"I've always been a bit old fashioned," says Marcus Bonfanti, explaining the reasons for recording his latest album, Shake the Walls, on analogue tape rather than the more accepted modern day computerised process.

"You get more warmth in the sound and for me, there's no substitute for having everyone playing together in the studio because that's the natural way we make music. We're a live, gigging band, even when we're not doing my gigs, we'll be playing together with someone else, and the two functions, recording and playing live, should be an extension of one another."

London-born Bonfanti, who is in the front rank of a considerable wave of young British blues singers and players, first noticed that he was out of step with trends when he was at school. Growing up listening with his parents to their Cat Stevens, Chuck Berry, Beatles and Jimi Hendrix records, he assumed these were the current music stars and was surprised nobody at school in the 1990s had heard of any of his favourites.

"I asked this mate of mine, who had long hair and always seemed pretty cool, what I should be listening to and he said, Never mind these people, check out Led Zeppelin. So I did," he says. "I bought Led Zep lV, ll, lll and l in that order and started poring over the album credits, and I discovered they were playing songs they hadn't written themselves. I thought, Who's this Willie Dixon bloke? And from there I started going back through the blues, got into Chess Records with Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and went back to JB Lenoir and Son House."

The excitement of these discoveries is still with him as he talks about saving up his pocket money, trying to make sure it didn't get half-inched at his tough London school and going off after classes to buy the next album he'd planned in his romance with the blues.

One day his mother brought a guitar she used to play down from the attic. Its strings were, he says, inches off the fret board but he was hooked and was able to apply some of the musical knowledge he'd developed through playing the trumpet from the age of six to transpose the songs from his album collection on to this beast of an instrument.

From the first moment he touched that guitar he was set on becoming a guitarist and after having played for barely two years he applied to and was accepted into the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. All was not as it seemed, however, and having taken a year out after school to work two jobs to finance his time there and practise in every spare moment in order to be as good as possible once he got there, he decided after a year and a half that he didn't like the set-up and quit.

Staying on in Liverpool he formed a band and started working on the local bar circuit from Monday to Thursday and going further afield at weekends.

"We worked all the time, playing blues, soul and old rock 'n' roll as an instrumental trio and we were able to earn enough to keep us in food and drink," he says. "But eventually we realised we needed more than food and beer money and this guy said he'd give us a better paying slot if we did songs rather than just instrumentals. Neither of the other two fancied singing so having agreed to do the first gig with songs in three days' time, I became the singer by default, spent those three days learning songs and how to put them across and went for it. I've got better. I spent quite a long time working on making my voice something that people might want to listen to."

By the time he made his first album, Hard Times in 2008, Bonfanti was a songwriter as well as a singer and despite being relatively new to both these roles, he was quickly picked up on as a new British blues talent deserving wider recognition. Released two years later, the follow-up, What Good Am I To You, reinforced his standing and in 2012 he won the British Blues Award for Best Songwriter.

"Having come to songwriting quite late, that was quite an accolade but it's become something I really enjoy," he says. "Between the solo shows I've been doing recently and working with the band, I keep busy on the road and don't always get the time to write that I'd like. But I find starting off in the morning with a blank sheet of paper and reaching the end of the day with a song finished and ready to play really satisfying and actually quite exciting – not as exciting as getting up on a stage and playing but close."

The Marcus Bonfanti Band plays Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, on Saturday July 6; King Tuts, Glasgow, Sunday July 7; and Ironworks, Inverness, Monday July 8.

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