Chris Buck of Cardinal Black - Guitar Secrets, New Music & Rise to Fame

Chris Buck of Cardinal Black

 I'll be ready when you want to come home, if you can't decide I'll wait, you don't want the truth, I'll keep telling you what you want to hear, I can help it if you want to I'll never need more time Today, we are thrilled to sit down with Chris Buck, the phenomenal guitarist behind Cardinal Black. From South Wales, Chris has taken the music world by storm with his soulful, blues-infused riffs, showcased in his Friday Fretworks series and Cardinal Black's chart-topping debut, January Came Close. With their new release, Midnight at the Valencia, earning rave reviews and nods from icons like Slash, Chris and his band are redefining alt-rock.

Get ready for an exclusive dive into his gear, creative process, and the rise of Cardinal Black. Let's get started. Now here's The Trout with Chris.

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David Smith at 469-372-1587. Alright, let's start with something simple. I have notes here, but first let's talk about Tom.

So when your PR guy, who I've known for several years, sent me information about you. He sends me information about people, hey, would you mind talking to him? And my agreement's always the same, I gotta like him. He kinda knows my taste anyway.

And I watch your video with the one driving in the car. Oh right, Need More Time, yeah. And I'm looking at Tom going like, before I even listen to it, I look at Tom and go, is this guy from Alabama? I mean, he looks like a redneck from the South, which I live in Dallas, so I'm a Southern person.

And then he has that kinda soulful voice that kinda lends itself to the Southern appeal. And so that's really what caught my attention. And then everything I read about you guys, and this is what your PR John told me.

He said, you guys sell out. Not sell out like you sell out, you sell out. No, we're not sell out, so we just, you know.

I'm looking at, I do a lot of research on everybody I interview. And I'm looking at, of course you are coming to Texas, you're doing Antoine's. Yeah.

I sold out. I started looking at the places, sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out. You guys kinda had, your history is interesting to me from the standpoint that there was a chance when you were all together, or some of you were together, years ago.

And then, Creative Differences, there's an interesting article. Yeah, yeah. In bands, you know, it's like people like, my last band broke up, my wife says, are you disappointed? I go, how many bands do you break up over, you know? That was during COVID, that was a different time.

But then you kinda like, years later, some of you got together. You were, were you in the original Tom band? Were you the guitarist? I was, yeah. I've been there from the start.

So, bizarrely, we had, so the name of that band was the Tom Hollister Trio. Which seems like a very egotistical move on Tom's part, which very much wasn't the case. And we had very little aspirations to actually be a band.

And where did you start? Was it Bristol, or where did you start? No, so it was in South Wales, so you could pretty much throw a blanket over a couple of mile radius in South Wales, and it would have covered all of us. You know, we're from very, very close together. And I can remember Tom in school, Tom is a couple of years older than me, he's probably about four years older than me.

So you've all known each other for a long time then? Yeah, well, I remember Tom in school, but it was that kind of, you know, that age range in school, that in, now we're in our thirties, four years is nothing. When you're in school, four years is a big age range, you know, why the hell would he be hanging out with me, you know? So I remember seeing Tom, I remember seeing him playing in school performances and school concerts and all that kind of stuff. And being a little bit in awe of him, he's a big guy, you know, kind of seemed to have facial hair, you know, at an age where nobody should have had facial hair.

He's had five o'clock shadow since he was about 15, I think. And so I vividly remember in school, but we never really crossed paths. And then his then girlfriend, now wife, her sister was going out with my best friend.

And through a guy that I'll be forever indebted to, I guess, or can forever blame, depending on your standpoint, a mate of mine called Ross introduced us. And Tom was doing, to use his words, some Mickey Mouse university degree, basically to escape getting an actual job. Asked me to come and contribute to a part of his coursework for his university degree.

So I drove up to Cheltenham, we hit it off, kind of stayed in contact. And actually, pretty much the first thing we did, because we were both absolutely skint, was form a cover band. Because, you know, famously, there's not much money to be made in original music.

