It is hard to believe it has been thirteen years since the exhilarating duo of John Spiers and Jon Boden released their last album of new material, the much-praised Vagabond, in 2008.
Both have been incredibly busy in the intervening years, together at the forefront of the majestic Bellowhead as well as recording their ‘best of’ album The Works (2011), and individually too, with Boden focusing on his Folk Song A Day project and his inspiring trilogy of solo albums, whilst Spiers’ has been busy recording with Peter Knight as well as the Gigspanner Big Band and Jackie Oates.
Fallow Ground (reviewed here) sees the duo reunite, and a much anticipated and thrilling release it is too, comprising thirteen tracks of songs and tunes revelling in the sheer fun of music-making rooted in the English folk tradition.
Before the album’s release, on the 17th of September, Folk Radio got the chance to speak to the duo, to chat about the album as well as the problems of rehearsing online, the difficulties of delivering traditional songs with some questionable subject matter, and the challenges of getting match fit for their upcoming tour. First of all, we tackled the topic of why the duo stopped recording together.
“We stopped for practical reasons,” says Boden, “For one, Bellowhead was really taking off, and it just felt like we were sort of fighting against ourselves a bit for time, for material and everything. So, that was why we stopped, but it was always our plan to come back, and over the last couple of years, we’ve had a few little conversations about how maybe, you know, now would be a good time, but we needed a new album. There was no way we were going to come back without a new album because it just needed new stuff.
“That was really the process, but it’s kind of difficult doing an album of traditional stuff because you’re always looking for good material that hasn’t been done much before, and it gets harder as you go along. You know, it feels like there is sort of a limited number of songs and tunes out there that are suited to any particular line-up, or you know, or they’re destined to be Spiers and Boden tracks.
“So, it was a couple of years thinking ‘oh yeah, we need to get some material together,’ but that coincided with lockdown so we were both able to go back to our bookshelves, get the books and CDs out and start listening and reading and just trying to find some stuff that jumped out at us and fortunately it did!”
As Spiers adds, the process was “absolutely classic Spiers and Boden methodology! Work out that you want to make an album first, and then go scouring in whatever resources you’ve been playing in, the years or weeks and months before, to find stuff that you just want to explore!
“Jon’s always very good at firing off hundreds of song ideas,” notes Spiers, “and now you don’t have to meet up in a pub to suggest like twenty songs that you could do they all came via WhatsApp. Because we live on opposite ends of England, it made sense to do it remotely for the first few bits, just getting material and seeing if the other one enjoyed playing them, sending little recordings and things to each other.”
“One of us would come up with an idea, record it, and send it over,” adds Boden, “then the other would put something down, send it back, and then we could tweak it and muck about with arrangements that way. It was actually quite a practical way of doing it. It’s not a very romantic way of doing it, but in the context of lockdown, and in the context of us living two hundred miles from each other it worked fine.”
The thirteen tracks on Fallow Ground take the listener through familiar, and not quite so familiar, traditional songs and tunes, several of which the boys have played as part of their individual repertoires. As Spiers says, “A lot of the tunes were ones that I’d had a go at playing solo already in front of audiences and knew that they worked as solo arrangements. As soon as we actually got together and played them together that’s when you realise which are going to be the good ones and which ones not. You can only have a hunch until you start mucking around. When we get together that’s when the ideas spark.”
Of course, 2020 and 2021 has meant the opportunity of getting together to spark such ideas has been a challenge. How did the duo manage rehearsal in the time of Covid-19?
“Rehearsal was really hard for us, really hard,” notes Boden, “The last time we recorded together we were playing a lot on the road, so we were able to rehearse and sound check and all that sort of stuff and work stuff out. This is the first album we’ve ever made where we haven’t been seeing each other regularly. So that was difficult anyway, then add to that lockdown.”
