Category: Interviews
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Andy Bell: Chatting with a folk producer in demand
If you’re a fan of the contemporary folk scene, the chances are that you’ve been listening to Andy Bell’s work for some time. A kind of unsung hero, he has been working with some of the genre’s biggest artists for a decade or more, and his relatively new label – Hudson Records – is home…
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Ross Couper & Tom Oakes: The Interview
There are so many ways to interview musicians these days – phone, Skype, WhatsApp (yes, it’s possible) – but nothing beats sitting backstage at a festival, face to face, with the music from the main stage pounding away in the background. That’s the setting for the second half of this double interview with Ross Couper…
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Martin Simpson, ‘Trails & Tribulations’ – a review
The life of a folk musician in 2017 is something of a nomadic ritual. In search of audiences, you spend huge amounts of time traversing A-roads, B-roads, deserted night motorways lit in murky orange and country lanes lit by nothing at all. It’s time spent thinking, working things out, meandering down half forgotten memory lanes,…
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Rosie Hood on folk song collecting in the 21st Century
In the months that I’ve been interviewing folk singers for this blog, one thing that tends to come across perhaps more strongly than anything else is the sense of enthusiasm for the subject. It doesn’t seem as though traditional folk music, in England at least, is something you get into lightly. It becomes a bit…
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Marry Waterson on Bright Phoebus: an album of myth and magic for all the family
The great ‘lost’ folk album, Bright Phoebus, means a huge amount to a lot of people, most of whom assumed that it would remain lost given that its two central figures – Lal and Mike Waterson – have now passed away. But a springtime announcement changed all that when it was revealed that Lal’s daughter, the artist…
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Martin Simpson: The Trails and Tribulations interview
And so, here we are – my second Martin Simpson interview in the space of half a year. Is Grizzly Folk turning into a Martin Simpson fansite, you might wonder? The answer’s no. While I’m amazed as any other guitarist by what the man does, I think both of us would feel a little uneasy…
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The Doc Rowe interview: “I’ve gone to places and missed the ceremony by 19 years because they only do it every 20 years and I’d got the date wrong”
When we met Doc Rowe earlier this year, we turned up with a list of questions and an hour set aside. We’d have been better advised to burn the notepad and clear our diary for the next month. Boy, that man can talk. But, then, when you have so much to say, it’s hardly surprising. The…
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Lisa Knapp on “Till April is Dead”, collaborating with guitar legends and the immortal importance of the shipping forecast
I first heard Lisa Knapp when I came back from living in Japan. In the decade I’d been there, I’d found myself drawn into a musical scene that centred around a duo called Tenniscoats – a couple who mix fragments of acoustic performance into weird and wonderful soundscapes. I was keen to find someone in the UK doing…
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Sam Sweeney: “We don’t have the budget for leaping in Eliza’s band”
It took yonks to track Sam Sweeney down, but only a few minutes to realise why that was. Just take a look at this interview. The man is involved in a million things at once and incredibly passionate about doing them without half-measures. He joined Bellowhead on the cusp of adulthood, and he seems to…
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Paul Sartin on Bellowhead, Faustus, The Transports and a life in folk music
This week’s folk conversation is sprawling to say the least, but that’s to be expected when your chatting with a man who has been a fiddle and oboe player in Bellowhead, a musicologist, one of the blokes in Faustus, one of two Pauls in Belshazzar’s Feast and the musical director of the triumphant recent production…