So we formed a cover band and we started doing that. And then very quickly out of that, we started writing. And the Tom Hollister Trio was essentially Tom's final year dissertation piece, I guess.

It was the conclusion of his Mickey Mouse degree, to use his words. And we had no aspirations beyond that evening, really. It was meant to be, right, you've got to put together a performance, play a couple of tracks, maybe release a CD, three-track EP or something.

Show that you've learned something in your last three years of this music degree. So it all culminated in a show, we put a show on in Cheltenham. And out of the blue, Steve Winwood showed up.

Through a mutual friend of a friend of a friend of Tom's lecturer. Steve had just come back, it was around the time he did Madison Square Gardens with Eric Clapton, that kind of live album. I remember that tour, yeah I do.

So he arrived at this venue in Cheltenham with literally nothing but dollars in his pocket. So Tom's wife, lover, tried to charge him to get in. I'm really sorry, I only have dollars on me.

Tom thankfully intervened, having recognised who it was. And Steve was very kind, very genuine with his feedback. And his response gave us loads of constructive criticism and said, look, you're very welcome to come and record at my studio.

And he has this beautiful studio in the Cotswolds. Yeah, I'm sure, and it's in the Cotswolds, oh okay. Exactly, it's just a perfect part of Britain.

So before we knew it, it went from being, well this is just a one-off show, to well I'm now, of course I'm now a rock star. I'm in Steve Winwood's personal studio, and you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it felt like the ball got rolling very quickly.

Retrospectively, it was just a small kind of ripple in a vast ocean, but at the time it felt very significant to us. And we did that, we kind of morphed from being called the Tom Ollison Trio into TH3, just to try and soften the actual focus on one person. Which in fairness to Tom, he never wanted.

And we did a couple of things, we came to the US, we were managed by a guy called Alan Niven, who'd been Guns N' Roses manager early in their career. Taking them from being like a Sunset Strip band through to Wembley Stadium. And we did a bit of recording in the US, we signed with a US record label.

And you know, needless to say it all imploded when we were kind of, I guess in my late teens, early 20s, Tom was about 64. You would be forgiven for thinking, looking at him. But yeah, he kind of referenced it earlier, as much as we tried to do the kind of creative differences, big acrimonious splits of, fuck you, we never want to see you again.

The reality was we were doing a wedding on Saturday, so it was like, fuck you, see you Saturday. For Bruno Mars and Kings of Leon, Sex on Fire, and ABBA medleys. So yeah, we did that for about 10 years, and various other creative projects, but it always felt like unfinished business.

There was a lot of material that we'd written back in about 2009, 2010. So yeah, it felt like unfinished business, and I guess it was only really a matter of time until it did culminate in something, and that turned into Cardinal Black in May 2021. So literally about four years ago to the day was the day that we actually officially launched Cardinal Black, with no expectations really.

We had no idea what was, how it was going to be received, if people would like it. I'd been doing quite a lot of stuff on YouTube, just as a means of, you know, kind of making ends meet. Were you doing your own channel? Yeah, so a lot of kind of guitar-centric stuff.

So I had a series on YouTube called Friday Fretworks, which, as the name suggests, was a weekly thing, it was every Friday. Just, you know, talking about whatever niche element of guitar that I could kind of get my hands on, whether it's old, you know, playing all the Les Pauls or whatever. And I'd amassed a little bit of a following on YouTube.

So I was relatively confident that at least, even if 10% of the people that follow me on YouTube was interested in original music that I would put out, you know, we might have a little bit of a kind of leg up. And lo and behold, we put out our first song, Tell Me How It Feels, in, like I said, May 2021. And within about 24 hours, that had got to the top of the iTunes and Amazon and Apple rock charts and all this kind of stuff, and just sort of gave us this unbelievable leg up, you know, that we've kind of been trying to kind of ride that wave ever since.

