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As RBC Bluesfest wrapped up for another year, the fans were left wanting more after listening to Midnight Shine, Tim Hicks and Tom Petty. (Cover photo: Mark Horton)

Midnight Shine

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet, and even get to know, the members of Midnight Shine before they took the Stage on the last night of RBC Ottawa Bluesfest. This band is comprised of a group of guys, from Northern Ontario, who could not be more down to earth. They are so easy to talk to and are clearly passionate about their music and the message that it sends.

It also helps that their music is really easy to listen to. Their sound is smooth and their message is clear. Midnight Shine should be on repeat on the playlist of every coffee house, restaurant and bistro. The smooth harmonies and slight rocker feel make you want to bop your head right along to the beat, without it being intrusive on the surrounding atmospheres.

Midnight Shine performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

I am also a big fan of what Midnight Shine stands for and the messages that their music send. Their political messages about indigenous people’s rights are well thought out and come across clearly through their music. Bluesfest recognized the importance of this message by having a reception after the concert. This reception was frequented by Mark Monahan himself, who even stood up (on a bench) to say a few words. His speech highlighted the importance he places in indigenous people relations and how he, and the whole bluesfest team, would like to make a conscious effort to have more bands like this, who clearly support and advocate for indigenous people rights.

Midnight Shine performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

For a band of four guys from Northern Ontario to make this kind of an impact is truly inspiring!

Tim Hicks

After Midnight Shines’s reception, I headed down to the Claridge Stage to hear Tim Hicks. Although many in the crowd were there for Tom Petty, the country star clearly had his following. The cowboy boots, plaid shirts, jeans, and large belt buckles could be seen throughout the crowd. And by the end of the set, I think Hicks had even converted a few Petty fans, or at the very least, had them toe-tapping and head-bopping right along.

From the second Hicks came on stage, the crowd was chanting lyrics to his well-known, and recently certified Platinum, single “Stronger Beer”. Tim’s reply, claiming that patience was a virtue, was well received with chuckles throughout. When it finally did play, near the end of his set, a massive “Stronger Beer” flag was unveiled as his backdrop. Tim introduced the song by saying “It’s Canada 2017 and we’re about to sing Stronger Beer in the Nation’s Capital”, the crowd roared with excitement. The lyrics were barely audible, as so many different verses were sung simultaneously amid the cheers.

Tim Hicks band performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Tim Hicks’ whole set had the crowd jumping and dancing. It consisted of some of his most popular hits such as “She Don’t Drink Whiskey Anymore” and “Stomping’ Ground”. It seemed to me that everyone knew at least the chorus to most of his songs.

Seeing as it was my first time seeing Tim Hicks perform live, I was very impressed. I was equally impressed by his availability after the concert to sign merchandise, take pictures and chat with fans. He greeted everyone with a smile, as if they were old friends, and did not seem to tire of it for one second. Even though his line never seemed to shrink.

Tim Hicks performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Tim’s show was a fun, upbeat, boot-stompin’ good time, and I look forward to seeing many more shows from him in the future.

Tom Petty

The final act of 2017 Bluesfest, and arguably the most anticipated, was Tom Petty and the heartbreakers. His show drew in a very eclectic crowd, of young and old and everyone in between.

Tom Petty performs at the RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa PHOTO/Mark Horton

Tom Petty was more than just a headliner, Tom Petty is a rock icon and whether you were a fan of his or not there was something special about seeing this man and his band perform. This was their 40th anniversary tour, it’s worth asking the question if any of the other bands we’ve seen over the last 10 years will still be going as strong as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performs at the RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa PHOTO/Mark Horton

This was one of the biggest and best finales to RBC Bluesfest in recent memory and one of the most interesting as well. I’m sure that Tim Hicks would never have dreamed, when he started his career, that one day he’d be opening for the legendary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Well that’s a wrap, RBC Bluesfest 2017 is in the history books. This was the first major event I was able to cover for Sound Check Entertainment and it’ll be one I’ll never forget. Started out with meeting High Valley for an interview and wrapped up meeting Tim Hicks while listening to Tom Petty…how do you top that?

If you missed any of our coverage of the last 10 days simply click here and you’ll be able to read all of our coverage of RBC Bluesfest past and present.

More photos from Day 10 of RBC Bluesfest

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The Riot Police performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Midnight Shine performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Tim Hicks band performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

The Souljazz Orchestra performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Tim Hicks performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Sari Schoor performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Tim Hicks band performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Midnight Shine performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Midnight Shine performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Peter Wolf performs at the RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa PHOTO/Mark Horton

Peter Wolf performs at the RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa PHOTO/Mark Horton

Graham Mallany of the Tim Hicks band performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Tom Petty performs at the RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa PHOTO/Mark Horton

Tim Hicks performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Tom Petty performs at the RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa PHOTO/Mark Horton

Midnight Shine performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers performs at the RBC Bluesfest in Ottawa PHOTO/Mark Horton

Midnight Shine performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

Sari Schoor performs at the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest by Renée Doiron

  Free Fallin’ Into the Final Day of RBC Bluesfest with Tom Petty, Tim Hicks and more! As RBC Bluesfest wrapped up for another year, the fans were left wanting more after listening to Midnight Shine, Tim Hicks and Tom Petty.

