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This weeks feature
Adrian Legg - a family inheritance
Admired by his fellow guitarists, and feted on his regular concert tours across the United States, Adrian Legg is perhaps best known in the UK for his albums ‘Waiting For A Dancer’, ‘Guitars and Other Cathedrals’ and ‘Wine, Women and Waltz’.
You may also have seen him touring with Eric Johnson, Richard Thompson, and David Lindley, as well as opening for Joe Satriani and Steve Vai (both major Legg fans). |
Adrian Legg |
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A modest, quietly spoken musician, Legg comes alive on stage, unleashing breathtaking feats of virtuosity, and even retuning his strings in the middle of a piece. This technical brilliance is wedded to genuine emotion on Legg’s album ‘Inheritance’, which harks back to an often unhappy childhood.
“I started looking back when my father died a few years ago,” Adrian explained. “It wasn’t a very good relationship, but when someone dies you try to find what was good about a relationship, so I was looking back to my childhood and finding out what I still carry with me. That process then carried over into the album. It’s a chronicle of where I came from and where I am now.” |
A very fine sound... |
Adrian was born in a Salvation Army hostel in Hackney, his ancestors a mixture of Huguenot and Jewish refugees, combined with East Anglian farming stock. The family moved to Cheltenham when Adrian was young, and though he was persuaded to take up the oboe, his sights were set on the guitar.
“It was the sexy thing to play,” he recalls. “The Shadows were the group then. They had a wonderful shiny sound and a bloke with glasses, like me, which gave me hope that I could be sexy, too. |
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“The electric guitar attracted me initially, but I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near it, which, of course, made it even more attractive. So I made my own. I bodged up anything I could out of scraps of wood, things made up of three strings, four strings - some of them sounded more like balalaikas than guitars.”
Today, Adrian is regarded as one of the world’s finest acoustic guitarists, but the album ‘Inheritance’ recalls a time “before the guitar arrived in my life, as well as what has happened since and beyond it”.
One track, ‘Emneth’, concerns his maternal great grandfather, a choirmaster in Norfolk. “I learnt my trade singing hymns,” Adrian explains. “They were short, simple, easily learned structures, and a lot of my tunes tend to be like that.”
The tracks for the album were mostly recorded in one take, to preserve the spontaneity of live performance, something that remains his main raison d’etre.
“Recently, I’ve been touring America for a couple of months each year. It can be wearying, but there’s also something nice about moving from place to place. You never have to make a bed, you never have to wash a bath out, and you never have to wash up.
“Music always used to be an event that people came together for, that’s the central humanity of it, it’s a very social event, and it’s something I’m keen to continue.”
(‘Inheritance’ is released by Favored Nations) |
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