Charlie Wheatley will release his new album Live at the Chapel on 22nd September 2026, self-released on CD and vinyl. The first single, a live set featuring Bristol Sailorman, Lemmie Brazil’s, and Y Washael, arrives today, 7th July, along with a live video.
The album is the first instalment in a three-part series built around folk manuscripts from the British Isles, reworked through arrangement, composition and live performance. Wheatley’s plan runs across biannual concerts in different London venues: each one is recorded, and that recording becomes the source material for the next. Tunes are expanded, rearranged and threaded together with newly uncovered archival melodies and his own writing, until the project grows into a collection of 40 pieces. Some are traditional; others he composes close to the language of the older forms, so the join between archive and invention is deliberately hard to find.
“I’ve become increasingly interested in the idea of folk music not as something fixed or preservable, but as something that continues to change through use,” Wheatley says. “This project is a way of letting that happen in public — allowing each performance and recording to reshape the material, so the music keeps moving between past and present.”
Live at the Chapel was recorded live at Stone Nest, the former Welsh chapel on Shaftesbury Avenue. Wheatley plays guitar alongside Tom Wheatley and Nina Harries, both on double bass, with Tom Moore on viola. The pairing of two double basses gives the record a deep, resonant floor, and the music holds traditional dance tunes against devotional song, drone and minimalism. Conor MacMahon recorded the performance; Tom Moore handled mixing and mastering. An album launch party takes place at The Boathouse in Wapping.
https://www.charliewheatley.com