“There were sort of huge swathes of time when you were sort of going through the motions,” says Spiers, adding, “not knowing when we were going to be allowed to rehearse properly, and we’d have flurries of activity where we’d sort of go, yeah, let’s get all these tunes together and send them over.”
“We were able to get together for a few social distanced rehearsals,” Boden adds, “Actually, what we found was that the songs were easier to arrange remotely, because I guess with songs the narrative gives you a structure to work with, whereas tunes are so much more about feeling, and that’s really hard if you’re not in the same room. So essentially, we got the song arrangements hammered out before we rehearsed and then when we got together in rehearsal, it was like, right, ‘what are we going to do for these tune sets!’”
“It was back to really organic working,” adds Spiers, “just like we did when we put together Through and Through in Jon’s dad’s flat in Oxford in 1999. The only thing was, we didn’t go on as long as we usually do because we’d forgotten how exhausting it is working on stuff that intensively!”
“We’re not quite as young as were!” Spiers continues. “We’re not going to stay up all night to do it! But we had enough days to get the lion’s share together. Also, there were sets that we left alone a bit, which wasn’t our natural instinct early on – we wanted arrangements that impressed people at every possible turn and maximise our innovation or impact. We’d watch people like James Fagan and Nancy Kerr and go ‘oh my god, they’ve got this third strand of music going through it!’ It was all quite competitive from our point of view anyway. For Fallow Ground we didn’t quite have that same pressure. Some of the tracks are literally us playing some tunes or singing a song with minimal accompaniment, which is the kind of music, especially in the folk world, I really enjoy.”
Lockdown has seen the huge development of online gigs; for most musicians, this has been the only way to make a living and to keep connected with their audiences. “The whole live stream gigs has been fascinating,” says Boden, “there was a time in lockdown where it felt like, ‘okay, what’s going to happen is every gig anyone does is going to be live-streamed,’ I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think that works. I think it maybe takes away the specialness of each gig if every single gig is available online, but I think it might well be that every tour has a live-streamed gig or a set.
“I find it quite interesting from the point of view of, you know, there all sorts of little line-up, or gig ideas that I have that I think well, that’s great. I’d quite like to a rocky version of Remnant Kings, you know, just doing the rocky numbers from the albums, but, you know, there’s maybe four hundred people in the country who would come to that gig, so you can’t do that as a tour, but with a live stream you can. I think it might open up the possibility of doing varied types of gigs because then you can reach that sort of niche audience.”
For Spiers to online gigs have been beneficial but challenging, “You’re sort of in a shed, playing to a laptop, and it can feel a bit weird! But a lot of it was about people needing to feel connected, and it was about people wanting to support us, which we’re very grateful for, you know, audiences deliberately choosing to see as many online gigs. That meant we were financially able to do something during it, but there’s no substitute for a proper live gig.”
“We did do an online gig,” adds Boden, “the Oxford Folk Weekend (April 2021), and that felt really good but it was also a bit weird because there were no audience, you know. We were always about the live thing, in Spiers and Boden and Bellowhead, I think that’s a function of playing traditional folk music, it’s in that environment that it come alive.”
There is much to savour on Fallow Ground. As is typical, the duo they have taken a selection of songs and tunes and made them their own, and there are traditional tracks that have rarely been recorded in the past. Opening track ‘Bluey Brink,’ for example, is a barnstorming which ensures the album hits the ground running. It’s not a song that is familiar to many, even a duo that has an impressive track record of knowledge of traditional song. In fact, for Boden, it wasn’t even initially obvious it would be the opening track, “We had thought that maybe ‘Butter & Cheese & All’ was a natural opener just because of the lyrics, but actually, when we tried that, it was like no, we need ‘Bluey Brink’ to go in, you know, to hit it hard! That was a great find. It’s a pretty obscure song, and I must have heard it, but I didn’t remember it at all. I was listening to a Peter Bellamy album and I was like, what the hell is that song?”
