This article was originally published in Rhythms magazine (Issue #331) September-October 2025
GUITARS, MUSIC AND MILES - Australian-born blues guitarist Michael Charles returns home in November on a leg of his eighteen international tour.
By Ian McFarlane
The question on some reader’s lips might be: who is Michael Charles?
By way of introduction, Michael Charles is an internationally recognised, Australian-born blues guitarist who has lived, toured and recorded in the United States for 35 years. Following his early career playing the pubs and clubs of Melbourne in the late 1980s – alongside contemporaries Dutch Tilders, Geoff Achison, Jimi Hocking – he received an invitation from Buddy Guy’s management to appear at the renowned Legends club in Chicago, Illinois USA.
After making the life changing decision to relocate to the States in 1990, Charles worked the Chicago blues circuit performing with Buddy Guy, Phil Guy, James Cotton, Eddy Clearwater, Junior Wells, as well as touring with blues legend Jimmy Dawkins as his guitarist. Since then he has developed his solo career, as well as receiving further accolades such as being inducted into the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame in October 2015.
He’s currently undertaking his eighteenth consecutive international tour, “Guitars, Music and Miles 2025”, which will see him return to Australia this November. He last toured here in 2016.
When we connect, I asked him about that first experience of playing at Legends.
“My manager at the time said, ‘you’ve been invited to play at Legends club with Buddy Guy, what do you think about that?’. I said, ‘well there’s nothing to think about, let’s get out of here, let’s do it’. Between my management and Buddy’s manager, Marty Saltzman, they organised the whole thing.
“When we landed in LA the plane had already been delayed by eight hours. I got to Chicago, they picked me up at the airport and took me straight to Legends. I didn’t have any time to clean up or have a shower. Marty introduced himself and Buddy was on stage playing. Marty goes, ‘I’m gonna get you up to play’. My official show was planned for two nights later. I was supposed to get introduced to Buddy and warm into the whole situation. I was jetlagged, I couldn’t see straight, I was on another planet, here I am totally in awe. Before I knew it, they’d tossed me this guitar and I’m on stage. Buddy just looked at me and I looked at him but walked right passed him to the farthest part of the stage, as far away as I could get so no one would even see me. I asked one of the members of the band, ‘what key is he playing in?’. He said, ‘figure it out for yourself’. I went into automatic pilot.
“The place was totally packed. Next minute I hear through the monitors, ‘take it Michael’. I was weak at the knees, but I pulled it off. We got off stage, that’s when they introduced me to Buddy. I said this is totally backward. He just giggled and said, ‘welcome to Chicago’. My gig was two days later and I had adapted, got to know some people. I was a lot more comfortable. Something like that has never happened to me again. It was one of those one-time deals. I was over the moon with the whole thing.”
Charles taps into classic blues sounds with a Stratocaster played through a Marshall stack, with distortion and wah wah adding that extra tang. Once he started getting noticed by the US blues music press, there were comments such as “Australia’s answer to Stevie Ray Vaughan”, or “sounds like Eric Clapton”. What was his reaction to that?
“Ah, it’s all lies, man,” he laughs out loud. “Yeah, I read that stuff and I don’t like being compared to others and I truly don’t believe I sound like any of those guys either, but at the same time you gotta take the compliment. I don’t bring it up myself.”
I ask him who were some of his primary inspirations?
“It was guys like Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck, George Harrison. Also, Scotty Moore and James Burton, who both had played with Elvis. Even going back further, my dad taught me how to play guitar, so he was my biggest influence. And Glen Campbell, he’s one of the greatest guitar players of all time.
“I remember watching the Glen Campbell TV show with my dad. I would have been 15 at the time. He was playing ‘Classical Gas’. I said, ‘dad, do you think I’ll ever be able to play like that?’. He looked at me with this cheeky grin on his face, thought about it for a minute and said, ‘practise’. Just one word. I’m still practising to this very day. That was the wisest thing I ever heard from my dad. Then I heard about Hank Garland, who was one of Glen Campbell’s heroes, so he had a big influence on me.”
In his live set, he’s been known to play blues classics such as ‘The Sky is Crying’, ‘Going Down’, ‘Hey Joe’ and ‘Key to the Highway’, but I ask him what are some of the best songs he’s written?
“That’s a tough one because every song you write, and I think every song writer will say this, they’re all my children. It really depends on what mood I’m in because there’s always a reason why you write a song. Certain songs I’ve written will affect me in different ways. There’s a song called ‘Leaving My Troubles Behind Me’ which is a slow blues thing. I wrote that when I was starting to feel disconnected with my marriage. I got married when I was really young, at 20 years old, just a kid. That song always brings me back to a time I was feeling a little lost, confused, not knowing what was going on. But I always knew my music would keep me alive.”
For those readers who are now keen to see Michael on his Australian tour, what can audiences expect?
“Um, I’m still figuring that out. I’ve got Winston Galea lined up to be my drummer. Last time I used Greg Williams, my producer, on bass. I know a lot of musicians, so I’ll leave it about a month before I get there to put them together. My shows when I tour here in the US and Canada, I put in a three-to-four-hour show. So, the show will be a surprise. All I know is that whoever plays with me when I do hit the Australian shores again, they might hate me because I’m very particular on how I play my shows (laughs). But we’re all friends and they’ll chuckle, ‘oh, we have to deal with Michael again’.”