Interview: Dorian Sorriaux of Blues Pills

[avatar user=”Ross” size=”50″ align=”left” /]This time last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Dorian Sorriaux, the guitarist of rising blues stars, Blues Pills. Chrissy, their tour manager, introduces me to a smiling Dorian before we find the production office to chat. Just as on stage, in real life, he’s incredibly laid back and calm and looking forward to the night’s show.

Apologies for the lateness of it, a lack of WiFi and computer issues delayed it but better late than never.

Also, thank you to Claire and Sarah at Nuclear Blast and Blues Pills’ tour manager, Chrissy Köhler for giving us the chance to chat with Dorian.

Welcome back to Glasgow. How’s the tour been going so far?

It’s been going great so far, it’s been going really good, actually. It’s nice to be in the UK and we played Ireland for the first time. Yesterday arriving in Scotland was beautiful, it reminded me of Brittany, where I’m from. Good gigs and everything’s been good.

How did the band first get together?

I met Zack [Anderson, bass guitarist] when he was playing with another band. I was playing with another band as well. My band opened for his band in France. Then he started the band with Elin [Larsson, vocalist] about half a year later and she’s Swedish so the band was based in Sweden. They needed a guitar player so that’s when they asked me to join, so I did! That’s how we met, just playing in other bands, travelling around. Elin was travelling from Sweden to California, it just happened naturally. You happen to meet some people and start a band. The difference is we come from three different countries, all over the world and other than that, it’s pretty natural.

As a guitar player, who are your influences?

There’s a lot of them. Billy Gibbons, for sure. Peter Green, Danny Kirwan; the early Fleetwood Mac. There’s Paul Kossoff from Free, there’s Rory Gallagher. Philip Sayce, that might be the only…alive guitar player that I’ve mentioned [laughs].

Well, Billy Gibbons is still alive.

He is; you’re right! [laughs]. From that new era of blues guitar players, Philip Sayce would be the one I would mention as a real influence. There are loads more and also bands and music; lots of things like the way I play guitar but to specify guitar players, that would be a few of them.

You’ve just been confirmed to appear at this year’s Download festival. Are you scheduled to appear at any of the other major festivals?

Yes, we are. We’re playing Rambling Man in the UK and Download would be the only other one in the UK. I’m excited about Rambling Man because it’s a great line-up; Rival Sons, Greg Allman, Seasick Steve, The Temperance Movement. It’s going to be a good day.

And what about any of the European festivals?

Yeah, yeah, for sure! We’re going to play the Rock Am Ring Rock Im Park, Nova Rock, a lot of festivals. I think it’s almost thirty.

You were here last year with Rival Sons. Is there any band you’d love to go out on tour with?

Rival Sons again! [laughs] It was a pleasure to be on tour with them and I’m a big fan of them, watching them every night was very inspiring. Of course, there’s lots of bands; ZZ Top. If I could just meet Billy Gibbons and have a short talk over a coffee; that would be a pleasure. There’s a lot of great bands out there. I love the Daptones stuff; soul from New York, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and Charles Bradley, Graveyard from Sweden is another.

The band recently released a live album, what has the reaction been to it?

It’s been pretty good, I haven’t actually followed the reviews but what I’ve heard was good. People seem to like it. The artwork is really nice and it’s a nice way to refresh the album we released almost a year ago. It’s the album played live, kind of a new perspective on it. It’s been nice. Really, I haven’t paid that much attention but I think it’s been nice.

Should we expect any new material in the near future?

Yes. We’re working on the second album. We’ve been touring and recording, that’s why we haven’t had time to check out what people think of the record [laughs]. We’re still working on it, planning out how we’re going to do it; we’ve started to record. We’ve got eight or nine songs, we want to have a couple more but it’s getting there. It’s on the way. I can’t say any dates because if I say a date it’s probably going to be the wrong one because of deadlines being pushed [laughs]. I want to say next year but you never know what happens. There’s a good chance it’ll be the first half of the new year.

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