Blow’s lead guitarist Claude Poffandi is a deeply passionate man who conveys nothing but charisma and ardent love for his band, his music and pure Aussie pub rock.
Blow are all about playing music and having fun, and since 2005, where other groups in the genre have come and gone, they’ve been keeping on strong with tradition.
“When we got this together, it wasn’t really about being a party band, rocking it and whatever,” says Poffandi. “It developed for me with people’s yearning for writing, for originals, and the band got its own sound and things developed from there.
“Some of us came through that pub rock era, just out of school and playing all those gigs, and that’s the way things were done. We were doing covers, starting to get itchy, because if you were a creative sort of person you wrote some songs. I guess we’re doing it the way bands used to do it.”
Even when they’re performing other people’s songs, they still manage to put a personal twist on them – as Poffandi describes them, Blow are an original band that plays covers. “Everything we do, we ‘blow’ – as in we don’t just play the songs, it becomes us. If we do ‘Superstition’, it’ll not be how Stevie Wonder plays. You’ve gotta work – we’re not one of these bands that sits back.”
And it’s that personal spin and the hard work they put in that gets Blow’s fans going, bringing people from all ages to their shows. “[The audiences] vary from mid-to-late 30s to 60s, but generally because of where the places are,” says Poffandi. “But that’s not to say that we don’t appeal to the younger ones. As a matter of fact, I play in a duo with my 26-year-old son; his age group has acquired a taste for the sort of stuff that we play, like The Doors and that.
“The delight we’ve had playing these gigs, putting our songs in it, is that people keep dancing, people keep singing along with it, and that was a big thing for us – we love that we can put hooks in our songs, that people can sing choruses and that sort of thing. It fits into the classic rock thing quite easily.”
Blow have carried their version of the classic rock sound onto their new record, When I’m Gone, under the direction of renowned producer Steve James. The collaboration was a fruitful one, says Poffandi.
“Steve doesn’t do stuff if he doesn’t wanna do stuff, so we were delighted – we started off with a few songs and once he got into it, he’s done a fantastic job and the album sounds great, we’re very blessed to have him on board. Steve brought out the songs the way they should be out there; he was able to capture what we were trying to do and it was along the ideas of what he had. Sometimes you sit there and it’s good because he says it’s the way it always should have sounded, it’s how we pictured it in our minds.
“When you write a song and start working it into a band, it has a certain sound as a band, then by the time you get to the time where it’s put down, the mixing can make it or break it sometimes. With Steve, he made our songs sound how we wanted them to sound.”
When I’m Gone is out now through MGM. Catch Blow at Sharkies Leagues Club, Saturday November 26; andSouth Hurstville RSL, Saturday December 3.
