FOLK SONGS, MODERN WITCHCRAFT AND THE RAGING BEAST

When the worlds of Greta Van Fleet's Jake Kiszka and alt.folkie Chris Turpin collided, it was musical love at first sight. After a whirlwind romance, new project Mirador was born.

- Polly Glass

Life moves fast in Mirador. They wrote their first 10 songs in a week. Their first gig took place in front of 12,000 people, opening for co-frontman Jake Kiszka's 'other' band. At their first headline show, in Nashville, fans queued outside for two days straight. By night two, in New York City, they were singing the words to all the songs. Rapidly forming a Deadhead-style community, fans travelled together between cities, sharing intel, trading lyrics, making their own merch. Promising omens, certainly, for one of the hottest prospects in high-spec, nostalgic rock'n'roll since Jack White and Rival Sons began blazing that trail. All that, and at that point Mirador had yet to release a single piece of music.

“Those gigs were wild,” recalls Chris Turpin, nursing the remains of an iced black coffee, shades on in the Soho watering hole in which we've met. “Every show they were there from midnight the night before, queues around the block, they waited three hours after the show...”

Turpin, the British, lesser-known half of Mirador, plays in alt.folk duo Ida Mae with wife Stephanie Jean Ward (they previously founded short-lived blues mavericks Kill It Kid). An ardent lover of the early blues voices of Lead Belly, Elmore James and Blind Willie McTell — with the neat little moustache, chic threads and elegant gestures of an outlaw matador, plus a huge, distinctive voice that seems to come from somewhere primordial - he feels like a natural sparring partner for Greta Van Fleet's old-soul, Pageian guitarist Kiszka.

The pair met backstage in Detroit, in 2018, where Ida Mae were opening on Greta Van Fleet's US tour. Pushing past initial shynesses of one another, they came together over red wine, guitars and songs that felt ancient, mysterious, haunted; less electric blues rock, more unplugged legends of the Delta.