Spiers agrees, “I don’t even think Jon thought there were many legs in it. I just went ‘well, we absolutely have to do this, I’d never heard it before, how have I not heard this song before?’ It doesn’t quite feel traditional, but it also doesn’t feel like a pop song. I know its history; it’s as traditional as many other folk songs, it’s just that it came via the music halls and then A.L Lloyd and then Peter Bellamy, that’s how it got us.”
“Our version actually starts to get quite rocky,” adds Boden, “a sort of 80s rock anthem feel! So, we went with it, you know!”
“It’s such a ridiculous subject for a song!” notes Spiers, “You want to hear the story because it’s funny and manic, the story of a crazy bloke who would drink anything and somehow not get damaged by it – I think we’ve all met someone like that! And we tried to make the music that went with it.”
“Such a weird type of hero,” says Boden, “sheep shearing and drinking acid. Brilliant!”
The title track, ‘Fallow Ground,’ is a song that comes with several different titles, including ‘As I Stood under My Love’s Window’ and ‘The Cock.’ It’s an unusual folk song, and Spiers and Boden give it their idiosyncratic twist in its rhythm. “There is another version,” notes Boden, “that a good friend of ours, Ian Giles, sings which is more of an 18th century version, and Andy Turner does it in that sort of 18th/19th century version, but I got it from Louis Killen, from Ballads & Broadsides, and it’s a beautiful unaccompanied version, just a really lovely, compelling, gentle, positive folk song.”
In a twist with the expected narrative of folk love songs, nothing bad happens at the song’s end, as Boden explains, “The first time you hear it, you think, okay, right, he’s gonna run off, she’s going to be pregnant and it’s all going to end badly or, one of them is going to die or the husband’s going to turn up with a broadsword and chop his head off or something. Something bad is going to happen, and it doesn’t which is lovely.”
Choosing a song that ends happily is just one aspect that marks Fallow Ground as something quite special. There is a distinct lack of songs about death or misery on the album; there is certainly more joy in the album than you would expect in a collection of folk songs. It’s tempting to suggest this was a deliberate decision, a shifting from the darkness of Covid-19 and lockdown and looking towards something a little more uplifting, but that wasn’t the original intention.
“It wasn’t a sort of conscious decision,” says Boden, “but we very much felt that we weren’t really very interested in finding sad songs. There’s some contemplative stuff, but there’s a warmth to it all, which we were both drawn to, so, no, I think it was kind of an instinctive response to the situation.”
“We had the idea that we wanted it to be an up album,” adds Spiers, “but it wasn’t particularly deliberate.”
As Boden adds, “I guess when you’re in a lockdown, you’re just looking forward to that sense of re-blossoming and re-opening, and so that’s a natural thing, artistically to head towards, I think.”
The chat turns to lockdown, and the challenges musicians have faced over the last eighteen months, both financially as well as creatively.
“I think, as a musician,” reflects Boden, “you’re very aware of the fact that it might not go on forever, your audience might start to dwindle, and you might end up going ‘okay, this isn’t working.’ But there was always a sense that would be a gradual process if it happened. The idea that you could suddenly have no work and no knowledge of when you are going to have any work is really scary. It’s not just musicians, half the economy is in the same boat; I think we shouldn’t get overly sentimental about music. It’s actually harder for agents, technicians, and musicians who aren’t lead singers. It’s much harder if you’re a session bass player for example, because you’re waiting to be asked to do the gigs, but, yeah, it was pretty scary.”
Interestingly though, one of the first tunes the duo worked on for the album, ‘Funney Eye’, had a particular lockdown history, as Spiers explained. “We worked that one out together in the first lockdown. We wanted to record something apart when everyone was doing that sort of split screen thing. We worked on that completely remotely, it’s the only one on the album that was done like that.”