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Midnight Shine shines on CityFolk stage in Ottawa debut

Midnight Shine shines on CityFolk stage in Ottawa debut

It was a beautiful late summer afternoon in Canada’s Capital, the great lawn at Lansdowne park was still soggy from the rain on Saturday but the crowds were starting to make their way down for the final day of CityFolk. (more…)

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RBC Ottawa Bluesfest...is it all in the name? #MondayMusings

RBC Ottawa Bluesfest…is it all in the name? #MondayMusings

It’s that time of year again, first everyone is excited about the forthcoming announcement of the Ottawa Bluesfest lineup and then for the next 5 months won’t stop complaining about the lack of “blues” in the lineup. (more…)

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Noel Fielding interview: 'Adults can't deal with anything that's illogical'

On the eve of a solo tour, Noel Fielding - formerly one half of The Mighty Boosh - talks to Mark Monahan about this all-new banquet of weirdness, and explains the benefits of his Bohemian childhood and how he survived turning 40

The Telegraph | 18 October 2014 | Mark Monahan

Fantasy man: Noel Fielding, in his north-London studio Photo: Rick Pushinksy

The first thing that catches my eye upon entering Noel Fielding’s north-London studio is a cartoonishly bizarre rubber mask, perched atop a limbless female mannequin, daubed with zombie-like flourishes of paint and crowned with a daft shock of green hair. It could be the product of an unholy fertility rite involving Frankenstein’s monster, the Incredible Hulk and The Silence of the Lambs’ psycho Buffalo Bill.

“I made this the other day,” says Fielding, in those breezily honeyed tones of his. “It looks a bit like Lionel Messi. In Kiss make-up?” He pauses for a second, as if pondering whether the reference to the flamboyant glam-metal band is quite right - but he is soon sure. “If Lionel Messi wore Kiss make-up, that’s what he’d look like,” Fielding says firmly, roaring with laughter. “Imagine if he did wear Kiss make-up for the final, and said nothing about it. He just went, 'This is what I’m wearing: what are you going to do about it!?’ It’d be amazing, really frightening.”

The chances of Argentina’s star footballer ever representing his great nation while slathered in Estée Lauder are, admittedly, slim. But then, this is Planet Fielding, where things make only the trippiest kind of sense.

For Noel Fielding is one of surreal comedy’s 24-carat originals: a worthy heir to The Goons, Monty Python and (yes) Kenny Everett, and a match for the great Eddie Izzard. He won the Perrier best newcomer award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1998 – as half of oddball duo The Mighty Boosh, with Julian Barratt – and, four years later, made the main-prize shortlist with with his solo début, the intoxicating shot of pastoral eccentricity Voodoo Hedgehog.

Between 2004 and 2007, there followed three Boosh series on BBC Three - “little fairy-tales” as Fielding now puts it – whose cult popularity gradually burgeoned to the point where the pair’s 2008-2009 live tour was filling arenas and raking in millions and Fielding had become a national heart-throb. (During a telly interview around the time of that tour, when the pair were asked if there were any questions that people often asked either of them, Barratt instantly and brilliantly replied, “Yes – 'Where’s Noel?’ ”).

Many, however, will know Fielding as a team captain in the BBC Two comedy pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks, or perhaps as a teammate of friend and fellow dandy Russell Brand on Channel 4's Big Fat Quiz of the Year, and he was also Richmond the goth in the sitcom The IT Crowd. Close pals with the band Kasabian, he is said to have counted Ben Stiller and the late Robin Williams among Boosh admirers, and is these days living in north London with his girlfriend, Xfm DJ Lliana Bird. He has also twice held exhibitions of his own paintings in a Soho pastry shop.

Add a face that's part matinée idol and part Dickensian villain, and a manner (in the flesh, as on stage or screen) somewhere beguilingly between Woodstock hipster, teddy-bear and Clanger, and you have a fellow both as idiosyncratic and as rock'n'roll as any comedian has ever been.

One of Fielding's recent creations: 'It looks a bit like Lionel Messi, in Kiss make-up' (Picture: Mark Monahan)

I meet him just a few days after the second series of his most recent venture, Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, has finished on E4. This second helping of kaleidoscopic, dream-logic, often hilarious live-action and animation, set in a café perched on the side of a volcano, won more or less unanimous praise from critics (including the Telegraph's own Christopher Howse), which, as Fielding points out, was in stark contrast to series one.

“It’s been weird,” says Fielding, an alumnus of both Croydon Art College and Buckingham Chilterns University College. “With the first one, we just wanted to make a mental show and try lots of animation techniques and lots of characters. But it was the strongest reaction to anything I’ve ever done! It was either: absolutely love it, or absolutely hate it. And the people who didn’t like it were angry: 'WHAT... IS ... THIS!?’ I mean, I literally could have raped a horse and people wouldn’t have been as angry.”

