Soaring High With AK & The Red Kites: A Blues Awakening

Interview by: Mark Lacey

When Andrew Knightley, otherwise known as AK, departed the London scene in favour of the Chiltern Hills, the end of his tenure with Trident Waters was inevitable. However, having bonded with some local musicians in his new home town, it wasn’t long before AK was inspired to form a new band, bringing a unique fusion of delta blues, country, and high-energy hard-edged rock – leaning on his influences of Rival Sons, Ritchie Kotzen and ZZ Top. Despite only being together a short while, AK has already released a new EP, and his ambition to bring his music back to the live circuit shows no limitations. You be a fool to bet against AK & The Red Kites being a household name in 2025.

MyGlobalMind.com caught up with AK (Singer / guitarist), Rob Hoey (bass) and Ash Sims (drummer) before their recent London show.

MGM: You’ll all former London musicians, but now live in the tranquillity of the countryside, with scarcely a live music venue to be seen.

AK: Rob and I are from Buckinghamshire. I used to be in London, but I migrated during COVID. I’ve been out there a while, and Ash is from Northamptonshire.

Ash: There’s a couple of bits and pieces here and there, but nothing like you’ve got around Camden. We all cut our teeth in and around London.

AK: Moving out of London was really when the whole AK & The Red Kites thing started anyway. I used to be in Trident Waters before that.

MGM: Trident Waters was a band that was doing quite good things. You did an album in 2021, a couple of EPs, and were building some real momentum.

AK: Yeah, and then COVID happened. We did the album during COVID, released it, did some shows. But then the whole moving away from London thing just changed the dynamic. I recorded this new record with a producer up in Barnsley. I just wanted to go in a slightly different direction, and work with people that were a little bit closer. Because we were out of London, it was like a different vibe. I wanted the band to do something fresh.

MGM: Have you guys known each other a while?

Ash: Sort of, yeah. AK moved the area, and we started chatting. We’ve all been in different bands beforehand, and with Buckingham not having many venues, you’ve also got to pick and choose the players you find there as well. When we started hooking up and chatting about playing music, it just felt like a fit because we’d all been in London doing the scene.

AK: We had that Camden connection. We just met down the pub, and got pissed. That was just how it started. I was like, I need a bass player, and I’m looking for a drummer as well. We tried a couple of drummers, but they weren’t really working. Then Ash came along and it was just like, that works. That was it. That was how we came together. I think that was an advert, wasn’t it?

Ash: I’d put an advert out and had loads of shit responses from bands. But yeah, AK sent the track for Devil’s Tom, and as soon as I heard it, I was like, I want to be in that.

MGM: Was there a temptation to make this a Trident Waters mk2?

AK: Well, interestingly, a lot of the music had been done for this EP already, and there was a sound to it. I think it’s more of a song-driven thing. Trident Waters was always badged as London blues rock, whereas this is a bit more of a dynamic rock songwriting driven venture. There are still guitar solos, but there’s less of that. It’s more about the song. Trident Waters was deemed as a power trio, but at the moment, whilst there’s still three of us, I don’t necessarily deem it a power trio. I’m not saying it’s not. But we can get another guitar player, we can get a keyboard player, or we can have two back and forth. We can bring people in and out. It’s that kind of sound that can be scaled up and down.

MGM: What did you want it to sound like when you first got together?

Rob: I wanted it to be heavy. I think I brought some good low end to this. I’m not used to really playing in a three-piece; there was just a lot of filling out to do. When I say heavy, I mean that sonically it had to be quite expansive. We’ve been working on that in the room to get it to where it needs to be.

AK: When there’s only three of you, you have to really get it sounding big. You have to work on those tones and those dynamics between the three instruments. That was the key for the trio. From day one, I was going to incorporate another guitar player, but it was just working as a trio, so we left it at that. But the idea of getting a couple of other live players in for certain gigs, making it even bigger, could make a bit more sonically interesting in places.

MGM: Your website refers to influences like Rival Sons, and ZZ Top. You can definitely hear that in the guitar tone. And we’ve just established Rob is a doom-monger.

Rob: I am a doom-monger. That’s what I’ve been doing up until this point, but this has been a nice departure for me, actually. Stepping into this band, I definitely hear those ZZ Top vibes. Maybe those references are more sonically. It’s all guitar tone, especially with ZZ Top, and getting those real classic crunch tones.

AK: I think it sits in that niche of blues rock, americana rock, classic rock, whatever you want to call it. It’s not like we want to sound like these people, or that I set out to sound like Billy Gibbons. I could rip Billy Gibbons off if I wanted to, but then I’d just be ripping Billy Gibbons off. So, what would be the point? But, if you like their stuff, then you would probably like our stuff as well. I think every song has its own unique character on this EP, and it’s actually quite hard to put it in a box.

MGM: As a band, I suspect you’re way too young to have witnessed those classic era seventies blues rock bands live?

Ash: It’s really cool though. The proto metal thing, bands like Blue Cheer and Leaf Hound, and those really old bands, like Mountain and stuff like that, they had that mad resurgence. We’re standing in the Black Heart in London right now, and they used to play all that stuff here quite a lot. It really gave rise again to that heavier ’70s blues rock stuff. I think people have really started to catch on.

AK: I’ve always gone backwards. Even when I was at school, I was listening to bands from 20 years before. Whereas everyone else was into the latest thing. I went right back to the Beatles, then rock n roll, and then the Delta stuff. I’m just a man out of the wrong time.

MGM: You’re playing tonight in the Black Heart to promote your new single. Talk to me about the new single, and what the new EP signifies for you.

AK: ‘Stronger’, is the third single from the EP. I think it’s the strongest single. We didn’t want to release it too early; we wanted to build things a little bit. We’re probably going to put another single out from the EP. We put it out to test the waters, and it came out before we’d even played a gig. We’ve only been playing together since April / May. We did our first gig in July, then did another one a couple of weeks ago with the Cold Stares. This is our third gig. Not much has really been happening yet. The EP’s been doing really well numbers-wise on Spotify, so we’re just going to keep pushing them because they deserve to be heard.

MGM: It’s quite a brave move to be headlining in London, despite having only been together as a band such a short time. How much of the set is new material vs covers or Trident Waters songs

AK: We’ve got a ten-song set. Eight of them are AK & The Red Kites. There’s six on the EP. There’s another two that will be released later on, and we added in a couple of Trident Waters classics as well.

MGM: What’s the ambition beyond this show and into the future? Where do you think you can take this?

AK: As far as possible, until the wheels fall off. I’d like to go to America. I’d like to get it on tour, get more stuff picked up by Spotify and heard. The hardest thing is just getting it heard by a bigger audience.

Ash: More gigs, and some festivals next year.

Rob: There are some great festivals that do this stuff, like the Black Deer Festival. We’ll just chip away at that block and see where we end up in the next year.

AK: We’d love to support Joe Bonamassa, or Rival Sons, or Blackberry Smoke; that’d be great. We played with the Cold Stares, and it’d be good to do a tour with them. That’d be fun.