Since his glorious 1986 debut Guitar Town, Steve Earle has lived the maverick troubadour lifestyle to the hilt, welding country to hard rock with Copperhead Road and injecting redneck-bating, radical politics into the heady mix in albums such as Jerusalem, finding time for mainline drug abuse and serial divorce along the way. Now on his 16th studio album, he seems to have reinvented himself as a Texas bluesman in the footsteps of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Terraplane takes its title from the 1930s Hudson Motor Car Company of Detroit model, which inspired the Robert Johnson song Terraplane Blues. A third of it was written while Earle toured Europe alone for five weeks with just a guitar, a mandolin and a backpack. He recorded the album with long-time associates The Dukes and they’ll be backing him at The Ritz. Political, activist, critically acclaimed novelist and actor in HBSO series such as The Wire, hyperactive Earle even co-wrote the title track with Marianne Faithfull for her new studio album, Give My Love To London. Still, hardcore Earle fans will be more interested in his extensive back catalogue of rabble-rousing alt-country.

Tue 20 Oct, The Ritz, Whitworth Street, M1 5NQ, 7.30pm, £29.50, www.seetickets.com

Tue 20 Oct
Words:
Neil Sowerby
Published on:
Tue 20 Oct 2015