SLO Folks Presents: Clive Carroll

Born in Eng­land, Clive began his musi­cal jour­ney in Chelms­ford, Essex. His par­ents had a taste for Amer­i­can coun­try and old time music and it wasn’t long before Clive was play­ing in the fam­i­ly band on a home­made ban­jo. By his ear­ly teens, gui­tar in hand, Clive was tra­vers­ing the worlds of soul, pop, funk, and tra­di­tion­al Irish music, bal­anc­ing his affin­i­ty for Slay­er with the etudes of Tár­re­ga.
This breadth of musi­cal curios­i­ty was to become one of his strengths; even as a kid Clive was as com­fort­able accom­pa­ny­ing a group of folk singers as he was jam­ming along to Nir­vana, or read­ing charts on ban­jo and gui­tar in the­atre orches­tra pits.

Clive went on to earn a 1^st Class Hon­ours Degree in Com­po­si­tion and Gui­tar from the famed Trin­i­ty Col­lege of Music in Lon­don, all the while bal­anc­ing his clas­si­cal work with for­ays into the world of the steel string gui­tar. By the time he grad­u­at­ed from Trin­i­ty, Clive had not only penned orches­tral works, he had writ­ten an album’s worth of solo acoustic gui­tar music. A chance meet­ing with Eng­lish gui­tar leg­end John Ren­bourn proved the cat­a­lyst for Clive’s debut album, ​“Sixth Sense”, which Ren­bourn deemed ​“a mile­stone in the jour­ney of the steel-string gui­tar”. He sub­se­quent­ly took Clive on the road with him and the pair toured North Amer­i­ca and Europe togeth­er, launch­ing Clive’s solo per­form­ing career.