Skip to main content
Music Radar MusicRadar The No.1 website for musicians
  • Guitars
  • Amps
  • Pedals
  • Drums
  • Synths
  • Software
  • Pianos
  • Controllers
  • Recording
  • Buyer’s guides
  • Live
  • DJ
  • Advice
  • Acoustic
  • Bass
  • About Us
  • More
    • Reviews
Magazines
  • Computer Music
  • Electronic Musician
  • Future Music
  • Keyboard Magazine
  • Guitarist
  • Guitar Techniques
  • Total Guitar
  • Bass Player
More
  • Purdie on the Purdie shuffle
  • Type beats
  • 86000+ free music samples
  • How to make an AI cover song
  • Three-chord trick

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

  1. News

Fink on guitar gear, production tricks and the challenges of making an authentic modern blues record

By Matt Parker
published 17 March 2017

“‘I woke up this morning’ - that’s off the table”

Sunday Night Blues Club

Sunday Night Blues Club

Singer-songwriter Fin Greenall is best known by his nom-de-plume Fink, a name shared with his trio, completed by bassist Guy Whittaker and drummer Tom Thornton.

The Ninja Tune-signed songwriter has always been an individual, a genre magpie channeling trip-hop, desert rock and dub, while others endlessly rehash their Dylan influences. Similarly, his production and songwriting credits extend well beyond your typical folk club, to work with John Legend, Professor Green, Amy Winehouse and Banks. 

Now based in Berlin, Fink has released 10 albums (including side-projects/live records) in 10 years and recently took time out to tackle a new challenge: a contemporary blues record.

The response is Sunday Night Blues Club, Vol 1, an album that has been produced by Flood and places luminaries like Colin Stetson (Arcade Fire, Bon Iver), Mike Dawes and New Orleans sticksman David Shirley in the role of pick-up band.

Prizing feel and a run-and-gun writing process over six-string dick-swinging, it’s a powerfully effective, left-of-field take on 21st century blues. 

We spoke to Fin to find out more about the challenges of taking on one of the most thoroughly “rinsed” areas of modern music history…

You’ve previously been something of a genre-spanning type. Is Sunday Night Blues Club, Vol. 1 your first genre record?

Some of my records are too ‘genre-spanning’, maybe, so on this blues record it was a really great opportunity to do the opposite of that

“Genre-spanning! I like that. Some people see it as a fault and I think that’s kind of justified - some of my records are too ‘genre-spanning’, maybe - so on this blues record it was a really great opportunity to do the opposite of that and actually have some focus. 

“There’s one track on the record, She Was Right, which was this amazing, epic orchestral piece with Colin Stetson, who’s a genius at this wind, circular-breathing stuff. That’s the only track where it’s really ‘blues meets…’; every other track on the record, the whole raison d’être is, ‘If you don’t like blues, you’re not going to like it.’

“That kept me on the straight and narrow with this one, because every time I wanted to add some electronic influences, or add a poly-synth, or say, ‘Maybe I’ll just do a little folky, major, Joni Mitchell thing here’ it always stopped me, because I thought, ‘I want to make a blues record and I want to keep the focus.’ So, yeah, this record is probably the first one where I’ve made a genre record.”

You can trace links to the blues in so many of your other influences – trip-hop, folk, rock, desert rock. Why now for a blues album?

“I’ve just needed to do it to get something out of my system. I’ve always loved the blues, and I just needed to see if I could do it. This is the first time I’ve had the confidence to own it all, to say ‘this is going to be my blues’ - ‘my accidental life’, as Big Bill Broonzy used to say.

“Having said that, one of the real challenges of the record was to write original blues, because it’s one of the oldest genres that we’ve got in modern musical culture, so it’s been used and abused for 70/80 years now.

“Most of the ideas have been done, rinsed and repeated, so to try and find the right balance was a real challenge. I didn’t want to do any lyrics like ‘I Whatsapped you’, but I also didn’t want to go too retro, putting in lyrics about rivers and Mississippi, because that’s not my journey at all.”

Page 1 of 3
Page 1 of 3
Gear of yore

Gear of yore

You have many different collaborators on this album yet there’s a real uniformity to the sound. Did you issue a tight brief to your musicians?

“No brief at all. With the Colin Stetson collabs I just sent him the tracks and used whatever he sent back. With the drummers, I briefed one of them for this track Black Curls. It was this guy Hugo [Degenhardt], who’s drummer for the Bootleg Beatles, and I wanted a rolling, 10-minute 'Ringo Starr in 1965' kind of feel to it and he did it perfectly. But, again, I used his take, unedited and plopped it over the top. 