So, yeah, four years on, I think, relative to the amount of time that we have officially been together as Cardinal Black, you know, taken out of context, the shared history that we have. I think relative to the amount of time we've been together, we've kind of seen what we've done all right, you know, we've kind of, you referenced the kind of sold out shows in the US and all this kind of stuff. It still is a little bit surreal to us that we can kind of announce shows 5,000 miles away and that anyone would want to show up, never mind enough people to actually sell out a venue.

It's, yeah, it's a little bit mad. I don't know why people like us. I think you hit the nail on the head a second ago that it's invariably when you least expect something that something will happen, you know, whether it's a standing ovation, whether it's a track to take off in a way you didn't expect, or whether it's a gig to go well that you weren't expecting to go well.

That's life, I think, in general. But I think there is a lot to be said for if you're doing it for the right reasons and if you're doing it from a genuine place that, you know, is real and it comes from somewhere good. I don't know, the universe will reward you in some way, you know, it's all very cosmic.

It may not be today and maybe tomorrow, but it might be six months from now or a year from now. Absolutely. And, you know, again, you referenced bumping into people who you've met in the past, you know, that happens so frequently in this industry, because I guess it is quite a small industry.

It is. You will run into people that you've met in the past. And again, that is, you know, that just leaves this idea of, well, just be nice.

You know, I get asked a lot, you know, I do like on all occasions do guest lectures for like universities and stuff about music, about the music industry and how to try and get on in the music industry. And people are always looking for what's the best piece of advice that you can give. And it's like, be nice, be easy to deal with, be a pleasure to be around, you know, don't be a dick, don't be, you know, don't be hard work and it will reap rewards.

You know, I mean, when we toured with Peter Frampton, that tour went very well for everyone. I think Peter had a great time. We had a great time.

It was a particularly good tour for us. Was this before you got ill? No, so this was one of his finale tours. Was he still standing up or was he sitting? No, he was seated.

Okay. So it was initially scheduled for about a year before COVID or I guess during COVID, probably mid-2020. I didn't realize, I didn't know I'd been sick that long, but anyway, go ahead.

I think during that time, I guess, you know, his illness seemed to have progressed a little bit. So he was, he was sitting down for the shows and had announced that prior to the shows, you know, so as not to surprise people, I guess. But he was, aside from that, he was in fine fell.

He was doing like three plus hours every night. He's incredible. He's, you know, a force of nature, you know, even more impressive considering his illness.

But that was just a great tour. You know, we had a blast. It was amazing venues, amazing crowds.

And, you know, because of, I think how, how we just got on with everyone, you know, we kind of minded our P's and Q's. We went out of our way to be pleasant to everyone and not get in the way and, you know, stick to your curfew. You know, if they say you need to be off the stage by 8.30, you're off the stage by 8.28. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And we just kind of went out of our way to be, to be nice to be around.

And consequently, they asked us to come out to Europe. Unfortunately, we couldn't do it. The, you know, financial implications of doing that would have just probably bankrupted the band, unfortunately.

Yeah, I understand. At that particular time. But you just, you just be nice, be pleasant to be around.

And that will reap rewards, you know, whether that's today, whether that's in three years' time, you know, word travels. It does make a difference because Americans expect British people to be nice. That's just what.

Yeah, yeah. And I tell my friends, especially people I know in the UK, just come into America, keep talking with an accent and they won't care. Yeah.

We find that it's, I mean, it's to speak in sweeping, swathing stereotypes. But American audiences seem to be so enthusiastic and so, so appreciative that a band has gone to the great effort of crossing the Atlantic to come over. Well, it's a lot of work.

Look, there's a lot of people that don't do it because it's so expensive. You've got to get visas. You've got to go through a lot of work.

And traveling, it's a problem. It's a pain in the butt. You know, that's why I knew a great band over in Europe that I said, now they've been together for ten years, they broke up finally.

They broke up, kind of. But I said, you could sell out in America. And they go, it's like, it's difficult.

Yeah. You've got to have a lot of money behind you to just do it. Yeah.

We were very fortunate last year when we did that for the first time that we played, played a festival in Omaha, Nebraska, which I guess, you know, on the kind of the great map of tour stops is probably not everyone's first, first kind of call. But there's a wonderful couple called Jeff and Vanessa who organized a festival called Playing With Fire in Omaha. And were very sweet to invite us over.

