ONE of Australia’s leading blues and roots musicians, Jeff Lang, will be heading to Barnoldswick next week as part of a whistle-stop UK tour.

“It’s not a very long tour but it’s certainly a busy one,” he said. “I’m in the UK for 13 nights and I’m playing on 12 of them. It’s good because you don’t have time to be jet-lagged.

“I’ve found that gigging is the ultimate cure for jet-lag when you arrive somewhere where the time zones are so different. By the time you get to your evening my body’s telling me I’ve been up all night but then there’s the gig to do, the adrenalin kicks in and gets you through it.”

Jeff said that a packed gig schedule is also a very effective way of preventing getting homesick.

“If you have too much time off on the road you feel as though you should be at home - I’ve got a family in Australia so I shouldn’t be sitting round or visiting guitar stores.”

Multi-instrumentalist Jeff has won a number of awards in Australia for his music which ranges from the blues to rock and folk.

With 16 albums to his name, Jeff’s most recent release is Alone in Bad Company.

“When I’m recording a new record I always like to set up a simple rule for myself,” he said. “This can be something like only using an eight-track recorder, but for this record I decided that I would play everything myself.

“That meant that the results would be fairly stripped back but I wasn’t just going to limit myself to just guitar and voice; there’s piano on there, percussion and other things too.

“Working without a producer meant I certainly had more flexibility. I could go in in the morning an start to work on a song and then add in some guitar or whatever and then when I’d got that song to where I was happy with it I’d mix it. That was a day’s work.

“It’s a different approach to working with a band - and in some ways it’s also slower because with a band you might lay down five or six tracks in a day and mix them later but I really enjoyed the experience.”

Jeff admits that he wouldn’t have liked to have taken this solo route earlier in his career.

“I’ve produced quite a lot of other people as well as working on my own stuff but even so, I was surprised at how different it was working on your own,” he said. “There is a potential sand trap of getting bogged down in the process and not really paying attention to the end result.”

For his UK dates Jeff will be performing solo which means many of the songs will be very different from the album.

“I’m a firm believer that the material should be strong enough so that it can work no matter what you do,” he said. “A record’s not a gig and a gig’s not a record.

“The thing that’s appealing about a gig is that it has that immediate, visceral connection between performer and the audience. I’ve felt that from both sides both as an audience member and as a performer and it’s something special which I try to create at every show I do.”

Jeff Lang, Barnoldswick Music and Arts Centre, Thursday, July 26. Details from 01282 813374 or www. barnoldswickmusicandartscentre.com