BURIED TREASURE
Sur Le Plage
Unearthed from rock obscuria’s basement, Seasick Steve’s secret past in French yacht-disco.
Steve Leach With The Crystal Grass Orchestra
Ocean Potion
PHILIPS, 1976
WHEN HITHERTO-UNKNOWN blues hobo Seasick Steve made his UK breakthrough playing Jools Holland’s Hootenany in 2006, he cut something of a grizzled, hairy dash. Playing a guitar dubbed The Three-String Trance Wonder – which he said was haunted – he set the rhythm for Dog House Boogie by stamping on a wooden box. The people liked what they heard, and five Top 10 UK albums followed, including 2008’s platinum-selling I Started Out With Nothin’ And I Still Got Most Of It Left.
His was a ripe backstory. Steve Wold had started riding the rails aged 14, it went, and had learned his craft from Mississippi-born country bluesman K.C. Douglas. Along the way there was manual labour, juke joints, sleeping rough and a nickname earned on an ill-fated Scandinavian ferry crossing: finding success late in life, this man of indeterminate age was the real deal.