Shannon will appear with nick Charles and friend sin the International Blues Day Jam Saturday August 3rd at 4.15pm Marsh Mezzanine stage
Shannon Bourne is a critically-acclaimed blues-and-roots-founded guitarist, singer and songwriter with a strong following of discerning fans and the power to sway audiences with the naked emotion and sheer virtuosic power of his soul-searing performances.
Shannon’s song-writing influences — Richard Thompson, Beck, Matt Walker and Scott Walker — take the Shannon Bourne Band sound from bluesy, hard-edged, riff-laden rock to guitar-based sonically exploratory progressive and post rock, while remaining strongly accessible to audiences. And always there is extreme emotional honesty, the baring of a soul that knows darkness, and a musical sweetness and delicacy also.
As a master guitarist and slide-guitarist with a distinctive and unique guitar voice, Shannon ranks among Australia’s very finest players, a peer to the likes of Geoff Achison and Jeff Lang — with both of whom he often shares a stage — and few others. His influences — Gary Moore, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Roy Buchanan, among others — are evident in his playing, and his extraordinary performances genuinely permit his inclusion in the same sentence as such legends; but Shannon has a sound all his own, making him a musician’s musician as well as one loved by audiences, and fuelling the strong demand for his services as guest sideman and session musician.
Apart from performing with the Shannon Bourne Band, he also performs solo, where the flavour is reminiscent of John Martyn, Richard Thompson, and Pink Floyd, while still very much bearing the Shannon Bourne signature. Shannon performs regularly as Chris Wilson’s sideman, and has toured Australia with international musicians including Richard Thompson, Tony Joe White, Bob Brozman, Bob Margolin, John Butler and The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and internationally with Duke Robillard, Buddy and Julie Miller and The Waifs. Shannon has also worked with prominent Australian musicians Russell Morris, Broderick Smith, The Black Sorrows, Vanessa Amorosi, Matt Walker, John Schumann, Andy Cowan and Kerri Simpson. From 2009 to 2011 he toured with Tex Perkins’s Helpmann Award-winning The Man in Black: the Johnny Cash Story. His guitar-playing can be heard on numerous albums including Russell Morris’s ARIA award winning blues trilogy(Sharkmouth, Van Diemans Land and Red Dirt, Red Heart) and Chris Wilson and Geoff Achison’s 2012 Box of Blues.
Something of a prodigy, Shannon first picked up a guitar aged 10, inspired initially by Alice Cooper and then by Gary Moore, whose fire and passion is strongly infused in his personal style. Shannon started fronting bands aged 14, performing twice a month at Melbourne Blues Appreciation Society blues jams for many years, serving a valuable apprenticeship and helping him win the 1997 Victorian Guitar Solo Competition and the 2001 VicTas Blues Music Emerging Talent Award.
Shannon is currently song writing with Russell Morris and working on 3 new projects(acoustic EP, band EP and instrumental EP).
Shannon’s instrumental album Words Fail, produced by Jeff lang was released in 2018