Buffalo Nichols
Date: 10 January 2025
Venue: New Gate Arts & Culture Centre, 2-4 Kennedy Street, L'Derry, Derry, BT48 6RF
He tells a sad story but one enlivened by his skills as a guitarist, his expressiveness as a singer and his insights as a lyricist.
Nichols was born in Houston and raised in Milwaukee. At around 11 years old, he turned to guitar in order to, why else, avoid little league. "I didn't like team sports, I just wanted to be by myself. So the most solitary thing I could do was play guitar," Nichols recalls. "And once I started playing guitar, everything changed. That was the only thing I did." He taught himself to play by emulating The Ramones, his favorite band at the time, on an acoustic guitar borrowed from his older sister– "It's very punk to try to be like your big sister," Nichols notes. After conquering all of Johnny Ramone's riffs, he was hooked. "I started taking it as a challenge: as soon as I could play all the Ramones songs, I started playing Green Day." Heavy metal soon followed. "I was getting angrier, so the music was getting more aggressive and more challenging, too." He started playing in bands with friends, but soon had no choice but to set his sights a little higher. "By the time I was 13, I was just better than all of them at guitar, so I started going on Craigslist looking for bands to join." Soon after, his first proper music release came in the form of a death metal demo, when he was 14.
Still, Nichols never envisioned himself as a career musician, until suddenly he did. "Up until I was 17, I just did it all the time and I didn't think about anything else, because I was a dumb teenager. And then once I started realizing I've got to make a living somehow, I thought, 'well I spent the last six years doing nothing else,' so it's either this or nothing." So he began exploring even more genres as a hired gun guitar player for those in need, jumping at the chance to sharpen his self-taught skills by learning everything he could from his fellow musicians. But while this helped him become more technically proficient, he found it creatively unfulfilling over time. "I got into music for creative reasons, and at that point it was just a job. I don't regret anything I've done, but I do feel like I spent too much time playing for other people."
The next natural step was for Nichols to strike out on his own path, and Buffalo Nichols was born. Why that name? "I just always had the [Buffalo nickels] association in my mind, because of my last name. And when I was young I was fascinated with the Buffalo Soldiers, and my grandfather was part of an all-Black infantry in the Korean War also called the Buffalo Soldiers. So the imagery of those words was always very powerful to me." As Buffalo, Nichols has been able to channel all the diverse influences of his past into a singularly-voiced solo act that's often been billed as the blues– but Nichols himself is not so sure. "I've been playing different types of music for 18 years now, so blues is one part of it. But for me as a musician, that's a tiny fraction of it." And though applying such genre shorthands to his music helps him reach interested audiences, Nichols hasn't let it stop him from writing and playing what he wants. "It affects the way the music is released, but as far as writing it doesn't enter my mind. Sometimes I write blues songs, sometimes I don't." And Nichols makes a great case for rethinking the way we classify music and its makers. "Nobody listens to one kind of music, but still artists are expected to make only one kind of music. So I'd like to present every side of me, rather than fit into one thing."
Seba Safe, real name Mike Dalton, is a 30-year-old musician from Galway – the west of Ireland. Galway is the artist's home despite a 10-year move to Dublin, Galway is ultimately where his passion was born "I went to school here (Galway), grew up here, started making music here".
Seba to clarify how he would define his sound, "I think I've fallen into the indie/folk bracket … Indie folk pop is what I'm saying for convenience". Seba Safes' music is mellow and calming, with the artist's lyrics resonating with listeners due to lyrics full of loss, hurt, love and change, his lyrics as being the most important aspect of his music," Every song is written on the acoustic guitar and its always lyrics, they're created on the acoustic guitar so I suppose that where the folk comes from".
Stage times and show duration are approx.