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

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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?