“I think the coherency comes from Flood, the producer. When I took my tracks, which I thought were pretty done, to Flood for mixdown, he was so clever. He took the one track that he thought was the closest to the sound we wanted - I think it was Keep Myself Alone Now - and he said, ‘Right, the mission is to bring all the tracks to the level of this one, so we’ll bring them up or scruff them down and make them sound like they’ve come from the same moment.’

“After Flood had got his grubby little fingers on it, what came out of the mixdown was next-level shit. He would mix it down so loud that all the levels on all of the machines were red. I think that captured some of the energy, cranking it right to the edge.”

Was that all-analogue at the root then? Not a lot of people like to crank digital signals, for good reason…

“Flood used a really nice balance of in-the-box tricks and nice outboard. We re-taped a lot, I re-amped a lot in the studio, just to get the air and the space, so when we took it to mixdown the bits and pieces were all very legit. I really didn’t do much to them.

Those guys were geniuses back in [the '60s]… they were using the room as their plugin

“It’s that old-school technique of, ‘If you wanna put reverb on it - put it on it and record it’, so you use the reverb on your amp. You do what John Lee Hooker would have done in 1962 - those guys were geniuses back in those days, with the balances and EQs, because they were using the room as their plugin, rather than outboard gear.

“I talked to Flood about some of the artists he’s worked with over the years, and quite often he’d be telling me stories where he’d be like, ‘Oh, the microphone I used for that take was a Beta 58’ and you’d be like ‘What? It wasn’t a Neumann £20,000 ribbon mic?’ He’d be like, ‘No. It’s a Beta 58 and it sounds great.’ It’s the take not the kit that counts.”

What kind of gear did you use to record Sunday Night Blues Club?

“The Gretsch is an old Tim Armstrong model. I bought it because it was matt black, and I believe the terminology was ‘murdered-out’ back in those days. It’s toured with me and had a bit of road wear. I played it quite a lot on the Hard Believer tour.

“The nylon-string tracks are on my Brady III, which is made by this guy called Mal Brady up in north of England. Then I’ve got, we call it the Orwell, it’s a 1984 Martin D-28. 

“Amp-wise, I used this beautiful Fender ’68 Silverface, which I rented from this amazing guitar-maker in Berlin called Dr. Lutz [aka the GuitarDoc]. He’s got a shop and I saw this Silverface in there and I rented it out for the first half of the record, so now I’ve got my own, which is really delicious.

“Then a straight-up Fender Twin, which is one of the Tweed-y ones. It’s been on the road for 10 years now and it looks like it’s really been toured. It sounds beautiful.

“I rarely used my pedalboard. On a few tracks, like Little Bump, I used my Space Echo to get a kind of modern effect on some key notes, just pulling it into my space, as opposed to being super-retro and having a double-bass and shuffle-y drums. The subject matter is pretty modern, too, on that one.”

Page 2 of 3
Page 2 of 3
Nothing but the truth

Nothing but the truth

What did having that desire to create a contemporary blues record do for your lyrical content? Did you find yourself falling foul of cliché?

When a white guy from Europe is tackling the blues, you’ve definitely got to make it your own

“Of course. Obviously, with blues, the clichés are very, very obvious - you know when you’re going off-piste. So, ‘I woke up this morning’ - that’s off the table. ‘My baby left me’ - that’s off the table. It’s so obvious what’s not cool, you know?

“Really, it was about channeling a feeling. With a track like Boneyard, I’m going through a big issue - death - and I can’t write an essay; I’ve got three lines to do it in. 

“It’s just: ‘don’t think too hard; what are you feeling right now?’ If the answer is, ‘Man, I’m feeling really shit right now’, you’re off. It’s honest and you’ve got to own it. You’ve got to anyway, but when a white guy from Europe is tackling the blues, you’ve definitely got to make it your own or it’s going to be pretty obvious that it’s not your music.”

What was the most enjoyable thing about making this album?

“Just the fact that every day you might have that feeling that when you get home, something that didn’t exist this morning now exists. It might be ugly and stupid, but it still exists. It didn’t and now it does, so it’s almost like birth and rebirth on a daily basis.

“I really, really loved that process with the blues, because three/four days a week I’d get nothing but clichés and then on the Friday I’d come home with Hour Golden in my pocket, which didn’t exist that morning.”