So they actually met us or kind of really got to know us on the Joe Bonamassa Blues Cruise around the Mediterranean. Oh, so did you play in that? So we did, yeah. So we did the Mediterranean one and spent a good amount of time with Jeff and Vanessa.

And they, you know, really kind of, they'd already offered the kind of idea of coming over to the US and doing their festival prior to that. But it was only really on that cruise where we got into the bare bones of it, kind of broke it down. And essentially that gave us the opportunity, gave us a bit of a free swing, as it were.

You get a foothold. Yeah, exactly. And they were kind enough to, you know, kind of facilitate the visas and all of the kind of bureaucracy around that and all of the kind of red tape.

That was nice of them to do that. And it gave us a bit of a free swing at Nashville and at L.A., you know, which has undoubtedly facilitated this proper tour, you know, this year. So, yeah, I can't say that would have happened otherwise.

But at the same time, we had to be very careful with the money that we did have or the money that we were earning in the months running up to that tour to see us through. Because it's just astronomically expensive. It's expensive to go anywhere these days, you know.

I don't care where you go. I mean, you got hotel, you got food, you got all that stuff, you got transportation. And that's before you walk on stage.

Absolutely. I mean, we were quite significantly in the hole, you know, prior to playing a note, you know, landing in the U.S. And that was even with Jeff and Vanessa's help, you know. But thankfully, the shows that we did did well.

We sold a load of merchandise, which helps hugely. So, yeah, we were very fortunate. But it takes, you know, quite a decent amount of cash flow in order to be able to speculate like that in the first place, you know.

And you don't want, as a performer, you don't want to spend your time worrying about that stuff. I mean, really, when you walk on stage, you want to spend whatever you're going to have, two hours, whatever time you have, you don't want to be thinking about, you know, I hope we get to that hotel in Omaha. Yeah, yeah.

You know, you don't want any of that stuff. The funny thing is about Meantime, I guess, is that we're probably a little guilty of that. We run Cardinal Black as a business, and that's not a very rock and roll thing to say, you know.

No, that's very smart. That's very smart. You have to, in order to have a fighting chance of making enough money to survive from this.

I mean, we're just about at the point where we can kind of survive off the meager income that Cardinal Black brings. And that's the irony, is that you break it down and look at our kind of our incomings, and we're quite a lucrative company. There's a lot of money coming into Cardinal Black.

There's pretty much exactly the same amount of money going out to keep us on the road, make records, you know, fund all of the stuff that we need to do. And I guess the question is, at what point do you, I mean, if the U.S. goes well this year, you know, the idea is that it will feed into festivals in America for next year, and we will be back over, you know. But then straight away, we're kind of like, well, if we make a decent profit in the U.S., that will give us a little bit of money to try and unlock new territories that we've not been to yet.

Whether that's Asia, whether it's different European countries or whatever, you know. I guess at some point, you have to kind of draw a line and say, well, these are the territories we're going to try and own. Let's focus on those.

And that will give us a little bit more kind of money to actually try and bank and live, you know, have a decent standard of life and not worry about me having to do all of the other stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis to put bread on the table. But, you know, me and Tom in particular, I mean, me, Tom, and Adam are the obviously kind of core members of the band. We run it as a very tight ship.

We run it as a business. And that's not very romantic. It's not very rock and roll.

I don't know whether we're maybe a little bit guilty of talking about that too openly on occasion. The business part of it is you have to run it as a business because if you're ever going to make it… No, it's the music business. The clue is in the name.

Yeah. If you don't want a day job and your day job is not going to the studio or, you know, we're going to pick out merch today or a new logo, no, I've got to go work at a steel factory this morning and I'll be CEO. I mean, and I think that's smart.

And here's the other thing, though, Chris. Most creative people don't understand that because their brains don't work that way. Yeah.

