Album: Blue Blokes 3, Stubble (Fledg'ling)

As members of 3 Mustaphas 3, Ben Mandelson and Lu Edmonds were playing footloose and fancy-free with blended roots music “forgeries” as far back as the Eighties, so the string-band crossovers done in cahoots with folk-blues guitarist Ian Anderson on Stubble should come as no great surprise.

Using an instrumental palette of guitars, mandolin, banjo, bouzouki, cumbus and saz, the three blokes grab songs from all over and turn them into something else. Elmore James’s “Sunnyland” acquires a certain trad-folk hauteur and Huey ‘Piano’ Smith’s “Don’t You Just Know It” is given a Flying Lizardesque makeover, while Hank Snow’s country ballad “A Fool Such As I” is transformed by Anderson’s voice and languid slide guitar into a British country-blues.

It’s a pleasant, whimsical affair.