Once part of a 5-a-side football team with the four members of Toy Guns, sporting Sonic Youth t-shirts as their strip, the Vulnerable Things front man is a man with a plan, as I discover over a pint of Camden cider.

This maverick does as he shitting well pleases, the first time he went record shopping he swept up Kylie’s debut album Kylie, German dance electronic duo Snap’s World Power and Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast. All in the same purchase! “The guy at the till probably though I was mental,” he says. Bringing back the root-master of all genres in 2008, is blues hound and Vulnerable Things vocalist G.P Bennett.

Having formed roughly four years back there’ve been a few line up changes. Original member Ed Green is still their drummer and they’ve enlisted a bass player in the form of Keith Lovell, and Lewis ‘counts bricks for a living’ Hodgkinson is their guitarist.

“There’s been a bit of a period of limbo over the past few months, we had a few issues with our drummer,” says Bennett.
Growly, gravelly and downright old-school dirty, this London quartet are not meek or mild. But their name isn’t an exercise in Irony For Dummies either. “The name thing was really just that no one liked the idea of having to come up with one,” explains Bennett, “we weren’t far off pulling one from a hat. It was the only thing I came up with that they were like ‘yeah alright’. And I only picked it ‘cos I liked the idea of having a V in the name as searching things listed alphabetically, not that many bands would come up.”

Sure, apart from Ritchie Valens, The Vandals, Luther Vandross, Vanilla Ice, Vanessa Mae, The Vapors, The Velvet Underground, The Verve, The Village People, Gene Vincent, The Vines, The Violets, Visage, The Von Bondies and The Vulgar Boatmen.

Eternally bound by a love of all things blues and quite predominantly The Black Keys, the longest serving members have all known each other for quite a while. New recruit Lovell came from a Gumtree advert. “We weren’t even looking for a bassist but he said all the right things,” like “I like the Black Keys” presumably, “and we invited him down for a jam. We just gelled straight away, so he was like the perfect person really. Quite rare!”

Quite rare indeed, but I hear what you’re thinking: what effing London Blues scene? And so does Bennett.

“It’s got a stigma to it. Everyone thinks it’s old man’s music, which is completely what we want to get away from. Especially people thinking it’s like 60s and 70s British blues. It isn’t for me at all. It’s about where it originally came from and how it can be progressed.
“If you say to people ‘we’re a blues-influenced band’ they hear ‘boring and crap’. It’s blues from a songwriting point of view.”

Did you know that the Blues Bar in central London is actually called Ain’t Nothing But… The Blues Bar? Cos I didn’t. Bennett did. It’s where he cut his LBS (London Blues Scene) teeth, frequenting the joint three times a week, helping out running nights there and joining in with jam sessions. And Vulnerable Things play there once a month. “It’s really the only place in London that there is for blues.”

It’s always packed out whatever night of the week you go, but that’s possibly because as a venue it’s quite the tourist attraction. And VT are keen to enlist home grown blues fans for their home grown take on traditional blues music.

His favourite live venue in London is probably the Hope and Anchor. “It’s a great place and has great sound. We’ve played probably our best gigs there. But I’m looking forward to playing Madame JoJo’s too ‘cos I’ve never been”.

That Madame JoJo’s gig is their official album release party. The record has already had some great reviews - see Blues Matters magazine - and as a result is selling well in Holland.

“The night we’re playing is exactly what we’re about,” says Bennett, “a modern perspective on blues, it’s a new night by God Don’t Like It profiling blues and 60s garage.”

Bennett is the sole lyricist in the band, although all of the band members bring their own creativity to the table. “We do usually two or three new songs every rehearsal and try to have at one ready for each gig, so we’re not playing the same old stuff all the time.”

He goes through various stages of inspiration, “I was even a massive Portishead fan at one point which sounds bizarre now”. The others vary in their tastes from Rage Against The Machine to John Lee Hooker and Patrick Carney. Once playing on the same bill as Dr. Feelgood – who are total arseholes – they’d like to jam alongside the likes of Moon Music Orchestra or obviously the hallowed Black Keys.

“When I was younger it started with Nirvana and that sort of thing,” says Bennett. “I remember being at a family barbeque once when I was about thirteen, and obviously it was boring so I taught myself to play ‘Come As You Are’ on my cousin’s guitar over about six hours that day.”

Tom Waits is probably his biggest personal inspiration - that and his bumper membership to the Black Keys fan club (I’m getting one too).“That kind of music is why we started the band.”

Re: Tom Waits, what’s your opinion of Scarlett Johansson doing that covers album? “I only heard about that yesterday so I’ve not actually heard it. It is quite a weird concept (actors making music) so I’m not quite sure about it. Like Juliette Lewis is in a band now. Cover albums are hard even when you’re already a successful musician, I should imagine it’s hard to be credible when you have such a high profile too but I haven’t heard the album so I can’t pass comment.”

Ever well-mannered, the gang don’t seem to have any rifting with creative differences. “No, and there wasn’t with our old drummer either I mean we’d been playing together since we were 12, went to school together and lived together, that situation just ran it’s course really. And all of us now come from the same blues angle so that’s why we get on.”

Like a band of rogue blues prophets, Vulnerable Things are out to lure you in for a musical soul conversion - none of your Eric Clapton gash - but an intense, simmering and raw, bluesy swamp stomp.