The Mojo Slide is a group of musicians, hailing from Cambridgeshire, (Cambridge and St Neots) united in their passion for blues-inspired alternative music.

Formed in 2011 and signed to DO IT Records, they are to release their debut album 'Twist Your Bones' on November 14th. The album features a contemporary mixture of classic rock 'n' roll, and blues rooted alternative rock.

The Mojo Slide are:

Mark Wilks (vocals)
Mike Fenna (lead guitar)
Matt Legg (rhythm guitar)
Danny Savage (bass guitar)
Michael Ireland (drums)

On the track 'Smiling', "Mikey, our drummer, had an idea that we should write a song about someone who had quite a straightforward life, but who was happy with what he had - a kind of happy-go-lucky 'everyman'. It was actually inspired by the unfortunate death of Mikey's brother in a car accident. From this inspiration, Mark wrote some lyrics, starting with 'I always like to keep things simple. Some say I'm the happiest man around', and then Mike took the lyrics away, wrote the music on an acoustic guitar using the fingerpicking style you can hear on the record, and recorded a demo. From there the song came together, with Matt adding the slide guitar to give it a slightly country feel".

They add: "It's one of our favourite songs to play live, with a really uplifting chorus, and it shows the versatility of the band - that we're not just about fast paced blues rock 'n' roll".

They've also released a video for the track, watch it below;

'Twist Your Bones' (a reference to a line in one of the album tracks - 'Make You Bleed', which talks about both how the devil might torture someone and also a good description of how some people dance at our gigs!) was a true labour of love, taking 2 1/2 years from the beginning of the recording process to its release date in November 2015.

Despite being signed to a label, when we negotiated the contract we decided to pay recording costs ourselves, in order to keep a higher rate of royalties from sales, and also to have greater control over the process. The result has been an epic in terms of effort and time, but also we've managed to capture the sound we all imagined when first putting the album together.

We started off by recording all of the drums in a professional studio, before recording the rest of the album in a combination of two home studio set ups, with the mixing and mastering done by Mike.

We were unbelievably picky about the mixing and recording process, resulting in some songs being fairly simple, but others having a multitude of tracks and multiple takes needed - for example 'Little Bird' actually has over 40 tracks on it, including the various strings parts played by Matt.

The mixing was done by committee which meant it took longer, but we ended up with something that everyone was happy with. Because of how long it took, I'm not sure we'd follow the same process next time, but it was definitely an interesting and satisfying experience to go through for our debut album.

Tour Dates:

Nov 14th - The Corner House, Cambridge (album launch)
Nov 25th - The Spice of Life, Soho
Dec 5th - The Rock, Cambridge
Dec 10th - Dublin Castle - Camden

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