River town - Rob Heron & The Tea Pad Orchestra

Rob Heron & The Tea Pad Orchestra don’t care what genre you choose to put them in – western swing, country blues, ragtime hokum or whatever else– as long as you understand that they’re 100% sincere and 100% immersed in this stuff. This is no lazy pastiche, no dressing up box. They live and breathe this music and want you to get immersed with them.

The Tea Pad’s sound draws on a myriad of influences – from Bob Wills to Django Reinhardt, George Jones to Tom Waits – yet ultimately sounds like nobody else, that North Eastern Swing style that’s utterly their own and changing all the time.

Across the four wonderful albums – 2012’s “Money Isn’t Everything”, 2014’s “Talk About The Weather”, 2016’s “Something Blue” and the brand new “Soul Of My City” – the band have constantly added new flavours to their sound: Heron in particular is a vinyl obsessive, always fired up about some new passion – calypso or boogaloo or whatever this week brings – and that eclecticism feeds into their songs, with the new album adding twangy 60s guitar tones and modernist R&B styles.

In November 2018 the band released their single “Life Is A Drag” on Germany’s Migraine Records ahead of their upcoming album “Soul Of My City”, which was released on Tea Pad Recordings in February 2019.

Joining Rob Heron (vocals and guitar) is Ben Fitzgerald (guitar), Tom Cronin (mandolin and harmonica), Colin Nicholson (accordion) and Ted Harbot (double bass) and Paul Archibald (drums).