That’s creativity in its most pure form, really, isn’t it? At first it didn’t exist and now it does…

“Yeah, channeling your inner feelings. The minute you start double-thinking yourself, you lose so much good shit. You can’t lose if you’re honest.“

Sunday Night Blues Club, Vol 1 is out now on R'COUP'D.

Page 3 of 3
Page 3 of 3
Matt Parker
Matt Parker
Social Links Navigation

Matt is a freelance journalist who has spent the last decade interviewing musicians for the likes of Total Guitar, Guitarist, Guitar World, MusicRadar, NME.com, DJ Mag and Electronic Sound. In 2020, he launched CreativeMoney.co.uk, which aims to share the ideas that make creative lifestyles more sustainable. He plays guitar, but should not be allowed near your delay pedals.

More about guitars
Stevie Ray Vaughan plays guitar as he performs onstage at the Alpine Valley Music Theater, East Troy, Wisconsin, August 25, 1990

Learn 5 classic blues guitar licks from Albert, Freddie and BB King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton

Paul Simon

Paul Simon demonstrates his Travis picking style on acoustic guitar: "The thumb is always moving"

Latest
The Lottery Winners

"I've got that disease where I can't stop buying guitars" – The Lottery Winners show us their pedalboards and custom PJD guitars

See more latest ►
Most Popular
The designer behind the Line 6 Helix reveals the one thing you might not be doing 'right' with your guitar amp modeller

By Rob Laing25 September 2023

See Eric Clapton joined by Stevie Wonder, Joe Bonamassa pays tribute to Jeff Beck while Gales, Fish and Kingfish unite at Crossroads Guitar Festival

By Rob Laing25 September 2023

Matty Healy for president? The 1975 frontman releases ‘campaign video’ in support of the band’s forthcoming US tour

By Ben Rogerson25 September 2023

Whole Lotta Glove: When John Bonham punched Robert Plant in the mouth over £30 worth of petrol

By Stuart Williams25 September 2023

John Mayer breaks out his Monterey Hendrix Strat, solos with H.E.R and guest with Sheryl Crow at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Festival

By Rob Laing25 September 2023

Watch Chad Smith play 30 Seconds To Mars’ biggest hit in one take after hearing it for the first time

By Stuart Williams24 September 2023

Nirvana session cellist Kera Schaley talks about playing on In Utero: "The funny thing about All Apologies is Steve kept trying to talk Kurt out of putting cello on it"

By Rob Laing22 September 2023

Show Us Your Studio #9: "I use Ableton and Maschine as glorified grooveboxes on steroids - it's endless fun and inspiration!"

By MusicRadar22 September 2023

Could this Neumann w495 emulation be the most useful free EQ plugin you download this year?

By Ben Rogerson22 September 2023

SampleRadar: 435 free UK urban samples

By MusicRadar22 September 2023

Groove Synthesis’ 3rd Wave synth module does away with the keyboard and is ready for your desktop

By Ben Rogerson22 September 2023

  1. Zakk Wylde, Dave Grohl, Lemmy Kilmister and Slash backstage during Dave Grohl's birthday bash at The Forum on January 10, 2015 in Inglewood, California
    1
    16 famous musicians who almost joined very famous bands
  2. 2
    Marty Friedman’s guitar teacher told him to take a bong hit every time he played an exercise correctly, but the ex-Megadeth guitarist has better advice for students
  3. 3
    6 of the best classic tape emulation plugins
  4. 4
    “Right now I’d like to do a song, it’s a little thing by Howlin’ Wolf…”: Listen to Jimi Hendrix’s newly unearthed performance of Killing Floor at the Hollywood Bowl, 1967
  5. 5
    “He doesn’t do Zoom”: Mick Jagger reflects on how his songwriting partnership with Keith Richards has changed and discusses Paul McCartney’s bass playing on new Rolling Stones album Hackney Diamonds
  1. Cindy Blackman Santana
    1
    Cindy Blackman Santana tackles the iconic In The Air Tonight drum fill as she joins Chris Stapleton and Snoop Dogg on a new version of the song for ESPN’s Monday Night Football
  2. 2
    Hania Rani on bringing synths and drum machines into contemporary classical: “I spent 20 years playing one instrument, but I’m still interested in investigating others”
  3. 3
    Watch bluegrass guitarist Ian Ly become the 2023 US National Flat-picking Champion
  4. 4
    “It makes it exciting and dangerous and fun”: Yngwie Malmsteen says he doesn’t need to rehearse anymore and explains why he mostly ignores the setlist
  5. 5
    Watch Chad Smith play 30 Seconds To Mars’ biggest hit in one take after hearing it for the first time

MusicRadar is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.