King King: ‘Our kind of music is timeless and will always come back’
It seems that hard-working blues-rock quintet King King are regular visitors to Cambridgeshire, what with a gig a couple of years ago at the Junction and a top slot at last year’s Cambridge Rock Festival.
Formed in 2008, the band, whose songs include You Stopped the Rain, Rush Hour, I Will Not Fall and Whatever It Takes to Survive, are led by vocalist/guitarist and sole founding member Alan Nimmo.
“At the moment we’ve started recording the next album,” reveals the kilt-wearing bandleader. “To be honest, it was supposed to be finished a little bit sooner but we hit a few roadblocks with some illness – I was ill for a while and our keyboard player turned ill as well.
“So we got stopped in our tracks and we’ve just started back again now, and of course we’ve got the tour coming up in March.”
Alan’s brother, Stevie, joined the line-up in 2020. “Obviously he and I have been playing together as Nimmo Brothers for a very long time... I’d been quietly planning this anyway for a long time – I knew that at one point I was going to have to get another guitar player in, and he’s the only guitarist that I would have wanted to work with.
“I also wanted to strengthen up the backing vocals and a few other things. I knew what I needed to add to the band to start making it sound like how I wanted it to sound, so when I asked him to join he was more than happy.”
King King’s last album – their fifth studio LP – was Maverick, released in 2020. Will some of the new tracks the band have been working on for the follow-up be given an airing at the gig at Cambridge Junction in March?
“Yes,” replies Alan, who cites the likes of Free, Eric Clapton, Steve Marriott, Muddy Waters, BB King, Whitesnake and Thunder as major influences. “I think it’s always nice for our fans that they get to hear something new from us, so we’re going to put one or two of the new ones in there as a little taster before they get the album.”
With the recent gigs in and around the city, one might assume that King King have been coming here for years but, as Alan explains, that’s not the case. “It’s one of those things. Before that, we never really got to Cambridge – other than I think when we played with [British blues legend] John Mayall when we supported him a few years back, but that was it.
“But then we’re there twice in a row. It’s good. But we come back to these places because they were successful – we got a good crowd there and people seemed to be happy.”
Perhaps that’s down to King King’s emphatic blues-rock sound – a sound that never really goes out of style. “I think that’s always been the case, if a band does it honestly as well,” observes Alan. “You get your fashionable things that will fade but this kind of music’s timeless and it will always come back. It will always be there and people will always have it to fall back on.”
Alan looks back on touring with the aforementioned Thunder. “That actually changed everything for the band,” he recalls. “All of a sudden we had a much bigger audience to play to, and it was thanks to those guys.
“We got to showcase our music at Wembley Arena and in front of thousands of people in other places like that, and it was fantastic. We gained a lot of fans from that.”
[Read more: In pictures: Cambridge Rock Festival 2022, Jona Tee of H.e.a.t: ‘I started growing my hair at 11 and never looked back’]
King King, along with special guest, Squeeze frontman Glenn Tilbrook, will be performing at Cambridge Junction (J1) on Wednesday, March 29. Tickets, priced £32, are available at junction.co.uk. For more on the band, go to kingking.co.uk.
