The biggest booking of our season, and he's here twice. Flamenco to rock, over 200 venues a year in the nineties, Glastonbury, four albums — and a surname that means lute player.
Ian Luther plays Dreamboat on Friday 14 and Saturday 15 August, 6pm to 8pm both nights. Two nights, in the dunes at Porth Tyn Tywyn. It's the biggest thing we've booked all season and we couldn't get him for one night, so we took two.
He's a singer, songwriter and guitarist from Chepstow, and the one thing everyone who writes about him agrees on is that you can't file him under a genre. A set can move from a flamenco-styled instrumental to a lamenting love song to flat-out rock without apologising for any of it.
Through the nineties he played alongside Dave "Celtic" Cox as the Twist Devils, working over two hundred UK venues a year. Since then he's toured solo across Britain and Europe, played Glastonbury, and released four records — The Blue Planet, The Lonely Road, The End of the World and Cheek.
He's the guitarist in the Gwent band The Belgians, who reunited to play Chepstow Castle. And he wrote and composed a rock comedy that ran at the Edinburgh Festival — which started life, improbably enough, as a musical about working on a building site, written back when he was an electrician in Chepstow. It toured forty-five dates.
The detail we like most: Luther is a derivative of "lute player". He's pointed that out himself, and describes himself as a modern-day minstrel following his surname. Geoff Downes — of Asia, Yes and The Buggles — calls him "a complete one-off".
Friday the 14th he follows Max, who starts at 3pm with reggae, world music and live melodica. Saturday the 15th is Ian on his own.
Free entry, no tickets, as always. Bar open, pizza out of the oven all evening. More at ianluther.co.uk.
28 days only. Open every day to 31 August at Porth Tyn Tywyn, Rhosneigr.
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