Lloyd Spiegel

Celebrating 25 years as a blues artist, Lloyd Spiegel’s upcoming national tour is sure to be unlike any other. After taking last year off to plan for the next phase of his career, Spiegel is gearing up for an extensive list of gigs that will showcase his journey as a musician from where it began to where it’s headed with the unveiling of new music.
“It’s kind of a timeline of the last 25 years for me and it’s exciting going into some old material I haven’t played for a long time – even songs I’ve never played live,” he says of the set list.
Despite an impressive history of shows behind him – including a coast-to-coast tour of the U.S that he’s clocked six times over – Spiegel still enjoys making his way down to the regional towns and venues that he credits with keeping the local music culture alive.
“It’s sort of how I grew up, playing intimate venues in Victoria. And as a kid, that was a tour – to go Bendigo, Ballarat and then Hepburn Springs,” he says referring to the towns he’ll be visiting in the coming months, “I really like the intimacy of a smaller room.”
In many ways, these small shows are a chance for him to go back to his roots. Considered somewhat of a child prodigy, at an age when most kids would be dancing to whatever was on the radio, Spiegel was spending his time at blues jam sessions. By the age of 10 he was playing shows with people he then considered idols but now, over the course of the past 25 years, those idols have turned into his peers.
“My influences were Melbourne blues players; those people were like rockstars to me,” he says reflecting on the time he spent on the local music scene. “You can’t go and see blues bands as a four or five-year-old kid and not want to play guitar. It’s just something that happens to you.”
25 years on, Spiegel is one of Australia’s most successful blues artists and guitarists, having shared the stage with a slew of industry legends such as Etta James, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. However, when asked to pinpoint a few highlights of his career thus far, he points to the opportunities that his music has given him rather than the personalities he’s met.
“The highlights of the last 20 years aren’t so much about music… There’s been a lot of great festivals and a lot of great gigs in a lot of great countries, but the truth is that music is just that passport I’ve used to get places,” he says.
“All I did was learn the guitar and all of a sudden you’re in all these situations that you never thought you’d be in in your wildest dreams, so I’m very thankful for that.”
Describing the upcoming tour as “my way of saying goodbye to that era and introducing the next,” it’s safe to say that Spiegel has no plans to stop making music anytime soon. For someone with over two decades of success behind him well before the age of 40, it’s clear that this is just the first of many anniversary tours that fans and Spiegel himself can look forward to in the years to come.
When & Where: The Goldmines Hotel, Bendigo – June 12, Main Bar, Ballarat – June 13 & The Old Hepburn Hotel, Hepburn Springs – June 14
Written by Kara Ready