The tune has an interesting history, and its inclusion reveals much about the duo’s love of English folk tune tradition and its history. “It was found in a tune book collection of a fiddler, William Henry Giles,” explains Spiers, “most of his other material is stuff that you would recognise straight away; the mainstay of the English folk repertoire. A lot of these fiddlers would play for the dances but they also played for church music and functions. They often had a formal end of the book, and a fun dance at the end of the book, which is the ones we’re normally interested in, and I’ve never found this ‘Funney Eye’ tune anywhere else. Giles was from the village of Bampton in Oxfordshire, which is where one of the strongest Morris traditions is, but the interesting thing is his book doesn’t appear to have any of what we now know is the Morris stuff in there. I don’t know how linked in with that tradition he would, or wouldn’t, have been, but he had all the standard dance stuff that people play. It was just nice to get a tune that was sort of new to people.”
The tune as it came to Spiers though wasn’t finished, which meant adding new material to complete it. “There was only really a last phrase that was missing,” says Spiers, “and it’s a little four bar tune, so it’s got less complexity than some of the more common folk tunes. I had to finish it off, but it was just where it was going anyway. These tunes are built out of sort of stock blocks, and it already had the bit that made it an interesting tune.”
The traditional song ‘Reynardine’ also receives the Spiers and Boden treatment. It’s a song that took Boden back to his early days attending sessions in Durham. “I was introduced to this through the songs of Graham Miles when I was a student at Durham. Every Thursday, I’d go to the Colpitts Hotel sessions and Robin Dale, a good friend of Graham’s, his thing was Graham’s songs, and I found out about Graham there. Then I got the book [Songscapes] that Robin made with Graham’s lyrics and Robin’s photographs, and I was just thumbing through that book and thinking it’d be really nice to do a Graham Miles song. I think of myself as a Graham Miles buff, but I’ve never actually recorded any of his songs, maybe because they’re north-eastern and sort of don’t sit naturally with my voice, but I was just reading it and thinking that’s a lovely lyric and a nice tune. So, it’s one of those things where I thought I’d found a little on undiscovered gem and it turns out Archie Fisher and, I think, Martyn Wyndham-Read recorded it too! But that’s the nature of folk song!”
One thing that has kept Spiers busy over lockdown has been his remarkable Isolation Pub Sessions. For those not in the know, Spiers would film himself playing a few tunes, posting the video on YouTube once a month. Viewers could then film themselves playing along and send their videos to Spiers, who would then edit them into one big video and repost the session online. From a handful of participants, it quickly grew. Although the last official Isolation Pub Session was at the end of lockdown, Spiers brought it back for Towersey Festival in early September.
“That kept me doing something throughout a lot of this,” says Spiers, “and I’m still surprised the number of people that have come up to talk to me about it in person at festivals. I was at one last weekend and I was in a session with at least three of the people who were in the pub sessions, and that was really nice.”
As a monthly session, with sometimes fifty attendees, it quickly turned something of an online phenomenon, impressive considering they came about pretty much by accident, as Spiers explained, “Literally, the first one was me saying we’d normally have a session on a Sunday, somewhere around here in one of the pubs, that’s not happening, so here’s me playing some tunes on my own. I didn’t suggest anyone send in videos, which wasn’t the plan, but people did anyway. That’s when I got the idea to stick them together, it was quite easy when there was only five or six of them, but it turned into a bit more of a mammoth task when there was fifty! But I’m very proud of what it turned into and glad to have been of help to people on their own.”
For participants, the online sessions provided something of a community. Even for those not confident to send Spiers a video of them playing (myself included), the videos were a terrific way to participate in a session without any pressure.
“For every one that had forty or fifty people in it,” as Spiers notes, “there would be one hundred people sending me messages going, ‘I’m joining in, but I’m not actually joining in,’ and that’s fine. That’s probably a nice way into sessions for people, because there’s no pressure. Jon and I met in sessions, and it’s something we really believe is a great thing that happens in folk.”
