We had the pleasure of sitting down with the awesome South African blues man himself, Ross Harding, to chat about settling in the UK, his upcoming release and tour, and the state of the industry! Check it out below!

How would you describe your sound? It’s definitely blues but there also feels like more to it?

I think it’s hard rock music with a heavy blues influence. It’s a difficult one to describe because I don’t really know myself. It started out as more of a blues rock project but admittedly it does take its own shape. Loosely it’s heavy blues rock, but there’s a lot of different sounds, from 90s stuff to old school, 70s heavy metal. If you think of Sabbath, it was all kinda bluesy anyway. That’s the best I’ve got!

And so the tour kicks off in just a couple of days (time of recording) right?

Yeah, it’s on the go at the moment actually. The strategy I’ve taken for this year after basically settled into the UK for a year now and it was just building up the networking and band and my contacts in the industry, and leveraging that throughout the year. So I’m not doing extensive on the road touring, it’s kind of sporadic, lots of weekends and the odd midweek show all around the UK to navigate the landscape and build it up from that.

And it’s just local supports for each show, right?

Yeah, I’m not working with anyone in particular, just the venues or promoters recommending us certain support acts. I don’t know if supports is the right word as a lot of times these guys are as established as I am. It seems to be something that exists in the UK that I’ve had to wrap my head around, is this support act and then headline thing. It seems to be how the industry portrays it while in SA [South Africa] we just did music together. And I understand that this is the main artist, but I think that the industry is so… there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors all the time of who’s doing really well and who’s not. At the end of the day you just have to rock up to the gig and smash it as hard as you can. If you have musicians jumping on the lineup with you, you should be thanking them from the bottom of your heart for them being there and putting in that effort. We’re all in the same boat at the end of the day.

I don’t care what anybody says, it’s the toughest industry to try and make something out of. All of the interviews we do, it’s a lot of brave face. ‘Oh we’re doing so well’ when behind the scenes it’s not. I know it’s tough. Some shows are really amazing and others aren’t. You have issues with booking schedules and touring and the cost of running the whole thing. I think the perspective I’ve taken since coming to the UK is just a position of gratitude. The fact that I’m even playing shows in the UK blows my mind. I’m just doing the best I can!

Was it the music that made you move out here?

Yes and no. It was definitely part of it but my wife got an opportunity with a company where basically we were able to leverage for visas and so forth. That was a real blessing. But of course, as far as my music career is concerned, it was a trajectory that I wanted to fulfill, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that.

Are there any differences you can think of from the scene back home compared to here?

Yeah, you can’t even compare them really! The UK industry is way bigger for rock’n’roll. The music scene in Africa is massive if you think about house musicians and electronic music. But the rock’n’roll industry is much smaller. So there are fans, and there is a scene, especially in South Africa. I don’t know how much of a scene exists in other parts, it would be very niche in places like North Africa. I could be wrong, but it never came up on any tour schedule or anything like that.

The South African scene definitely has die-hard supporters, but it’s way smaller. If I think about the tour schedule and the way you can tour in the UK and branch that out into Europe compared to what you can do in SA, it’s not even a comparable thing.

You put out a single last year, are you writing some more and planning another EP or?

Yeah, I’m busy finishing up an album! the tour that I’m doing now is the Blood and the Blues tour, and that’s gonna be the album release as well. As I mentioned earlier there’s a few things that have had to be re-looked at from a distribution process. But it’s pretty much gone through the mastering process now; it’s right there! Then the release schedule starts.

Yeah, that’s almost as much work as everything else these days!

Absolutely, it’s 24/7, just trying to tick all the boxes. Not even doing performances but making sure the music is as high quality as possible.

Is it just you that writes it or do you bring the band in to help?

I’ve been through kind of a transitional period in that essence. The short answer is I do 95% of the writing. But it’s always influenced by the people you work with, whether their contribution is something that’s going to come up in a royalty or not. For example, the way the music sounded when I performed it with artists in SA, compared to the musicians in the UK is different, even though it’s the same song and the gents I’m working with here had no input in the writing. Their style and musicality is naturally gonna be portrayed; their personality comes out.

In SA we got to a point where the musicians I was working with were contributing a lot more to the process. But I do try to leave it as fluid as possible as I know that the way it’s going to be portrayed to the audience in its highest form is ironically by letting it go. Letting those musicians do with that music what they would. As soon as you try to box anything you aren’t getting the fullness of those personalities.

Have they done any of the recording of the album?

They haven’t done any of the UK. I actually did all of the recording in SA. It‘s still being mixed and mastered by my friends at Studio 31 in Johannesburg, but I’m still doing some of it virtually so recording it at my home studio and sending it all the way out to SA. It’s amazing what you can do these days! It’s been an interesting process to be able to do it that way. It’s not the ideal way I’d like to do it, I’d like to do it old-school and live tracks. But 90% of the guitars are live tracked.

I would say it’s more of a compilation. I’m reluctant to call it an album, although I suppose we’re just dealing with semantics. I really wanted to showcase different facets of my musical style. I do think that there are lots of influences that all form this thing. People are going to make up their own minds. Some of the diehard blues community could be like ‘nah, he’s not real blues’, and then the hard rock side can be like ‘ahh, it’s too bluesy for me’. I don’t really care, I just do my thing! What that’s done is allow me to showcase these different elements. There’s tracks with tonnes of acoustic guitar, and then ones that are really stripped back, and then some real aggressivey hard rock with longer songs and structures and moving parts. It’s kinda like a showcase!

And so you’ve got the tour through April, right?

Well really it’s like the full year. There’s dates all the way up until December. But it’s not five shows in a row kinda touring. There’s probably 40 dates. In 2023 I did 150 performances made up of lots of different types of shows, three different formats. But the first part of this tour is until the summer, then from the summer onwards will be the second part!