Despite hailing from Surrey, England—a location that is, without doubt, one of the least exciting places in the whole of the U.K.—blues musician Martin Harley is all about adventure. Leaving for Australia on a two-year escapade in his late adolescence, Harley took little with him aside from a serious preoccupation with roots music. Working as a nunnery’s pancake chef in the morning and mowing lawns in the afternoon, Harley spent his free time holed up in the back of a Holden station wagon to work on his prodigious talent for slide guitar.  

“From the time I left college onwards,” Harley tells the Straight on the line from his hotel at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, “I’d be in and out of the country on adventures. I wasn’t touring and making money from music at that time—I just wanted to explore. But the time I got to 30 I had a thought. Instead of working and saving the money, I figured I could maybe just play music and go on the road, and get paid to do it. So I made a record, and—this still seems bizarre to me—people actually bought it. That’s when the wheels started turning.”

Six full-length albums later, Harley’s decision to leave the pancake kitchen has more than paid off. Personally selected to tour with a number of high-profile names like G Love and the Special Sauce, Iron and Wine and James Morrison, Harley’s exposure has allowed his ringing strings to be heard on a number of prime-time U.S. TV shows including The Vampire Diaries and Banshee.

Easily identified by his bluesy drawl, a casual listener would assume that Harley was a new native of the Mississiuppi Delta. But the musician’s sound is made all the more unique by his decision to maintain his base in Britain.

“It’s definitely not normal for a guy from my part of the world to be playing the kind of music I do,” Harley says with a laugh. “I grew up with Culture Club and Duran Duran on Top of the Pops, and music in that form didn’t have any impact on me. And then I heard people like Howlin’ Wolf singing about ‘smokestack lightning’ and writing lyrics like ‘there’s another mule kicking in my stall,’ and I found these dark, visceral images so exciting. I love playing things that are sparse and electrifying, and I pull on a palette of imagery in my lyrics that comes from very far from home.”

Luckily, Harley’s penchant for globetrotting gives the guitarist plenty of material for his songs. Arguably one of the most daring live acts around—“I can’t live without an adventure, and I can’t live without a job,” he says with a chuckle—Harley’s love of travel saw him set the Guinness World Record for the highest gig on the planet.

“After two years of preparation, 25 of us hiked up Mount Everest to Base Camp, and then we went up even further than that,” Harley describes. “The aim was to raise money for kids in Nepal, because we knew that the NGOs at that time weren’t as monitored as they should have been and not all the money was going to the right places. It must have been good karma, because the spot where we played the show was very sunny, quite warm, and about 70-80 people turned up to watch—sherpas, medical researchers, and hikers.

“In classic Martin Harley style, though,” he continues, “I didn’t really think about the oxygen situation. I didn’t plan the set until I started doing it, and I opened with a song with lots of words in it. About halfway through the first verse I thought, ‘Yeah. Potentially, I might pass out.’ It’s a lot harder to sing when you’re at altitude. You constantly feel like you’ve just run up some very steep stairs.”

Not one to be put off by a little oxygen-deprivation, Harley followed up his Everest journey with his “Blues Gone Green Tour.” The 27-date acoustic set saw him travel 12,000 miles across the U.K. by bicycle, in a move that drew media attention to the West’s damaging car culture. Now famous for his adventurous shows as much as his intimate gigs, the guitarist is keen to maintain his exciting lifestyle alongside raising a new young family.

“From all my successes and failures,” Harley reflects, “the only things I have are lessons. And the only thing you can do with lessons is to remember them and try and improve. So am I going to be doing adventurous shows when I’m 60? I hope so! All these things are an everlasting learning curve for me, and I don’t want to stop.”

Martin Harley plays at the Vancouver Folk Fest at Jericho Beach Park every day from Friday (July 15) to Sunday (July 17).