Gigspanner Big Band talk about their new album, Turnstone, revealing an insight into an album that exists in a tradition of sprawling and inclusive experimentalism and where variation and difference are celebrated and encouraged.
Gigspanner Big Band’s ‘Turnstone’ is a great example of how traditional song can provide a template for exciting new musical discovery. It’s also a career-defining release from one of folk’s most powerfully creative groups.
If you’re seeking music that beautifully honours the traditions of this season, look no further than Jackie Oates & John Spiers’ “A Midwinter’s Night”, in which they carry these cherished traditions with inspiring grace.
Spiers & Boden have announced their Spring Tour dates for 2025. Watch them performing ‘Bluey Brink’, a strange tale…as Boden told us, “Such a weird type of hero, sheep shearing and drinking acid. Brilliant!”
Bellowhead founders and frontmen Spiers and Boden have announced a Spring Tour for 2024, something any folkie should find impossible to resist. They reunited in 2021 for Fallow Ground, “a genuinely warm-hearted, exuberant, and life-affirming album”.
Don’t miss Gigspanner Big Band and Raynor Winn’s live dates this month for their Saltlines project. Jackie Oates will be joining them as she steps in to cover for Hannah Martin whilst she takes maternity leave.
Saltlines is a massive, ambitious and highly unusual project; the fact that it feels perfectly judged at every moment is down to the sheer excellence of Gigspanner Big Band’s musicianship and the touching, clear-eyed nature of everything Raynor Winn writes or speaks. It is a constant delight.
Taken from Saltlines, the new show and collaborative project from The Gigspanner Big Band and author Raynor Winn, listen to Ten Thousand Miles and read John Spiers’s personal insight into the song collected by Cecil Sharp. Saltines is on Tour in July.
Filmed in the late summer of 2021 in a field near the Gate To Southwell Folk Festival, watch John Spiers and Jon Boden performing Bailey Hill / Wittenham Clumps from their latest album ‘Fallow Ground’. The duo are on tour in June.
We interview Peter Knight and John Spiers about their new album, Both in a Tune, the excitement of free improvisation, comparing playing to 90 minutes playing as a midfielder and the beauty of being lost in a tune.
Peter Knight & John Spiers’ ‘Both in a Tune’ is effortlessly impressive and sublimely performed…innovation, experimentation and improvisation at its very best. By the end this year it will surely still be in the minds of many as one of the best of 2022.
We chat to John Spiers and Jon Boden (our Artists of the Month) about their new album Fallow Ground that finds them reunited and revelling in the sheer fun of music-making rooted in the English folk tradition.