As Spiers adds, “It’s a brilliant feeling to be making communal music, and it’s also very, very good at sharpening your ears up once you get playing them regularly; to learn music quicker, by trying to join in and throwing yourself in at the deep end. It teaches you sensitivity as a musician as well, if you’ve got a singer singing a song, if everyone piled in and played as hard as they could, you wouldn’t hear the singer. So, there’s sort of unwritten rules there about trying to make something sound nice!”
One of the new tracks is ‘Saltash’, familiar to anyone who took part in the Isolation Sessions. “I put that one on the pub session the week I learned it because I liked it so much, and I wanted to see whether anyone else did really!” Spiers says. “It’s one of those amazing tunes that’s so simple. It’s brilliant. I loved its simplicity; there’s so few notes! There’s even ambiguity about whether it’s major or minor; as soon as you put a different chord to it, it gets a really different feel, so you can totally play about with it.
“I don’t know which one came first, whether it’s a hymn tune or whether it was a tune used for dances, there’s no definite one way or the other, but as a dance tune it’s got a real drive about it. It’s a great tune, and I can’t believe I didn’t know about it for so long. I only found that one very recently while scouring Cornish tune collections.”
‘Saltash’ appears early in the album, providing a nice link in the middle of a set. “Jon and I were putting a tune set together,” continues Spiers, “and I thought it would be a nice little passage between ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘William Irwin’s Modal Hornpipe.’ We only play it three times, which is very short, because it’s only four bar phrases, but it’s good to get from one tune to the other and have a little downtime groove in the middle.”
Fallow Ground concludes with two original tunes, ‘Bailey Hill / Wittenham Clumps’, which have personal resonances to both performers. Boden’s tune, ‘Bailey Hill’, relates to a location that holds fond childhood memories. “‘Bailey Hill’ is a fort, just outside Sheffield. It’s abandoned really, covered in trees, no signage saying this is a Norman fort or whatever, but it’s lovely. It’s sort of been reclaimed. It’s covered in bracken and it’s a place we used to go for picnics quite a lot and spend quite a lot of time up there.”
Spiers’ tune ‘Wittenham Clumps’ has a similar history, providing a valuable link to Spiers’ past and early session playing. “I wrote that a long, long time ago, before I even met Jon. I was playing that in sessions in Oxford, in fact, all the old crowd in Oxford will probably recognise that tune, I used to play it almost every session!”
“It’s just one of those places I’ve always known. The clumps refer to two hills with little bunches of trees on top of them, and one of these had a poem carved in the trunk of a tree. It was legible in the 1960s. When I first saw it in the 1980s the tree had grown over the poem, and some letters were bigger than others. Now the tree’s dead, and it’s just photographs that remain.”
Landscape is an important source of inspiration for both; Boden’s recent trilogy [Songs From The Floodplain, Afterglow and Last Mile Home] had landscape, and man’s impact on it, at the heart.
For Spiers, too, the landscape is a muse: “I often look to that sort of landscape for inspiration, not in a new age sort of way, just I feel comfortable there, and I like thinking about things there. If I’m thinking I need some new ideas, I’ll go for a walk somewhere that I feel comfortable and I’ll use that space in my head to try and think of musical ideas.”
The two tunes provide an evocative conclusion to the album, but they were not without challenges: “John’s playing on a one-row-box,” notes Boden, “which has just such a fantastic punchy sound, but there’s nowhere to hide with it! It’s the simplest melodeon there is, and there’s not really much arrangement going on. They’re great fun, but we really have to play them!”
“Because I’m playing a one row melodeon on that,” adds Spiers, “I haven’t got any choices over the basses, it’s either I play them or don’t!”
As Spiers add, “I’ve often sort of relied on creative left hand playing to see me through an arrangement and justify my position of going ‘listen to me, I’m playing!’ so yeah, that again means that the arrangement is quite simple. I really like that because we’re just letting the instruments speak for themselves, really. I wrote ‘Wittenham Clumps’ on a two-row, but I always wanted it to sound like a one-row tune. When you write tunes, you are always looking for something that sounds flash, but you know how to play!
