John Fairhurst will be bringing his band to the Great British Rhythm and Blues Festival in Colne at the weekend. Ahead of his performance on Sunday. he took time out to answer a few questions about his music and his career

For those who haven’t seen you live before, what can the audience expect from your set in Colne?

Well, its going to be a huge loud and dirty blues rock explosion! It's always a huge pleasure to play with Toby Murray (drums) and Justin Kool (bass), we love to jam it out and get really into the joy of being on stage together. There will be bunch of songs from previous albums and some new material we have been working on for a little while.

Your music appears to reflect a huge range of influences – where did they all come from?

As a child, there was always music playing. When I was born, my dad was in a big Captain Beefheart phase. Probably the first thing I ever heard was Trout Mask Replica on repeat, which explains a lot! But there was music from all over the world, India, Africa, Rock, Blues, Jazz, acoustic all sorts. I got well into Indian Classical music after meeting K Sridhar when I was a child and listening to his Sarod playing. me and my mates kinda discovered the joy of the vinyl collection as young teenagers. Floyd, Hendrix, Neil Young, Leadbelly etc etc. Then I got into metal and grunge. Metallica, Megadeth, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Rage against the machine. A bit later I was mad into the acid techno scene in Manchester. Travelling all over the world gave me the opportunity to listen to and play with all manner of musicians with all sorts of styles. I guess my music is one huge melting pot of influences that are constantly developing and mixing themselves together. how I play really depends on what I’ve been listening to at the time. It leads to a pretty eclectic set!

Even fellow guitarists are in awe of your playing. You must have been playing guitar from an early age.

That’s a very nice thing to say! My dad started to teach me the rudiments and open tunings, fingerpicking and bottleneck from when I was about 11 or 12 I guess, but the blues was already well in my head by then. Having been brought up listening to all sorts of music since I was a baby and listening to my dad playing, it was just a matter of time. There was a time before guitar, then all of a sudden it was the most important thing in the world, along with fishing! I guess being pretty obsessive about the things I get into really helped. There is no trick to getting good at playing. Just do it for every possible hour you can. Have you heard of the ten thousand hour rule? It suggests that after ten thousand hours practise you may master whatever it is you are practising. Personally, I feel that at that point you should have the technical skills to operate the instrument freely. After that it is more about imagination and it is only by you’re own imagination that you are bound.

Do you still practice today? If you haven’t played the guitar for a while do you start getting withdrawal symptoms?

I’m not sure I practice really, more just play every day. I improvise a lot and rarely play anything exactly the same twice. It's more an ongoing development. It's very rare that I don’t play at least a bit every day. Yes, I didn’t have a guitar for five weeks once. I felt naked and alone. It was weird! The guitar has been one of the very few rock solid things in my life.

How many guitars will you admit to owning? Do you have a favourite?

Ha ha! I think I have about 14 guitars at the moment. They are all different, they all play and sound different. All individual characters with their own feel. The mainstay of my playing has been on my very beaten and battered National Resophonic Estralita which I got new in 2001, although it looks like its been played every day since the 30s and has been everywhere all over the world with me. I definitely go through phases of favouring certain guitars depending on what style I’m playing and who I’m playing with. My psychedelically painted hot rodded and much altered Strat based on an encore, my first guitar, was stolen from the van in January 2016. That was my favourite electric guitar and I miss it a lot. I learned to play on that guitar. I also still play The Pig, a weird electric I built for my GCSE design tech project at high school. It's a creature all of its very own!

With the band you have an incredibly powerful sound for just three musicians – do you sometimes surprise yourselves at the sound you can create?

We really just get lost in it. We never quite know where it might go. Yeah, it's an awesome experience to hear what comes out sometimes. I guess it comes from having played together so much that we totally trust each other and each others musicianship so that we can really let go and improvise large sections, play with dynamics and see how much of a racket we can actually make. It just such good fun really

There seems to be a resurgence in blues rock at the moment with a lot of artists coming through. Why do you think this is?

There most certainly is indeed. Its great to see and be a part of. I think there is more interest now in the blues than ever there was. It spans generations. It is the very heart of much western music. I feel the mainstream music press plays a huge part in musical fads and trends and commercial sales. A lot of empty bullshit. The blues is real, it's not about fantasy, and you can’t really play it unless you really mean it. Living in a time of social unrest, class divide based on wealth and poverty and an uncertain future I think maybe people are just wanting to hear something honest. The blues is a social kind of music. Its about human emotion, music born of change and adversity, of poverty and strife, of good times and bad times. The blues has always been there. Everyone feels the blues at some point.

Where are you on the recording front at the moment? Can we expect something new by the time Colne comes around?

I have a lot of irons in the fire at the moment actually. Although I haven’t released anything for a couple of years I have been working away on various recordings that will eventually find themselves onto at least two new albums, if not three or more over the coming year. It's a real mixed bag. For sure a new solo album, a new band album, and a one-microphone project with my old blues partner Joe Strouzer amongst other things. I have my own studio set up now with loads of lovely analogue gear and I’m loving it! Yes we have a couple of new tracks ready for Colne, but the first singles won’t be out till the autumn tours.

Colne apart, what does the rest of the year have in store?

Well it's full on with festivals and shows all of August and into September. Boomtown, Shambala, Farmer Phil's, Solfest, Smallworld to name a few. I will be touring the UK solo in October with new material, a short solo tour in Belgium in early November and a UK band tour in November. In January I am going to tour India as part of documentary on Festival culture that is currently in production in both the UK and India. In February, it's Panama for 20 days to play Global Tribal Gathering with UK festival and touring bands such as Slamboree and to meet with tribes from Central and South America to share our art music and culture. It's going to be amazing! I’ll be touring the UK and Europe again in Spring, hopefully with the new albums. I’ve got a few interesting ideas up my sleeve for the releases!

The John Fairhurst Band, Colne Muni, Sunday, August 27. The Great British Rhythm and Blues Festival, Colne, August 25 to August 27. Details from www.bluesfestival.co.uk