Kingfish – BST 2022 – Review by Dawn Osborne

We have to thank BST for bringing Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram to our attention as he’s a bit of a prodigy having won a Grammy being only 23 and having performed in the White House at age fifteen. He already has two albums out ‘Kingfish’ delivering excellent Muddy Waters style Delta Blues and ‘662’ (referring to a Mississippi zip code) which although it has core Delta Blues tracks, also branches out a bit including one track covering territory even Deep Purple might have travelled. He also recently performed at a special gig for the Jimi Hendrix estate. He did two sets at BST, probably to make sure he did not clash with a main stage act. Concentrating on his latest album most with four tracks from 662, he also did a couple of covers, an instrumental and two tracks from his first album.

For the first set he kicked off with ‘She Calls Me Kingfish’ from the Second album and ‘Fresh Out’ from the first album both excellent raw Delta Blues. He followed this up with ‘Empty Promises’ a Michael Burks cover and rounded out with a more Jazz influenced number from his more diversified second album ‘Too Young to Remember’. He opened the second set with an Instrumental, followed up with ‘Outside of This Town’ and ‘662’ again core Memphis Blues.
‘Long Distance Woman’ definitely got into rockier territory and he followed this up with ‘Hey Joe’ which, of course, everyone in the crowd would know from the Jimi Hendrix version if not from the 1965 original version by The Leaves. As he left the crowd chanted ‘One More Song’ for at least a couple of minutes, virtually unheard of for a mid afternoon festival act.

Kingfish is able to truly communicate the sheer joy he feels in playing to his audience which translates to lots of dancing and good vibes in the crowd. Plenty of blistering solos pulling up guitar neck, almost shredding and big meaty riffs, some 70s style honky tonk keyboards which has some of the energy of Little Richard and jamming chops that would keep rock fans happy. There’s a real X factor and vitality about his playing. It is also very real, with an element of lettin loose which is a big part of 50s rock n roll and rock and metal and inspires so much devotion in those genres.’Long Distance Woman’ made use of feedback, shredding and playing his guitar with his mouth/teeth
‘Hey Joe’ combined big 70s style guitar and keyboards. In interview Kingfish told me he’s interested in exploring the genre of rock more in the future and I can’t wait.

Dawn Osborne