Help us to stage another amazing virtual folk festival on Spring Bank Holiday Monday – 25th May – and give your support to musicians who’ve lost their livelihoods during the coronavirus lockdown.
Source: Folk on Foot Front Room Festival 2
Fairport’s Cropredy Convention three-day open-air music festival announce the full line-up of acts appearing at this year’s event.
Fairport’s Cropredy Convention three-day open-air music festival will celebrate its fortieth anniversary this year. Below you can read the full line-up of acts appearing at this year’s event. Over three days (8, 9 and 10 August) Cropredy will present more than thirty hours of live music to an audience of up to 20,000 festival-goers.
Headline acts for 2019 include The Waterboys (Thursday), Frank Turner (Friday); and host band Fairport Convention (Saturday).
Other major acts include Gogol Bordello on Thursday, Seth Lakeman (Friday) and Richard Thompson (Friday).
See the FULL Lineup at: Fairport’s Cropredy Convention – Full Line-up Announced | Folk Radio
Frank Turner’s ‘Be More Kind’ is a return to political topics for the veteran folk-punk artist. Read the NME review
England kept his bones, now Trump wants to watch them burn. For a good five years Frank Turner has largely steered clear of politics in song, having dug into folk history to explore “the English identity” on 2011’s ‘England Keep My Bones’, and subsequently been dubbed a mini-Morrissey for discrediting the left and aligning himself with libertarianism (after numerous death threats, he later clarified his political position as “classic liberal”). Following two Turner albums of personal exorcism – 2013’s exquisitely broken ‘Tape Deck Heart’ and 2015’s redemptive ‘Positive Songs For Negative People’ – the barricade against right-wing opinion that he once mischievously kicked at has broken, and the world has spun a dark enough dance that even the soapbox-averse Turner feels urged to musical arms. He spends his seventh album considering the dire state of the world from multiple angles and, unlike the tidal wave of terrified tin-pot politics plonked incongruously in the middle of every alt-rock album for the past eighteen months, he even proffers some tentative answers. Continue reading
If that seems an unusual thing to say for an artist who shot to prominence with the anthem ‘Thatcher F***ed the Kids, it was and still is — but there are signs the Englishman has mellowed.Having shied away from political music in favour of ‘matters of the heart’ on his most recent records, his latest single Sand in the Gears jumps headfirst into that territory.Inevitably inspired by the political instability across much of the western world the past year, the released version of the track was recorded in ideal circumstances.Without planning, Turner and his band found themselves in Washington the night before Donald Trump’s inauguration – the perfect backdrop for an anthem that tears equal strips off the reactionary right and radical left.Turner told Something for the Weekend: “We spent most of the last year in the US, in particular over the summer when the presidential campaigns were in full swing.“I was toying with the song over Christmas and then in January we landed back in the States a couple of days before the inauguration [ . . . ] More: English folk singer Frank Turner talks about his music upsetting left wing Americans
