The Guitar Magazine – July 2019

KIEFER

SUTHERLAND

T

he Groucho Club in London’s Soho seems a

fitting venue for an encounter with a genuine

Hollywood star. Yet once we wind our way

upstairs to the room in which our interview

takes place – with its own bar, fireplace and a

striped wall painted by Turner Prize nominee

Ian Davenport – Kiefer Sutherland’s unaffected

demeanour almost makes us forget for a moment that

the unmistakable weatherworn voice we’re listening

to is familiar to millions.

With album number two in the can, Sutherland

is in Europe to play a short acoustic tour. Billed as

‘Kiefer Sutherland Up Close’, the intimate dates

include audience Q&A sessions, while the award-

winning Canadian actor and singer-songwriter also

tells some of the stories behind his songs. If there’s a

common thread running through his work in film and

television and the country-fried rock that’s also close

to his heart, it’s storytelling: “I think for the longest

time I’ve tried to find the common denominator

of what I love about acting and what I love about

music, and at the root of it is the storytelling. Getting

together with a group of actors and a director and a

cinematographer to tell a story, or getting together

with a group of musicians to tell a story. The big

difference is that the songs are really personal and

from my life. And I think that it took me a minute

to adjust to the fact that there was no character in

between me and an audience – there was just me.”

Does that make it more nerve-wracking?

“Oh man, my hand was shaking so badly! As an

actor, if you’re nervous, you just put your hands in

your pockets. As a guitar player that doesn’t work so

well! Every step of it has been a kind of challenge to

overcome... whatever fears one person has, they’ve

all had to be confronted on some level during this

process. We’ve played 300 shows in the last two-and-

a-half years, it was kind of a ‘sink or swim’ thing, but

it’s been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve

ever had in my life.”

Winding the clock back a little, how did your love

affair with the guitar begin?

WORDS CHRIS VINNICOMBE

PORTRAITS ELEANOR JANE

GROOMING CIONA JOHNSON-KING AT AARTLONDON

Fresh from the release of his second

studio album Reckless & Me, we sit

down with the star of 24 , Flatliners

and The Lost Boys to discuss the

parallels between onscreen and onstage

storytelling, how he was bitten by

the guitar-collecting bug at an early

age and why you should never let ’em

catch you lying...

“I played violin from the time I was four. I wanted

a guitar desperately when I was seven and my mum

said: ‘If you play violin until you are 10, I’ll get you a

guitar.’ And I played the violin until my 10th birthday

and she kept her word and got me a guitar and then

I never picked the violin up again!

“And then I just took [the guitar] with me

everywhere. It was a terrible Yamaha acoustic, it

was a piece of crap and the fucking action was so

high, but by the time I could start playing barre

chords, my hands were quite strong ’cause of that

guitar. I remember I used to pawn Christmas gifts,

and I would take whatever money I had made and

I would get to the guitar store and I would put a

downpayment on very funny guitars.

“I saw one last year that I hadn’t seen in forever, a

Gibson Sonex. It was such a cheap kind of version

of a Les Paul. I just remember that, as a kid, I was

always trying to get a guitar, or work my way up to

getting a good one. I can’t remember a time really

where I wasn’t either chasing a guitar or playing.”

Was collecting guitars a natural progression?

“At first, it was very practical. You wanted a Strat,

you wanted a Tele and you wanted a Les Paul. The

THE GUITAR INTERVIEW

GUITAR MAGAZINE 69

KIEFER SUTHERLAND