In Conversation With Colin: Will Wilde

Brighton based Will Wilde plays the harmonica as if it were a Stratocaster guitar and has been described as the Hendrix of the harmonica, he’s been touring the blues circuit for more than a decade with his sister Dani’s band and his own hard rock band named Bad Luck Friday.

Wilde blends his passion for blues with his love of rock. He takes what’s authentic and compelling about the music he grew up loving and introduces the raw energy of bands such as Led Zeppelin, Free and Deep Purple without losing the heart and soul of the blues.

The song that initially sparked Will’s interest in the harmonica was Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Help Me’ and at the age of sixteen he had picked up his first harmonica and taught himself how to play listening to Muddy Waters records. “It sounds the way I feel is the best way I can explain it,” he tells me as we chat about Chicago blues and why it connects so strongly. “It’s every human emotion rolled into one and I think that’s why it’s always resonated with me.”

Will has released four studio albums and one live album: Unleashed (2010), Raw Blues (2013), Live In Hamburg (2015), Bring It On Home (2018) and Bad Luck Friday (2022), as well as appearing as a guest harmonica player on albums by Walter Trout, Toby Lee, Brave Rival, Earl Thomas and Krissy Matthews.  His earlier releases reflect more of a traditional Chicago blues sound, but over time he has developed a more intense style that draws from the classic rock and blues rock music he grew up on. The new album Blues Is Still Alive is a celebration of the blues and its enduring legacy.

“The brief for this album was to make a blues album more in the way someone like Walter Trout or Gary Moore would make a blues album. It’s more rock influenced although the actual songs are very much 12 bar blues but I think the influence of people like Elmore James still comes through on songs like ‘Wild Man’ or ‘Don’t Play With Fire’ his vocal influence especially, he had a very intense voice and so pure conviction all the time is what I tried to take from that.

“I think it’s my best album so far. I’ve learned a lot about structuring songs and that has helped me develop my own harmonica style and sound a lot more. It feels very natural to come back into the blues because that’s where I started when I was sixteen. I feel I can play straight ahead blues now and put my own stamp on it, but it got to the point years ago I made a couple of blues albums and it felt like if I recorded another album of 12 bars that I would just be repeating myself. It didn’t feel as if I had anything new to say at the time whereas with this album it feels as if I’ve got something new to say within the constraint of 12 bar blues.”

Will writes his songs typically on guitar as he explains, “Harmonica is not the best instrument for composing on, I can’t play and sing at the same time so usually I sit down with a guitar and although I’m not the best guitar player in the world I get by for writing songs and use a piano for some songs as well, although drums was my first instrument.”

The song ‘Learn How To Love’ is a minor blues shuffle. “That song is about a troubled relationship and we recorded it pretty much live in the studio. I think with that kind of thing it’s important to have everyone in the band playing together, but there were some vocal overdubs afterwards. The harp solo was all one take and I think it’s probably my favourite harp solo on the record as well.”

When playing live on stage Will drops in some favourite cover songs too. “There’s been a few over the years” he explains. “Parisienne Walkways is the one that’s been in the set for a long time, also Lazy by Deep Purple is another one, it was on my album Bring It On Home and we sort of flipped it because there is some harmonica in the original Deep Purple track but obviously Ritchie Blackmore plays the majority of the soloing on that, so I took all of the guitar lines on the harp and then there’s a little guitar solo in the middle where the harp solo used to be.”

Will’s stage persona with black leathers and bandolier full of different harmonicas could be seen as form over function. “The bandolier is for practicality, I use at least ten harmonicas in every show”. Will explains. “Sometimes I change mid-song so it just means I don’t have to keep bending down or turning my back on the audience to pick up another harp. I put them in the bandolier in order of the set, so it is very practical but also it’s an image thing and somebody thought once at a show that I was a suicide bomber when I walked into the venue and told security but I don’t feel right without it now.” 

Will is the inventor of the Wilde Tuning, the world’s first harmonica tuning specifically designed for playing blues rock and hard rock music. “It’s a different tuning configuration, it was something I came up with after years of frustration with the original Richter tuning. Because I’m influenced by a lot of guitar players there are certain licks that guitarists play and certain notes that they add vibrato to that you can’t do on a regular harp so it was inspired by Brendan Power, he developed some tunings for his music and I took some inspiration from that and came up with the Wilde tunings. It lets me use a lot more bluesy expression in the upper octave to play those guitar-like licks.”

In recent years Will had moved away from the blues, performing more rock based material, however his latest album Blues Is Still Alive sees a return to his roots, and it may well be the finest album of his career.

Excerpts of this interview appeared on ‘The Rock Vault’ radio show March 4^th 2025

Written by Colin Palmer