Tom Russell in Concert

THE REAL Music Club are back at Flowerfield Arts Centre on Tuesday July 16 with a return visit by one of the world’s most revered songwriters – the legendary Tom Russell.

Ticket prices for the 8pm show are £18, which will include a complimentary glass of wine or fruit juice at the interval, and they're now available from reception at Flowerfield Arts Centre. You can purchase with your credit or debit card over the phone – call (028) 7083 1400. You can also purchase tickets online at the Real Music Club website ticketsource page at http://www.ticketsource.co.uk/realmusicclub .

We warn you that they’re sure to go fast.

Last time Tom visited Flowerfield he was here to promote his album Mesabi – much water has passed under the bridge, even since then, as he has just published a songbook with 120 of his classics included.

The book also includes short essays and antecdotes about the songs and their origins. It's been an extraordinary career, that is still going strong, and the stories behind these songs are as interesting, and enticing, as the songs themselves.

Tom’s recent albums Mesabi and Blood and Candle Smoke have contained some of his most compelling tales to date. A thread runs through the songs, a zigzagging but determinedly solid line that connects the perilous border town of Juarez, Mexico to the real and faux glitz of Los Angeles and the bleak iron range of Minnesota.

The broad landscapes created by Tom Russell for Mesabi are inhabited by characters we all know - Bob Dylan, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor - and some we may not: the now-obscure, once well-known singer Cliff ‘Ukulele Ike’ Edwards, the tragic Disney child star Jimmy Driscoll and the character actor Sterling Hayden.

Mesabi was the 26th album from an artist whose songs have been recorded by such icons as Johnny Cash, Dave Van Ronk, Jerry Jeff Walker, Doug Sahm, Joe Ely, Nanci Griffith, Iris Dement, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, among others. No less than Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the legendary poet, has said that he shares ‘a great affinity with Tom Russell’s songs, for he is writing out of the wounded heart of America’.

Among the special guests on the album are Lucinda Williams, Van Dyke Parks, Sir Douglas Quintet keyboardist Augie Meyers and Calexico, the band with which Russell previously collaborated on Blood and Candle Smoke. His work has attracted praise from high sources indeed – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain and The Shipping News, describes him as ‘an original, a brilliant songwriter with a restless curiosity and an almost violent imagination’.