“I’ve always found” reflects Sam Kelly as he leans back in his chair, “that the people I’ve enjoyed most at festivals and gigs are those who you can tell it’s just them; they’re being completely honest and true. The songs ring true and they’re singing in their own accent…that always resonates with me a lot more than someone who’s been told by some producer to ‘try singing a bit more like this’ or ‘sing with that accent a bit more’. What’s the point? You get into music because it’s what you love doing. It’s good taking pieces of things as inspiration, but at the end of the day you just have to listen to your own voice and just be happy with you.”
Wise words; in fact, throughout our interview Sam exudes a level of maturity and wisdom regarding his industry such that I have to keep reminding myself that the Cornwall based singer-songwriter is only twenty-three.
To be fair, he has reason to be self-assured. With two acclaimed EP’s under his belt and his 2015 debut album ‘The Lost Boys’ earning rave reviews (a Folk Radio UK called it ‘assured and polished’ in their Featured Album of the Month review ), a prestigious live session on the BBC Radio 2 Folk Show and a 2016 Radio 2 Folk ‘Horizon’ Award nomination, it seems that right now Sam Kelly can do little wrong.
I meet up with Sam and banjo-playing accomplice Jamie Francis mid-way through a short duo tour before they embark on their first series of summer festival appearances as ‘Sam Kelly and The Lost Boys’, an opportunity that Sam is “really psyched” about! Alongside Sam and Jamie, the line-up will feature Evan Carson on percussion, Ciaran Algar on fiddle, Graham Coe on cello and Toby Shaer on flutes, whistles and cittern. It’s predominantly the line-up from ‘The Lost Boys’ album and clearly the experience of making the album has already initiated the group-bonding process;
“Unfortunately, Ciaran Algar has become the fall-guy who everyone just takes the mickey out of” Sam laughs, “I do think it genuinely upsets him! We all get on really well. Graham and Jamie are the oldest at twenty-five and twenty-six, so they’re almost like the sensible elders of the band. Ciaran and Toby are the youngest, so they’re kind of like the kids. We’re just like a happy but dysfunctional family! So I’m really looking forward to getting out on the road with them to see if we still get on as well when we’ve spent a couple of weeks in a van together.”
One of the notably refreshing aspects of ‘The Lost Boys’ album was the youthful energy Sam and co. injected into traditional songs, an approach that carries through into their live performances;
“We obviously play a lot of traditional music” Sam explains. “One of my favourite things to do is to trawl through all these old songs and tunes to find ones which I like. I always like putting a fresh new spin on them. I love folk music how it is, but we want our music to be accessible to everyone so a lot of the time we’ll taper songs down a little bit, change a few of the words around so it’s more understandable to a wider audience. I like messing around with lyrics, we mess around with structure, melody and arrangement but always keep enough of the original song so that we’re respecting the original music and so people can recognise it and sing along. Our mantra is basically that we just play the music that we like to play and hope that other people like it as well. Most of the time people seem to.”
Sam and band also like to mix covers into the set-list, particularly at festivals; “We like all sorts of music” he explains, “we don’t just like folk music and we often find that’s the same for the audience, particularly when they’ve been listening to a whole weekend of folk music at a festival. So we do like to keep it mixed up and surprise people every so often. We do a fun cover of ‘Sultans Of Swing’ that I always introduce as a traditional song; I say it’s from the North-East of England, ‘collected’ in the 1980’s by Mark Knopfler. You can see people in the audience, mouthing along trying to work out where they’ve heard it before and thinking ‘Is this a Child ballad?’”
Despite having already released two well received EP’s, Sam knew that he needed to make ‘The Lost Boys’ album in order to really gain traction in the folk scene, particularly with reviewers who prefer to hear a full-length body of work;
“By the time we got to making ‘The Lost Boys’, between us we’d saved up enough money from gigs to get a fairly decent home studio setup and enough know-how to produce it ourselves as well. We just did the whole thing ourselves with our mate Josh Franklin who we went to University with. We recorded most of it in his garden shed and I did vocals and bits of guitar in my Mum’s lounge, in between the ice-cream van going past and the neighbour mowing his lawn!”
