Sandi Thom
It was a phone call that changed Sandi Thom’s life. When the Banff singer, best known for her inescapable Number One I Wish I was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair) was searching for inspiration, she suddenly found it.
Blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa had taken ill, and needing a replacement vocalist, he called up Sandi and asked her to fill in for a few shows.
“It was very unexpected, and he needed someone to come and sing in his place” she says, speaking from London, where she now lives.
“So, in 24 hours, I ended up on a fight to Nice, then going on the next night as a support to BB King.
“That experience came about as I was writing the album, and that really cemented the direction of it, as I came back home after being on tour for two weeks and I’d really experienced that blues world, which had opened my eyes to that audience.”
The experience clearly made Sandi go back to her roots, and her original love of blues music, and the results can be heard on her new Merchants & Thieves album.
It’s a more rugged and raw record than many might expect from the previously poppy singer, full of chunky blues riffs, and she’ll be playing tracks from it at her O2 ABC2 gig on Friday.
It may surprise the many people who know Sandi for her initial fame, playing gigs over the internet from her flat in Tooting, or those who bought her albums, which were heavy on mellow, acoustic guitar-led songs.
However, this is not a drastic departure or the singer, and she points out her very first band was a Fleetwood Mac tribute act.
But the experience did help Sandi re-discover her self-confidence, after she was axed by Sony when her second album The Pink & the Lily disappeared without trace.
“Being dropped from a major is like being fired and it does knock your confidence, so my experience with Joe came at the right time for me, as I was a bit like the walking wounded.
“When you get rejected you instantly consider it’s something you’ve done wrong, or you’re not good enough, and it took a while to build my confidence back up.
“ But the way people reacted to me just singing songs really re-installed my confidence.”
That surge of self-belief helped inspire Merchants & Thieves, on which Bonamassa guest-stars on one track, and Sandi believes it’s the best record of her career.
It’s released through her own label, Guided Angel, and that has helped the singer to craft the sort of album she wants to make.
“The album is a direct result of the fact it’s an independent record” she says.
“I’m the boss, I take charge of everything and I make all the decisions. Having that freedom, that state of ownership over what I’m doing, was what changed the sound.
“Everything else was he same – same producers, writers and band, it was all the same except that we had total control and made the record that we wanted to make. That’s where the heart of it lies.”
Energetic and chatty, Sandi barely pauses for breath, and only stops chatting when the passing wail of a fire engine’s siren threatens to drown her voice out.
Yet she has a tougher side too, having kept going with her music despite talking a vicious amount of flak early in her career, after critics claimed that her internet broadcasts from home were simply part of a marketing strategy.
But Sandi claims that no matter what is said about her, or what happens to her music, she’ll always stick with it, no matter what.
“I would never give up on music. I don’t ever see any other possibilities for me.
“It’s like when I left school I made a decision that this is what I would dedicate my life to.
“When I was a little girl, music was the one thing I loved more than anything else in the world!
“When everyone else was growing up, and my friends were saying they couldn’t be bothered with piano lessons or whatever, I was always the one still at it. So I’ve never considered anything else, there’s no other direction for me.”
That positive attitude shows itself again when she discusses leaving Sony.
“Being dropped was a blessing in disguise, as I could never have made this record while on a big label.
“I’m not knocking Sony, and I have great respect for the people I worked with, but this is the best place I could be.
“With Sony, it was a case where there were so many people to please that the original vision you had in the first place gets diluted because there’s so many people to make happy that you have to compromise.”
Her new direction has also seen her step up her guitar playing, moving away from the acoustic, going electric, and playing lead guitar on several tracks.
She’s even getting her signature guitar named after her, while recent live gigs have featured her covering the apocalyptic blues of Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks.
It’s something Sandi is proud of, though also nervous about.
“I was absolutely terrified about doing the Zeppelin cover at first” he says.
“I soon learned there’s a massive difference between doing it in your room with no-one there and then getting onstage with the lights down and you can’t hear what you’re doing.
“Actually, the first time I did it was at Oran Mor at my Celtic Connections show, and the one thing everyone had said to me was that I’d get better as a player just by playing, and if you make mistakes, that’s it.
“But I am getting better and my confidence is growing.”