Rich Hope And His Evil Doers voted in at NUMBER 35 in BluesMatters! 2006 Top 50 albums of the year. Get all the info in the issue 36 of BluesMatters.
Rich Hope Doing Good Things
Interview: Darren Howells
Full Interview In Issue 35 Of Blues Matters.
When Blues Matters! received “Rich Hope And His Evil Doers” we thought we’d discovered, via a helping hand from myspace (sssh!), the most exciting Blues-rock band, and self-titled debut album, since the 22-20s… Well, the band and debut parts we got wrong; Vancouver’s Rich Hope, described as a “young George Thorogood brawling with RL Burnside”, is a solo artist with “Rich Hope And His Evil Doers” being the second album recorded 7 years after his debut… Ah well, we got the exciting part right and with Rounder now adding their weight in Europe, Rich could well gain the kind of deserved success the 22-20s missed out on…
“There’s a bunch of people who play what they call “Blues” who just play Blues clubs and play just like every other band. It’s not really my scene. It’s a bit stale. I prefer it a little shittier. The Blues is a dirty girl… Canada has produced some pretty major internationally known acts, considering its population… It’s just hard for smaller acts like myself, because of the low population density. They don’t go out and seek new music in the way that Europeans do. Your population is much denser, so word gets around. Pubs and song fare in your blood.”
by Eden Munro
Rich Hope has been dragging his guitar along through the music scene since the late ‘90s, when he released his first solo album before joining the group John Ford as a guitar player and songwriter.
After burning back and forth across the landscape for a few years, that band came to an end and Hope set about recording another solo set, the self-titled Rich Hope & his Evil Doers, this time bringing together a set of tracks bridging the gap between literate songs—he draws inspiration for one of them from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—and a guttural, almost bestial blues grind… Read full article at Vue Weekly