TURNER PORTRAIT

The Atlanta-based rock quintet Blackberry Smoke return with a new album, You Hear Georgia. Bassist Richard Turner explains the thinking behind the big tones

Did you get the new album recorded before lockdown, Richard? Just before. We cut the record at RCA in Nashville and then shot up to Canada, and then a couple of shows into Canada, we had to escape or get locked in up there. So it was crazy. It’s been odd to be sitting on a record for a year.

How many tour dates do you think you lost in 2020 and ’21?

Oh my God. Maybe 200, although a lot of those shows are going to be rescheduled.

The upside is that You Hear Georgia is a great album.

I love it. It’s clean as fuck, recording-wise, and the bass is well thought out. After all this time as a band, everybody plays the part they think should be there. You know exactly where you want to go, and if you want to put a little signature doodle in there, then you can, or you can leave it super clean. It’s done without even speaking, a lot of the time. We think with each other’s brains now.

Some of your bass playing reminds me of AC/DC.

Well, Charlie [Starr, bandleader] is a huge fan, so that’s probably where it comes from. I totally hear how they do it, in the structures of their songs. It’s extremely complicated to sound so simple. It’s a tangled web of intricate playing over there in AC/DC, despite the fact that everybody thinks it’s so simple.

How did you get into bass in the first place?