“There’s a little run in the B part, which fits under the fingers so easily on a normal two-row box it’s almost cheating, but we so wanted the sound of that one-row because it is a massive sounding box. It’s still quite new to me, and I can play it, but suddenly the hopping between the two rows to get that little flourish has gone, and I have to play it all on the push and pull, and it was a massive challenge to relearn how to play that! I’ve got it now; I can do it! But when we were first practising it, it was like, ‘Oh god, I haven’t even thought about the fingering!’ I couldn’t do it for the first couple of days, and it’s difficult on the fiddle as well!
“They’re bloody difficult to play actually!” exclaims Boden, “I need to keep practising those before we go on tour, but great fun, really good fun to play.”
Both Spiers and Boden are passionate about the English folk tradition and its cultural history, a complicated and problematic history which is rightly under scrutiny today, especially the impact of Brexit and the development of the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. “There is work to be done for the English folk scene to get comfortable with our own material again,” notes Boden. “There was a sense in the folk scene that we were trying to be part of a broader European folk collective endeavour, and I guess the fear with Brexit was if people didn’t hate us, then they’ll hate us now! But, of course, everyone knows that music is different to politics, but I’m looking forward to getting back out and sort of re-putting the flag back into English traditional music.
“In an environment where we are, absolutely, rightly re-evaluating the imperialist backbone of the nation,” states Boden, “and that’s not an English thing, that’s a British and European thing, it’s awful how much of our financial security as a nation was actually built on slavery even after we proudly banned it we were still raking it in from slavery, singing two-hundred year-old folk songs is then suddenly in the same kind of category as having two-hundred year old statues of slave owners.”
Spiers agrees, adding, “English, or British, imperialism is an awful thing, but the first people that suffered at the hand of it were the English working class. I think the longer you’ve been subject to it, the longer it takes before people will have the shackles taken off, and I think we’ll be the very last people to rail against it en masse, but I can see a point where that will come.”
The challenge, of course, is how to engage with songs many of which have a problematic message for modern listeners, as Boden considers, “It’s difficult, and it’s tempting to go that it’s too much of a mine field and then not sing any songs that are in any way misogynist or imperialist. You have to try and come to terms with it. Retain and explain that’s all you can do. It’s odd with traditional music, as it’s performed now, because it’s not presented as historic documents generally, it’s presented as a living artform which is great, and it’s right, but then it’s almost more potent.”
There is a solution though, as Boden explains, “tweaking is definitely the way forward, that is what the folk process was anyway. There is a tweak on ‘Fallow Ground’, actually, the last line on the Louis Killen version is ‘If she’s not true to me as I am to she, I’d rather she was lost than found’, which I was never quite comfortable with, because, for me, it ruins the song a little bit, as it has that little sting, so I changed it to ‘I’d rather I was lost than found’. That’s a very simple tweak. That’s your job actually, as an interpreter I think,” concludes Boden, “to make tweaks as you go and try to keep the songs evolving.”
Fallow Ground is released on 17th September on Hudson Records, a label that has developed into one of the most stimulating on the folk scene over the last few years. “It’s exciting,” notes Boden, “They’ve got a Hudson Club now (https://hudsonrecords.co.uk/club/about-hudson-club), so, there’s an increasing sense of artistic commonality between Hudson artists. I think that’s the way forward really, for the industry; small record labels that have a bigger life. They’re not just creating product, they’re creating a community. I think Hudson are ahead of the game with that. It’s also really nice working with people who live in the same city as you, because you can meet up for a beer to talk about stuff rather than go down to London! It’s great!”
Fallow Ground was recorded in March 2021, and it’s clear the duo had a wonderful time playing together. “The whole thing was really fun,” notes Spiers, “and it was relatively quick once we got together andcould do it in person. Musically, until you actually play it together it doesn’t work, you can never feel a groove over the internet.”
