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Part one: MattRach & Play
A strange one this. A young 17 year old French lad, making it big on Youtube with his webcam and guitar ? No, we’re not messing with you; this is for real. It all began when this adolescent prodigy loaded up some homemade videos onto Youtube through his webcam, filming himself playing his electric guitar, in his bedroom, in a manner … er … well, you’d better just check it out yourself. After all, seeing is believing, as they say. His rocked up cover version of Pachelbel’s Canon (“Canon Rock” as he calls it) was his first performance to ignite the YouTube surfers. Then, little by little, all sorts of other stuff was posted up, each as breathtaking as the other and all of his own composition. In a few months, Mathieu (Matt) ends up reaching 25 million downloads of his performances, even surpassing the likes of Madonna. “It was just meant to be a bit of fun. And then, as time went by it all just snowballed. I really didn’t think it would take on such proportions”, admits the bewildered young man on French TV. It’s difficult to tell just how big this guitar genius is going to be one day, but, frankly, with this amount of technical talent and ear for composition, the sky is the limit. Whilst we wait patiently for his debut album later this year, we’ll have to make do with this live performance with his band “Play”. It would take a brave person to bet against the likelihood that MattRach will be the revelation of this 20th Guitar Nights Festival.
Official website
Part two: Alvin Lee
 Alvin Lee is one of the last (living) legendary guitarists to have so far escaped the clutches of the ‘Guitar Nights” festival. It was with his band Ten Years After that he achieved worldwide renown towards the end of the 1960s. In that decade, TYA undertook no less than 28 tours of the USA in 7 years, which is more than any other British band in history. His performance at Woodstock in 1969 remains part of rock folklore and has earned him the right to be mentioned in the same sentence alongside Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and earned him the accolade of being one of the most influential guitarists of the 1970s. At that time he was the man “who could play faster than his own shadow”. That being said, his technical prowess never compromises his musical qualities which tend to lean towards a unique blend of blues, swing and – of course – a healthy dose of rock. The track he recorded with George Harrison ‘The bluest blues’ was hailed in some circles as the most perfect blues number ever recorded. His latest album, ‘Saguitar,’ which came out in 2008, has seen Alvin Lee hit the road again with a world tour that started by a sold out show at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. On that evening, it would seem that he left his audience bewildered by the quality of his show. For not only is he himself a master of live performances, but he is currently backed by a dream rhythm section in the form of Pete Pritchard (Clapton, Mac Cartney) on bass and Richard Newman (Led Zeppelin) on drums. With that kind of quality up on stage in Patrimonio, who’s to say we won’t suddenly find ourselves magically transported back in time to Woodstock once more?
Official Website
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