Stephen Dale Petit

Since the millennium, Stephen Dale Petit has planted his tattered flag deep in the modern music scene. The Anglo-American bandleader is a blues scholar with a spittle-flecked punk heart. An award-winner who scored Classic Rock’s Blues Album Of The Year for 2020 Visions, but still feels like an outlaw. A former addict and cancer survivor who sings of life in all its beautiful, ugly glory. A onetime busker who took his licks on the dog-eat-dog circuit, but counts made mafiosi Ronnie Wood, Dr John, Eric Clapton, David Gilmour and The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney amongst his collaborators and admirers.

In Petit’s hands, the blues is not a museum piece but a living, breathing, growling, grinding thing. With early solo albums Guitararama (2008) and The Crave (2010), he announced himself as a master guitarist with dirt under his nails, sparking Classic Rock’s verdict that “Petit occupies a stunning middle ground between the fire of Freddie King, the instinct of Jimmy Page and the soul of Eric Clapton”.

But in a genre suffocated by twelve-bar dogma, the leftfield Cracking The Code (2013) and 2020 Visions (2020) reminded us that Petit is a contrarian, renegade gifted songwriter whose instinct is to tear it down. Now, with the latter album getting the showcase it was denied by both the world pandemic and his own recovery from stage 4 cancer, Petit’s New Blues Revolution is gathering pace. As former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor says, “The future of the blues is in safe hands with him”