Atua Blues
Biography Atua Blues
Grant Haua
is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. When we put together a bio for him he said “Nah man. I am a just a guy with a guitar. You need to tell the story straight”. So who better than to tell his story than the man himself - the following is Grants bio, straight from the horse’s mouth. - DF Records
I picked up guitar when I was 13, my younger brother had got one for Christmas the year before and I noticed he was already starting to get admiring glances when he played from the girls at our school, I said to myself "dam I need to learn the guitar too", unfortunately for me my brother was a better looker and player than me, so it didn't quite work out, but I've been playing guitar ever since.
I like to think I've paid my dues, its hard to tell growing up and gigging in a small but beautiful country like Aotearoa New Zealand, being based in a country with a population of 4 million, one often wonders about overseas acts to see where you stand, since the end of Covid I've toured around Europe twice and Australia twice as well, with a lot of shows in between back home, touring really is the best way to polish your act.
I've been the primary singer/songwriter/guitarist on 8 studio albums and 2 live over the years, my first solo album "Knucklehead" released in 2010 had good reviews resulting in an article on the album, it opened a few doors for me on the local circuit- one thing led to another and I ended up meeting percussionist Michael Barker [Neil Finn, John Butler Trio] - we hit it off straight away and formed "Swamp Thing", and for the following 8 years we wrote and toured regularly.
Mike was already a veteran in the industry at that time, the benefit of him being in bands that have done big U.S. TV shows like Letterman and Leno soon became apparent, straight off the bat we were doing festivals that were tough to get on, and after a few years we were headlining festivals both here and in Australia, slowly we progressed to bigger stages like Womad (NZ), Womadelaide (Aus), Woodford Folk Festival (Aus). It was on these stages we really excelled, often selling more cds than the more well known headline acts. After our Womad 2017 performance in New Plymouth we occupied both the 1 and 2 spots for album sales in the NZ charts.
In Jan 2019 after 4 albums and many tours through Australia and New Zealand I made the difficult decision to depart Swamp Thing, to focus on the music I really enjoy, soul music, and things are going pretty good, my 2nd solo album "AWA BLUES" was a Top 25 album of the year in Rolling Stone magazine France in 2021 and it really it opened up touring in Europe for me, getting a gig on the iconic German Music TV show Rockpalast is a highlight and more recently Taratata in Paris. I'm currently with the small but almost family French label DixieFrog and I couldn't be happier,, having released 4 albums thus far under their banner,,, and I'm still trying to learn the guitar.
