Folk

In these bleak economic times the concept of eccentricity seems just about the UK’s remaining viable export. But even in its natural habitat of the music world, the eccentric’s stocks are running low. Today, the hungry public have to…

We don’t do next-door very well in pop journalism. If we’re celebrating the back streets of Liverpool, it’s probably because they’re the roads that once led to Shea Stadium. Which is a strange thing, because small-scale, local and intimate…

In 1992 Kate Rusby was, you fondly imagine, a nervy teenager who couldn’t have dreamed of the outstanding career that lay ahead. The notion of a gentle young singer from Yorkshire with a mostly traditional repertoire lighting up a largely…

Had they begun in the mid-1970s, a time when the public seemed rather taken with weathered-yet-fiery acoustic music, Show of Hands would surely have been as massive as Steeleye Span. Instead, the duo of Steve Knightley and Phil Beer came…

As the title hints, Sussex singer Martha Tilston’s latest album is concerned with the complicated relationship between technology and the human condition. This theme is an easy one for folk musicians to bring up, but generally a hard one…