Few musicians have a backstory quite like Harry Manx’s. Born on the Isle of Man, he left at six years old, so young that when his family’s plane touched down in Montreal, He says he escaped his parents in the airport out of sheer joy at being in Canada.
By fifteen, Harry was homeless and had knocked on the door of a touring band’s farmhouse, asking to be a roadie. They said yes. Within a few years, he was working sound at Toronto’s legendary El Mocambo, mixing stage monitors for Rush on tour, and rubbing shoulders with blues legends like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon.
We chatted on the Pulse Podcast, and he told me about getting fired from a gig for bad sound during a John Hammond show. That was the greatest thing, Harry said, because the day after that he decided he should get serious about playing the guitar.
From there, the story only gets bigger: busking across Europe with his brother, ten years living and performing in Japan as a one-man band and studying ragas in Rajasthan before landing on Salt Spring Island, where he still lives today.
Along the way he picked up the Mohan Veena, a 20-string Indian instrument, and built a sound critics have dubbed “Mysticsippi” Blues, part Delta, part Hindustani.
Harry talked about why he plays at all. “I want to inspire people,” he told me. “I always feel like my music is aimed at the heart, and if you drop a tear or two at my show, that’s fine too.”
His new album, Falling Upwards, arrives this August after what he described as several years without the drive to record. The first single, Pork Pie Turban, is a nod to the jazz standard Pork Pie Hat, laced with a raga underneath. Harry tours Vancouver Island in August, and if you’ve never seen him live, I would start there.
Hear the whole conversation and find his tour dates at: https://bit.ly/S2EP43PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/