MacD on Music: Blowing a fuse

Delta Fuse are about to release their new album ‘Blown Fuse’ on June 27

We Irish have a great history of blues musicians. We’ve given the world such greats as Gary Moore, Grainne Duffy and Rory Gallagher, amongst others, and this week I’m talking to someone who’s keeping this proud tradition of Irish blues greats alive and well. I’m talking about Jack McHale, frontman and guitarist of Delta Fuse (also featuring Liam Bradley on bass and Sandy Aicken on drums).

Delta Fuse are about to release their new album ‘Blown Fuse’ on June 27 and I caught up with Jack to talk a bit about the band and the album.

“I’m from Letterkenny in Donegal. I started off as I was mad about music and really wanted to get a band together. I tried a few line-ups that didn’t really work, then I came to Derry, to the Tech. Sandy, who’s the drummer and who I went to school with, he was also there, and we ended up meeting up.

"We weren’t even really friends in secondary school, but I knew he was a drummer and I said ‘I want to start a band’ so me and him started off as a two piece. We started doing blues-rock stuff because I was absolutely obsessed with blues, and the name Delta Fuse came about because I was mad about Delta Blues, but because we were playing it electric, we used ‘Fuse’ instead of ‘Blues’.

"Ben, our old bass player, joined then and we started playing bigger and bigger shows and started going out on the road and touring more. Then Liam joined in the last two years, and we’ve taken a bit of a different direction now.”

Next, we spoke about the new album: “It’s called ‘Blown Fuse’. It’s heavily influenced by Hill Country Blues. That’s people like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, and we absolutely love that style of music that comes out of Mississippi. It’s a really hypnotic style of blues. We blast it constantly in the van when we’re on tour, and that’s really influenced this album.

"These kinds of riffs are quite hypnotic and quite repetitive, but then, also, it brings out that sixties, psychedelic, fuzz rock that we really love. A lot of our music is heavy fuzz riffs. It’s blues rock, but it really takes from that psychedelic sixties Blues boom, and a lot of American psychedelic bands as well. It’s definitely got a southern thing to it, but it’s very much our own. It’s kind of a modern twist on those things that we bring to it.”

“I recorded the whole album myself. We did it up in the hills of Donegal, for the Hill Country Blues in Burt. It’s an old farmhouse that we recorded in. It’s got a lovely barn and everything, and that kind of surrounding was really good to write in. We wrote some great stuff there and we put a cover on it too.

"We wanted to do a cover of someone we really admire, and we chose Muddy Waters because, I suppose, we cover a lot of his music. We put ‘Got My Mojo Working’ on as a tribute to him. That came out sounding great. It’s definitely gone back to our roots, very heavy blues but quite heavy rock as well.”

I asked Jack if he’s had any feedback on the album so far: “It’s been noticed by Joe Bonamassa. The two singles, ‘Sweat’ and ‘Tooth Rot Bop’, he added to multiple playlists. He’s shared us to his Instagram, which was great. It’s gone out around the radio stations, just doing the rounds at the minute. It’s got great feedback from the likes of Richard Dunning, who runs the British Blues Awards. He runs his own radio station and things like that as well.”

“We’re going on tour in Canada in September to promote the album. It’s all come out of this music because this is the newest music we’ve been playing, so this is what’s being picked up at the minute. There’s some great stuff coming out of it, and it’s not even released.”