Matt Walklate

Mat is a professional musician who teaches harmonica and has been playing the instrument for over 30 years. He plays chromatic, diatonic, tremolo, bass harmonica, flute and Irish tin whistle! He started playing harp when, at the age of 15, he heard a Sonny Boy Williamson II track and asked for a harmonica for his upcoming 16th birthday, on which he received a Hohner Pro harp and never looked back.

Born in Stoke, Mat moved to Manchester in 1989 to study zoology at university where, along with fellow students, he formed his first blues band Bad Dog. He says ‘We weren’t very good, but it was a great experience’. The allure of music was stronger than that of academia, and his career path changed to music full time. After turning professional, Mat was in a band The Moochers for 10 years, and they toured places such as Holland, Belgium, Germany, France and

Switzerland, including a memorable tour of Italy. Mat says, ‘There was no order to the tour, we went from one random place to another. If you had charted our progress on a map it would’ve looked like a seismograph!’

He is also well known for another band, The House Devils, predominantly playing in the traditional Irish music style. Mat’s current collaborations include a duet with singer/ guitarist Alex Haynes: they are presently working on a duet and a full band album of original blues songs, scheduled to be released at the end of this year. He also plays with Dr. Tom Attah, who has a PhD in blues and is a regular on The Blues Show with Cerys Matthews on BBC Radio 2. A session musician, Mat has kept busy during lockdown by recording library work for film and television. Session credits include an 8 Out of 10 Cats episode where

MAT WALKLATE

Dave ‘Dogfish’ Colclough, Editorial Team

Jimmy Carr pretended to play harmonica during the famous countdown clock, and most recently a couple of tracks for the Sky One sci-fi series Intergalactic, where he performs the tracks in a wedding scene (it sounds glamorous right? But it was actually filmed on a wooden platform in a forest in the middle of March near Manchester!), he tells me. Mat has been endorsed by Seydel for over ten years, and his main diatonic harmonicas are the 1847 classics with the wooden comb. ‘I have an insane amount of these harps in all keys and low tunings etc., and I can justify every single one!’ he says. He also uses a full set of Seydel Lightnings, which he tends to keep for recording and session work. For chromatic, he mainly uses the Saxony. Mat uses all three techniques for producing single notes: puckering, tongue blocking and also U blocking, where the tongue is curled in a U-shape to isolate the hole. He explains, ‘I use what is best for the situation. For example, I use U blocking when playing a lot of fast traditional Irish music - I can perform triplets easier by moving my tongue slightly to the left and right. However, many a time I use all three techniques in the same song. I think it’s better to have these tools in your armoury so you can use them when the situation requires’.

Mat not only plays Irish traditional music - he plays blues, rock, ska, reggae and Americana. All these influences can be heard on his excellent Sea of Blues album. Mat’s latest album is Traditional Harmonica, a mix of traditional Americana and Irish music. The two styles complement each other, and you can really hear the influences in the Americana tracks from Celtic music. From the energetic polka The Ballydesmond, where fiddle and harmonica dance together in perfect unison, the enigmatic Wayfaring Stranger to the spirituality of Meeting is Over, and my favourite, the hauntingly beautiful Tell Her I Am, this album is a must if you enjoy the traditional style. Sea of Blues is available from Bandcamp, Amazon Music and iTunes. Traditional Harmonica available from Bandcamp.