Fielding is currently, however, giving telly a rest to do something he hasn’t done since 2009: go on the road. Unlike that earlier tour, An Evening with Noel Fielding is a solo venture, even if it does also feature his younger brother, Michael, and actor Tom Meeten, regular collaborators both. He describes it as “half-an-hour of stand-up, and then it’s characters and music and animation”.

And, as with Luxury Comedy, there is also music recorded by Fielding and Sergio Pizzorno, of Kasabian (for whose 2014 Glastonbury show the aforementioned fright-mask was in fact made). But none of this comes close to conveying the eccentricity on offer.

Along with Fielding favourite The Moon, and Luxury Comedy’s Joey Ramone, Fantasy Man and Sergeant Raymond Boombox, there are also some tantalising new characters, and not merely that celestial body’s evil alter ego, Dark Side of the Moon.

“My brother plays my wife,” says Fielding, “and he’s been having an affair with a triangle.”

My mind races. The instrument, perhaps?

“No, just a triangle shape”, Fielding replies with a giggle, whereupon I happen to notice a three-sided slab of pink foam-rubber propped up on the floor nearby, with a fake arm dangling ludicrously from it. Is that Fielding’s love-rival, then?

“That’s him, yeah,” he says. “He’s called Gordon, but he’s quite a bloke. He’s like, 'Nah, yer ou’of oar-dah!’ So it’s quite absurd.”

Barely less absurd is that Meeten is playing Hispanic film star Antonio Banderas. “The idea is that he’s in-between jobs,” says Fielding, “and that I met him at a salsa lesson and he said he’d be my understudy, but then he starts trying to take over. And there’s a new character called Chicken Man, who’s half man, half chicken, and has got Chicken Tourette’s."

Chicken Tourette’s?

“A little bit. He flips between being a Southern lady, like in A Streetcar Named Desire, and being a sort of insane Foghorn Leghorn. And then, there’s some stand-up about turning 40.”

Ah yes, I say, I was going to ask him about that. Fielding, now 41, laughs loudly.

“I don’t know how that happened.” he says. “Apparently, that’s time. Julian’s older than me, and he said the thing about being 40 is that it’s like someone drops a fridge on you, from above, and after that the fridge is already on you and you’re crushed, and then 41, 42, 43, they’re just like pebbles. Once you’ve been flattened by a fridge, it’s fine.”

Strange days: Fielding (right) with fellow Mighty Boosh star Julian Barratt (Picture: Steve Double)

Although Fielding has clearly survived his own fridge-collision with élan, he is already twice the age that both his mother (a Home Office employee) and father (a post-office manager) were when they had him. "My dad was maybe 19,” he says, “and my mum 18 – they were young.”

As a child, he would often have to step over sleeping guests – “quite crazy characters” – the morning after his parents’ parties so that he could get to the kitchen and make himself breakfast. He also fondly recalls his parents’ record collection – “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind – all the weird stuff” – and, like any of us lucky enough to have been born in the early Seventies, was weaned on a diet of blazingly odd, Sixties-hangover children’s TV shows such as Animal Kwackers, Chorlton and the Wheelies, Pipkins and The Banana Splits.

Fielding readily acknowledges the impression that all this made on him, and is proud to have retained a child-like view of the world. "I think I’m constantly surprised that adults can’t deal with illogical things or thing that are weird or psychedelic," he says. "I’ve never really lost that."

And yet, this felicitously immature trait is accompanied by a very grown-up dedication to his art: Fielding spends many months painstakingly putting together every project of his, and he not only wrote, starred in and co-edited Luxury Comedy, but even co-designed the costumes as well.

There are signs, too, that his teenager’s thirst for late nights might be ebbing. He admits, for example, to having been exhausted by that 2008-2009 tour, which saw Barratt and him perform to roughly a quarter-of-a-million people.

“It was like being in Aerosmith or something,” he says. “It was all arenas, and doing comedy to 15,000 people at once is weird anyway. It was great, but there were 50 people travelling with us and there were trucks of stuff. We had Marilyn Manson’s tour bus, we were staying in five-star hotels. It was mental. We used to get up for the [late-afternoon] sound-check and then do the show and then party.

"I don’t think I could physically do that this time at all.”

Certainly, Luxury Comedy provided a welcome change in pace. Ultimately, though, it's the thrill and immediacy of performing live that has now lured him from the editing suite and back on to the stage, even if this time round he has swapped the O2 et al for far more approachable (if not exactly miniature) 1,000–3,500–seat venues.

“Yeah, I did miss doing stand-up,” he says. “It’ll be nice to cut out all the middlemen. In television, there are so many things between you making a joke and the audience seeing it. It’s like an assault course.”

“But,” he continues, “when you do 100-seat clubs” – as he has recently been doing, in preparation for the tour – “you remember what it’s all about: a room full of people, laughing. You go, 'I’m a comedian! I forgot I was a comedian, 'cos I spent four years making television.'

"But,” he adds, clearly thinking back to the relentless carousing of that last tour, “this is a peppermint-tea tour, this one.”

Is he quite sure about that? He grins naughtily.

“Maybe...”