“It was a real whirlwind thing” Sam continues. “We did the whole album in twenty-one days. Our first two EPs that we did in 2013 and 2014 gave us all a lot of studio experience because we only had say three days to do three tracks. So we got a lot tighter as musicians getting things in one take. We knew we didn’t have time to muck around so we had a plan of what we were going to do each day. We became a well-oiled machine in the studio I suppose. We were lucky to have some amazing guest musicians; Ciaran Algar, Graham Coe on cello, Lukas Drinkwater on double bass, Kitty MacFarlane on vocals.”
Sam’s introduction to folk came at an early age through his Grandfather; “He was Irish, a stereotypical crazy Irishman” Sam explains. “He was notorious around his town for dressing up as Santa and riding his electric scooter around giving presents to people. He just loved folk music and had a garage full of melodeons, bodhrans, harmonicas and all these weird little percussion things. It was just my favourite thing to do when I was younger, to go round his and see this fascinating Aladdin’s cave of folk instruments. He also had a lovely singing voice, knew lots of old Gaelic songs and would teach me to sing them.”
“When I was eighteen” Sam continues, “I got into music seriously. Until then I just saw it as a hobby. I studied it at the Brighton Institute of Music and that’s where I met Jamie and Evan who I play with. I’m twenty-three now, so that’s five years ago that we started doing it. I never thought ‘I want to do music for a living’…I’ve just done it.”
In advance of meeting Sam I hadn’t planned to bring up the subject of his ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ journey (I figured he’d probably answered enough interview questions about that by now). It came up anyway, however, in relation to the effect it had on his return to the folk scene.
Sam had already been playing in a folk band in Brighton when he and Jamie found themselves at a loose end in-between gigs in London. Auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent was simply a way to pass the time that day. A few months after auditioning, Sam got a call asking him to attend the TV auditions and before he knew it, he was performing in the final;
“It was all a massive whirlwind experience” he reflects. “I would never class myself as a fan of these kind of talent shows; I don’t watch them…but I think I had an amazing experience because of that. I thought ‘I’m just going to have a great time whatever happens.’ I actually had an amazing time; I got loads of free clothes and free food, which was a great thing as a student when you’re used to super noodles on toast!”
“At the time” Sam continues, “I never thought ‘Is this going to make it difficult for me to play folk music seriously?’ It just never occurred to me. When we went back to playing folk music after the show and trying to do it seriously, it was difficult at first. Talent show products go against everything that folk music is about. But there were a few people who were still welcoming and didn’t care; they could see how passionate we were about the music. I’ll always be really grateful to those first few promoters who took a chance and put us on in folk clubs and at festivals, who said ‘here’s your audience, just go out and play.’”
“Then we started getting a better reputation amongst promoters and got a few decent support slots with Cara Dillon, Sean Lakeman and Kathryn Roberts and people started to take us more seriously. At the start of some festival gigs, the audience knew I was a ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ finalist and were prepared to be completely underwhelmed. They were almost against us from the start. From a musical perspective it made us develop because we knew we had to be better, we knew we had to put on a good live show to bring people onto our side.”
Roll forward a couple of years and with his folk credibility firmly re-established, Sam feels a lot more settled in relation to his artistic direction. As we talk, he gazes tranquilly out of the window and reflects on his current position;
“In the last year or so we’ve come to a kind of sense of peace with ourselves about being comfortable with the music that we’re playing. We’re just going to play the songs and music that we like to play. If everyone likes it that’s amazing…if they don’t at least we’re being true to ourselves and our own hearts. I think before we struggled with ‘What should we be playing? What do people want to hear? What songs can we write that will appease these different types of people? Initially, and particularly after being on Britain’s Got Talent, it was hard to know what music to play. It’s only in the last year or so that I’ve felt truly comfortable with the music we’re playing.”