“It was such a great joy to be playing the tune sets in person”, adds Boden, “in fact Southwell Folk Festival (held on 5 September – review coming soon on Folk Radio), will be our first gig in front of an in-person audience for a long time.”
On that note, the focus is on the duo’s upcoming tour with a very special guest joining them, Lady Nade bringing her eclectic Americana folk to the mix.
“We’re really looking forward to touring,” says Boden, “we’ve never toured with a support before, so we’re just very excited to be touring with Lady Nade. We might even rope her in to sing the odd Spiers and Boden track!” “We’ll see if she’s up for it!” added Spiers.
Thirteen years has been a long time without the presence of one of the most exhilarating duos on the folk scene, and it’s a genuine pleasure to have the boys back together. Fallow Ground captures the duo at their very best, delighting in the vitality and thrill of English folk music and one that hints at, hopefully, better times to come.
“What I love about playing English music,” explains Spiers, “it’s always got a sort of perception of being weaker in terms of its connection to being a living music because it kind of died out between the wars, or just before the First World War. It’s always been institutionalised to some degree, you know, as soon as the Vaughan Williams thing caged it and put it into orchestral forms and stuff like that, but there’s enough of it underlying that you can still go back in and play it, I think, in the spirit most folk music was meant to be.”
Boden agrees, “I am glad that we’ve made an album of English traditional music that has a warmth to it, that I’m really pleased about. It feels a bit like reclaiming something from the shitstorm that was Brexit. Obviously in a tiny, tiny, small way, but for me, personally, it was quite big, actually. You know this music does exist outside of that, it can kind of rise above that.”
At the end of the day, it’s the music that matters. As we finish our chat, Spiers succinctly sums up the appeal of Fallow Ground both for the duo and hopefully their audience, “We’ve made some music that makes us happy, and we hope other people enjoy it as well. That’s all you can do!” I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Spiers and Boden’s Fallow Ground is released by Hudson Records on 17th September 2021, with a return to live touring from 5th September – 26th October 2021.
Spiers & Boden Fallow Ground Tour 2021
With Special Guest except* Lady Nade
SEPTEMBER
Sunday, September 5 – Gate to Southwell Festival
Tuesday, September 28 – St David’s Hall, Cardiff
Wednesday, September 29 – Mwldan, Cardigan
Thursday, September 30 – Redgrave Theatre, Bristol
OCTOBER
Friday, October 1 – The Regal, Tenbury Wells
Saturday, October 2 – Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham
Sunday, October 3 – Exeter Phoenix, Exeter
Monday, October 4 – Cheese & Grain, Frome
Tuesday, October 5 – Komedia, Brighton
Wednesday, October 6 – Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth
Friday, October 8 – Revelation, Ashford
Saturday, October 9 @ 11:00AM – The Spiers & Boden Festival (Full Day), Cecil Sharp House, London
Sunday, October 10 – Chipping Norton Theatre, Chipping Norton
Monday, October 11 – Nettlebed Village Club, Nr Henley on Thames
Tuesday, October 12 – The Corn Hall, Diss
Saturday, October 16 – Hartlepool Folk Festival, Hartlepool*
Monday, October 18 – Colchester Arts Centre, Colchester
Tuesday, October 19 – Cambridge Junction, Cambridge
Wednesday, October 20 – Pocklington Arts Centre, Pocklington
Thursday, October 21 – Manchester Folk Festival, Manchester
Friday, October 22 – The Live Room, Saltaire
Sunday, October 24 – Music Room, Liverpool Philharmonic (Matinee & Evening Show)
Monday, October 25 – Rheolwr Neuadd Ogwen, Bethesda, Bangor
Tuesday, October 26 – Canolfan Y Celfyddydau, Aberystwyth
Pre-Order Fallow Ground via Hudson Records: https://hudsonrecords.co.uk/product/spiers-boden-fallow-ground
Ticket links and more information via https://spiersandboden.com/
Photo Credit: Elly Lucas