That's the shame of it, I guess, and that's why so many people get taken for a ride and get taken advantage of because they don't want to involve themselves in that. And admittedly, when I started playing guitar, I didn't start playing guitar because I wanted to understand how publishing works or how, you know, insert whatever here, you know, all of the things that I've had to learn. I mean, I joked at the start of this call, you know, that I've not had much time to play guitar.

I genuinely haven't because that's, you know, most of my day at the moment is spent in front of Photoshop or it's spent in front of Final Cut Pro making assets for social media, making merchandise. You know, we have an album launch party next Friday. I'll be making T-shirts for that today and designing that and liaising with the printers.

That's the reality of being in a band for me at the moment, you know. But eventually that'll fade. Yeah, I hope so.

That's the right thing. Somebody else will kind of do it for you. My last band, we couldn't get arrested if we tried.

And the only success we had ultimately trying to book gigs because we didn't have an agent. So it was me booking the shows. And lo and behold, very few people were interested in dealing with the guitarist because I guess outwardly that sends the message, well, nobody cares.

This is the guitarist himself trying to book these shows. So I created an alias. I created a fake Gmail account.

And I would email venues as our manager. And then as soon as I got in through the door, I would find an excuse to loop in myself on my actual email address. I'm going to leave you in the very capable hands of our guitarist who can take it from here.

So it's, you know. It's sad you had to do that, but it's true. I don't care.

If you're in the creative arts, that's what you have to do. I don't care if you're a book writer, an author. I don't care if you're a movie star.

You want to break in, you got to do something like that because it separates you from everybody else. Even though people, you know, it's just the way it is. Subconsciously, I think it sends a message that, well, someone cares about them.

Someone is taking a punt on them. Someone is investing their time and energy and money into them. And maybe we should as well.

So, yeah, that's worked wonders for me over the years. So let me ask you about how you guys work together. Tell me about your songwriting process.

Do one out of two of you come up with an idea? I mean, obviously you've been doing it for a while. You come up with some riff and go, hey, I think this might do. Tell me how that kind of works together with all of you.

I mean, actually, the second album, this album was quite an interesting experience because I guess by virtue of the history of the band and the shared history of like ten plus years, I think it was our manager that jokingly described our first record as a greatest hits album of songs that nobody had ever heard because they span such a long period of time. You know, there were tracks written in 2009. There were tracks written in 2021.

You know, it was a consequence. I think the issue that we were inevitably always going to have with that first record was was making it sound cohesive because you think as yourself, you think there's cohesiveness to it, but you change your whole life changes over 10 years. Your mood changes.

Yeah, I could see that. Absolutely. And what you write about and how you write, you know, I mean, there's songs that I'm very proud of on that first record.

Don't get me wrong, but I think it was never particularly going to sound like a coherent record from top to bottom because it wasn't a coherent record. It was a record that had been written over a vast period of time. So to finish touring that and, you know, kind of have a clean slate or this blank canvas, this opportunity to kind of create something cohesive as much as that was initially terrifying because I'm not particularly someone that can write on command.

You know, when I do write, it's, you know, it will be a boat from the blue that will hit me when I'm sat on the sofa just noodling around or, you know, a melody or a chord progression or whatever it is will strike me. But to try and manufacture that or to try to create that artificially, I'm not particularly good at. Tom, on the other hand, can basically work nine to five, sit down at a piano and go, right, I'm going to try and write a song and we'll write a song.

Yeah, I don't know that way either. I don't have that capacity to do it, unfortunately. But I guess consequently, what we get or what what happens then is a mixture of that.

It will be this a couple of songs on the album. This is a track called Push Pull, for example, which I think is one of the maybe the penultimate song, one of the last tracks on the record that bizarrely turned into a song lyrically, at the very least turned into a song about my father who passed away in 2023. And me and Tom kind of piece that together.

Not long after his passing, Tom weirdly, given the the the subject matter of that song, Tom ended up writing most of the lyrics for that song. I think purely because because of how close I was to that situation, he was able to actually express my thoughts more eloquently than I probably could. But musically, that song dates back to about, I don't know, 2015, I guess in the sense that it was a demo on an old iPhone that I dug out of a drawer.

