Paul Sartin is a prolific musical marvel, he is the the brains behind Faustus, the brawn behind Bellowhead and the beauty at the heart of Belshazzar's Feast. A man for whom the very idea of only having one pot on the boil is a sign of weakness. Rumour has it that he...
An exclusive interview with Ashley Hutchings about his new album by Simon Jones. In September 1987 Ashley Hutchings released a truly remarkable and strikingly personal album, By Gloucester Docks I Sat Down & Wept. Detailing a love affair with painstaking...
English luthier NK Forster announced a major professional milestone today, celebrating 30 years of guitar making in Newcastle upon Tyne. His business, NK Forster Guitars, makes a variety of guitars and other stringed instruments for both amateur and professional...
Award-winning festival Bearded Theory celebrates its ten year anniversary at the end of this month, we caught up for a pre festival interview with Rich Bryan, Festival Organiser..... For a festival that started life as a private party in a pub, you’ve come a long way,...
Wardruna have just released the final part of their Runaljod trilogy, an epic musical journey through the Norse runic alphabet known as the Elder Futhark. The final album is called Ragnarok and we caught up with main man Einar Selvik to discuss his approach to the...
We grabbed a quick chat with Kate Rusby to find out a little more about her new release Life in a Paper Boat What comes first when writing your own songs, the words or the melody? Nearly always its a tune that comes first, tune, riff, passage of chords, any of these...
Angus R Grant is dancing round the kitchen along with all the rest of Shooglenifty; not physically of course, but as a reaction to the unexpected and sad news of his passing, I’m sequencing all of the Shooglenifty releases from Venus In Tweeds to The Untied Knot in...
Quite frankly it feels that Wardruna have tapped into some very ancient powers with their trilogy of albums exploring the deeper esoteric meanings of the ancient Norse runic alphabet. They use some of the oldest Nordic musical instruments , self-made frame drums and...
Available now on the BBC iPlayer, the BBC David Bowie Prom is a celebration and reinterpretation of the music of David Bowie with the Berlin-based, genre-defying musicians’ collective s t a r g a z e and its Artistic Director André de Ridder. They are joined by guest...
The Living and The Dead is a six part BBC supernatural drama series set in the late 1800s in the West Country. Written by Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham, co-creators and writers of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes, the BBC synopsis is 'Somerset, England, 1888. A...
Triumphant trio The Young ‘uns made a guest appearance on BBC-tv’s Springwatch popular spin-off show, Springwatch Unsprung, on Friday June 3rd. Teesside’s Sean Cooney, Michael Hughes and David Eagle, together one of folk’s hottest properties, made it two in a row last...
Show of Hands have unequivocally become one of the leading forces in British folk. Steve Knightley and Phil Beer are respectively recognised as one of the UK’s best singer songwriters and one of its finest multi instrumentalists. Without frills or fanfares they have...
In darkest Wiltshire, several trillion light years ago (1974 to be precise), an interesting bunch of characters who congregated at the Village Pump Folk Club hit upon the mad idea of organising a festival. Originally intended to be held at a barn in Bradford-on-Avon,...
Does the prospect of a new album and tour set you itching to get out there and share the new material? Absolutely! We're always keen to play, but in this case there's an added excitement, as a lot of the material is brand new for us as well as or audiences. So our...
We have an exclusive track 'Til Next Market Day' from the great new album by Damien O'Kane - 'Areas Of High Traffic'
Gretchen Peters recently released 'Blackbirds', which is widely perceived as one of her best albums to date. We interviewed Gretchen on her recent UK tour and you can see her at Cambridge Folk Festival 2015. I began by asking about the way the new album questions a...
I’ve been to a few 80th birthday parties lately. Well, when I say a few, I mean two. And they were more concerts than actual parties. Yet they were both joyous, humbling experiences honouring two of the most iconic and most enduring influences from the early days of...
These are the winners of the Spiral awards 2015, celebrating the music featured on this site from January to December 2014. This has been our biggest ever year for the awards, with just over 34,000 votes cast it has been amazing to see the interest it has stirred. So...
These are the nominations that received the most votes in the Spiral Awards 2014, in a few cases it was a very close run thing. The winners, and the nominations speak volumes for the breadth of music that we have covered over the last year - check them out, everything...
Every year we agonise over nominations, asking a wide range of 'industry professionals' (code for old soaks) to give us their considered opinion. But then the danger is it ends up being just like all the other awards out there, and that's just dull. So we have grabbed...
