
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