Our man heads straight back to elemental blues for this release. His voice if anything is even deeper and more grizzled than before and his mainly electric guitar rich and spiky. Some tracks have drums and some are acoustic. His son Jody engineers.

White rips into Baby Please Don’t Go with such firmness that there’s no way the lady is leaving! Hooker’s Boom Boom gets the low down dirty treatment and other titles such as Bad Dreams, Down The Dirt Road Blues and title cut Bad Mouthin’ deliver exactly what the listener might expect. Stockholm Blues is an autobiographical tale about playing in Europe.

Big Boss Man sounds tough as nails. Cool Town Woman has a biting vibe about it. The sound is captured clean but raw, as my chat with Tony makes clear. But the crowning glory is the weighty, monochrome reading of Heartbreak Hotel…the blues don’t come more desolate than this, good people.

Pete Sargeant