And I had a couple of weeks where I was a little bit frightened by the prospect of, well, you know, if this is going to be the same as the first record, I'm probably going to contribute about 50 percent to it. You know, where's my 50 percent going to come from? Because I feel like I'm kind of creatively barren at the moment. So I started going through old phone demos, and that was a kind of chord progression or a melody that I came across.

And once you get into that mindset of, oh, cool, I'm happy I'm creating again, other stuff starts coming from, you know, kind of the most unexpected of places. So what started as a bit of a kind of panic-stricken, let's dig out some old demos, suddenly very quickly turned into, oh, I'm writing again all the time. You know, new songs, new ideas, they come in left, right and center.

So, you know, what was initially quite a daunting prospect turned into really a kind of effortless experience, really. The entirety of the record was probably written over about two months. And that's, you know, again, by virtue of the band and the income or their lack of, or lack thereof at the moment, we're not doing this religiously every day.

We have, you know, other responsibilities. We're, you know, kind of all parents, you know, so it's juggling the realities of life with the expectations of being in a band. So it was written over two, three months without doing that religiously every day, at least together.

Me and Tom booked a nice little romantic getaway at one point and went and stayed in a cottage for a couple of days on our own and wrote a couple of songs together. So, yeah, it was a pretty effortless process, really, which, you know, given the trepidation I went into it with, was, yeah, quite nice. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, wait a minute, and it just starts flowing out of you, and you can't figure out, well, I couldn't do anything, you know, I couldn't do anything years ago or six months ago, and now it just kind of does its thing and it starts flowing out of it.

And I think all songwriters have the same situation. We can't explain where it comes from. Now, I could sit down and write you a song, but it's going to suck.

You know, okay, I could write you a song. What do you want to talk about? You know, I can do that. But to have something that people listen to, that's a different story, and that never comes to me except when it comes to me and it's there.

But I understand because that creative vortex, so to speak, starts up. And I think only creative people understand that because they don't understand, what do you mean? You could just write a song, can't you? Oh, sure. But can I write a song? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's funny. I have quite a lot of discussions about this with my wife, who is a scientist. She's a biologist.

She's a lecturer at Bristol University. So I think fundamentally she is wired in a very different way to me. Oh, sure.

Black and white. Everything's scientist. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. But growing up, she loved guitar.

She played guitar. I've never seen her play guitar. She categorically refuses to play in front of me.

But we've had endless discussions about she would say that, well, I approached guitar as I approached science or as I approached everything else. It was very mathematical. It was very methodical.

It was very regimented and structured where she said, watching you play and kind of just come up with stuff off the top of your head, I can't comprehend how you do that. So I think people are just wired differently. And, again, to try and explain that creative process to someone who isn't a creative person.

They don't get it. They don't get it. They don't understand it because it's totally alien to them, I guess.

I wish people could feel that moment, you as a performer, and the audience is in sync. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Ultimately, I mean, it's very easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day running of a band. You end up taking or kind of finding joy in bizarre moments. Like for Tom, for example, Tom tour manages the band as well.

So when we go on tour, any of the logistical elements of that tour, whether it's booking hotels, whether it's route planning, whether it's kind of advancing the shows and liaising with venues and promoters and front of house engineers, that's Tom. That's his role. He's kind of taking in the band.

I tend to do more of the content creation and design work and website maintenance, and then Adam handles the merchandise side of the band. So between the three of us, we've kind of assigned ourselves these roles that we own, and if they go wrong, if we fuck them up, it's on us, because that's what we do. And Tom, I think, in recent years, has got so into the kind of process of tour managing the band that he loves it.

I think if you said to Tom, what would be your career highlight of the past couple of years of Cardinal Black, it would genuinely probably be something like a successful visa application for the U.S., never mind the Royal Albert Hall or anything like that. But Tom made the point recently. We were chatting about it, and he said that it's such a vague industry, such an intangible industry.