It’s almost 9.30pm, and Joe Bonamassa has vanished. The night air is hot. We’re in the wings at Théâtre JeanDeschamps, a vast open-air amphitheatre inside the 13th-century citadel of Carcassonne, a hilltop town in the Languedoc region of southern France.
Barely half an hour ago Bonamassa was sitting here on a flight case, Diet Coke in one hand, cigar in the other, chatting to bassist Calvin Turner about this and that. The base-level confidence, perhaps, of someone who’s been gigging professionally since childhood; a man who’d played with John Lee Hooker and BB King by the time he hit puberty.
