Hailing from the Blue Mountains near Sydney, award-winning Australian solo artist Claude Hay blends slide guitar, bass and drums to create music that invokes the best of stomping traditional blues, hard rock and booty-shaking funk, all delivered with chops to burn and a vocal range to match. Claude is perhaps the world’s ultimate Do-It-Yourself musician – forging his live sound on the back of looping technology which allows him to create a band vibe without the band. This approach has seen this fiercely independent artist build an audience for his music globally with the release of three award-winning home-made albums. Taking DIY a step further than most, Claude has built all his own equipment: there’s ‘Betty’, his double-necked guitar which he made out of a kitchen bench top; there’s ‘Stella’, his new ‘Cigar Box’ guitar which started its life as a six dollar baking tin. He’s also built his own dome house and studio from the ground up, and pimped out his tour van with a shower and bar (a great move when you consider how much time he spends on the road).
‘I Love Hate You’ is Claude Hay’s recent third album which saw him win Male Vocalist of the year (2012) in the Blues Music (Chain) Awards. Initial takes were at Memphis’ legendary Sun Studios to kick off the process and the remaining bulk of the recording and engineering done at Hay’s home built ‘Vader’ Studios (a huge back-lit Darth Vader mask overseeing production).
‘I Love Hate You’ follows up 2010’s ‘Deep Fried Satisfied’, a very successful album for the indie artist that allowed him to get a foot in the door overseas. While promoting the launch of the album in the US, Claude performed live on the National Public Radio Network (which boasts a weekly listenership of about 27 million) and ‘Deep Fried Satisfied’ promptly shot to number nine on the US Billboard Blues charts in response. The album went on to rank number five on Amazon’s top ten Blues albums of 2010, with track ‘Miss You So’ polling third in the Best Blues Song of the Year category. ‘Get Me Some’ won the Australian Blues Music (Chain) Award for ‘Best Song of 2011’. A track about the aggravation caused by faulty printers, ‘How Can You Live With Yourself’, hit number one on Triple J radio’s Unearthed chart around the same time. ‘Kiss The Sky’ (2007) is the debut lo-fi masterpiece which started the story for Claude Hay’s solo career and still sells like hotcakes whenever Claude Hay performs at festivals and venues around the world.