Coming from a position of confidence, it’s perhaps not surprising that the second ‘Sam Kelly and The Lost Boys’ album is already in the planning; “I know a lot of people who really are prolific songwriters and write all the time” he explains, “I wouldn’t say I’m a prolific songwriter but I’m constantly having ideas. It’s just a case of turning those ideas into full songs which is often where my laziness unfortunately wins out! But I’m constantly thinking of song ideas. Me and Jamie do all the writing together and we share a flat together so we spend a lot of time just jamming through ideas. We only released the album in November but we’re pretty much got another full album’s material, a lot of which we’re playing live already. We’re hoping to get straight back in the studio and record it after the festival season and have it out early next year.”
Sam’s also cautious, however, not to rush to release the songs before they’re ready: “It takes a lot of work to get a song that you’re really happy with. It takes a while of playing it in front of live audiences and checking reactions. With all our songs, we’ll play them live and then randomly after five months we’ll suddenly decide that a banjo part doesn’t work or that the guitar should drop out in this part. I think it’s always worth just waiting that extra bit of time to get something that you’re really proud of.”
Listening to Sam talk about the forthcoming festival season and his excitement about the next album, I start to get a sense of why, after experiencing some of the attention normally afforded to commercial artists, he chose to return to his folk roots; “Me and Jamie always have this conversation” he recounts, “we’ll play a random folk club in a random town that we’d never otherwise go to and have an amazing conversation with someone who’s told us something about one of the songs we’re playing, or we’ve learned a song from them. It’s food for the soul, to meet these people who always have amazing stories and who you’d never otherwise have a chance to meet.”
“I think that’s the real beauty of folk music” he continues; “you don’t have that fourth wall that you get in a lot of genres where it’s like ‘we’re the band, you’re the audience, we’re going to play you music, you’re going to enjoy it’. In folk music you hang out and have a beer with everyone afterwards. I just feel that there’s a much more personal relationship between artist and audience in the folk scene which I absolutely love. There’s an amazing folk scene that we have in our country that a lot of the time it’s easy to take for granted.”
Maintaining his authenticity is something Sam clearly values; “I don’t really listen to pop music any more, there’s just so much of people who are trying to sound like other people. I can hear it all the time…singer-songwriters who are putting on accents or putting on voices, trying to sound authentic which is just the most ironic thing ever. If there’s anything that I’ve learned, it’s just that you have to be true to yourself and listen to your own advice more than anyone else. It’s great to have help along the way; I definitely wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am without help from amazing people like Tanya Brittain, Sam Lakeman who advises me all the time, Sean Lakeman as well, Cara Dillon, Mike Harding…all these people who have given me amazing advice because they’re people who have been there and done it. But at the end of the day you’ve just got to listen to the voice in your own head. Unless of course it’s telling you to kill people, then don’t listen to it!”
As my time with Sam draws to a close, we finish on the inevitable ‘what’s next?’ question; “We’re just focusing on touring as much as possible this year” he replies, “trying to get the album in people’s ears. I’ve just finished recording the second Changing Room (the Cornish band that Sam also plays in) album that will be out in July and I’m hoping to get involved with producing a few more things from other people. So it’s a summer of festivals and then hopefully hit the studio straight after the summer and get the second album done with the full band. I’m just really excited about everything we’ve got going on….”
https://soundcloud.com/folk-radio-uk/sam-kelly-down-by-the-salley-gardens
Sam Kelly Upcoming Tour Dates
April 30th – Bristol Folk Festival
May 6th – Merode Festival, BELGIUM
May 7th – Trinity Folk Festival, GUILDFORD
May 20th – Shepley Folk Festival
June 11th – Gower Folk Festival, South Wales
June 12th – Southwell Folk Festival
June 25th – Dunton Folk, BEDFORDSHIRE
30th June – Topic Folk, BRADFORD
4th July – Folk on Monday, LONDON
8th July – Folk at the Hall, North Wales
9th July – Moonbeams Festival, Yorkshire
30th & 31st July – Cambridge Folk Festival
3rd August – Sidmouth Folk Week
9th & 10th August – Broadstairs Folk Week
21st August – Folk East
26th – 28th August – Nordsjøfestivalen, Norway
29th September – Lyceum Folk Club of Newport
30th September – Derby Folk Festival
1st October – Folk in the Lounge
More details here:
www.samkelly.org