Hot band back at Retro Club

CAPITAL BLUES: Neil Warboys, front left, and the Wellington Heads will play the third Retro Club show at King Street Live on November 29.

The Retro Club returns for a third show with debut performances at King Street Live of Neil Warboys with the Wellington Heads and poet Annelyse Gelman.

Show founder Rob Maunsell said the Retro Club will stage its third performance at the Masterton venue on November 29.

The evening starts at 7.30pm with The Grafia Trio playing a short set with some originals and an Irish tune.

Gelman will command the stage for close to an hour, Maunsell said, before the Wellington Heads "hit us with their blues-based originals and classics".

"The Grafia Jam Band will keep up the tempo with a final set, taking us out to around midnight," he said.

The Wellington Heads have been playing in and around the capital for more than a decade and take their name from the striking and rugged southern coastline.

Wellington Heads comprises three core songwriter-musicians including Geoff Keith, Neil Worboys, and Bill Wood, who sometimes play as a three piece, while often engaging a drummer and horn players to form a larger live and recording band.

Wellington Heads songs comment on life experiences with a distinctive Wellington flavour evolved through the influences of Chicago blues, Kansas style blue jazz, the swinging rhythm n blues of Louis Jordan and Ray Charles, infused with Pacific and Hawaiian rhythms and a Latino feel.

The band also have performed at festivals in Tauranga and Manawatu and at the Nelson Jazz Festival and have released four albums.

Gelman is a prize-winning California Arts Scholar, the inaugural poet-in-residence at UCSD's Brain Observatory, and recipient of the 2013 Lavinia Winter Fellowship at New Pacific Studio. She divides her time between New Zealand and the United States, and is soon to go on tour.