Folk Police Recordings are very pleased to bring you the news that we will be reissuing The Minstrel's Grave, the third full length album from the wonderful Sproatly Smith. Originally available as a very limited edition CDR release from the Reverb Worship label, the reissue is remastered by Peter Philipson of the Woodbine & Ivy Band and will be available on CD and as a digital download.  

Out on 1st April 2012.

See Sproatly Smith live this summer:
June 10th Bristol, Folk House: Weirdlore, 
July 14th/15th Tintern, Folk On The Lawn
July 19th London, Cecil Sharp House
July 21st Prestiegne, Sheep Music

Walking, the latest Showcase Session is now available to download from form the Fatea website. This download is free and includes several tracks that are well worth listening to - not  least Katy Kay/Katie Cruel by Rapunzel & Sedayne and Blackthorn Winter by Sproatly Smith.

Do take the time to have a poke around the Fatea website whilst you're over there!

To download your copy, go to http://www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk/ 

Available until 30th April 2012.

We're very pleased to tell you that Folk Police have four nominations in this year's Spiral Earth awards: Oak Ash Thorn for best album, Elle Osborne for best female singer, The Woodbine & Ivy Band for best group and Rapunzel & Sedayne for best duo. The final winners in each category will be decided by public vote, so if you feel so inclined, please get over to Spiral Earth and cast yours: The 2012 Spiral Earth Awards. While you're there, do check out the site. It really rather good and they've been very supportive of Folk Police in our first year...

In other award-related news, FATEA Magazine (another website we urge you to support) have named The Woodbine & Ivy Band runner up album of the year and Elle Osborne second runner up female singer of the year. Yay!

Whilst we're blowing our own trumpet, the fRoots end of year Critics Poll named Rapunzel & Sedayne's Songs From the Barley Temple their 14th favourite album of the year and Oak Ash Thorn as their ninth favourite compilation or reissue.

A belated happy new year to you all!  xxx

The long awaited debut album from The Woodbine & Ivy Band is out on Monday 21st November. You can buy it from all the usual places or directly from our webstore. It's also available as a download from Bandcamp and all other digital retailers. Featuring guest vocals from Jackie Oates, Fay Hield, Nancy Wallace, Olivia Chaney, Pinkie Maclure, Jim Causley, Elle Osborne, Rapunzel & Sedayne, Jenny McCormick and Jim Causley, Folkwords have described it as "A landmark album that all folk rock devotees will want in their collections"

Meanwhile, Fay Hield, who sings lead vocals on the band's version of Spencer the Rover, is the featured artist at the latest Waking the Muse at the Proper Blog.

Spencer the Rover is now available as a digital single! You can download it from iTunes and Bandcamp.

Ahead of the release of the Woodbine & Ivy Band album, we're releasing the band's version of Spencer the Rover, featuring a lovely vocal from Fay Hield, as a digital single. It will be available from iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and all the usual suspects from 14th November. We'll also be making it available via our Bandcamp page.

We have the slightly grandiose notion that it would make a great Christmas hit single... and we reckon the last time there was a folk rock Christmas hit was way back in 1972 when Steeleye Span took Gaudete to No 14 in the UK charts (we're conveniently ignoring the Pogues' fantastic Fairytale of New York for the purposes of this story, of course). 39 years is, of course, far too long.

We've started a Facebook page to support the single, which you can find at http://www.facebook.com/Spencertherover. If you use Facebook, please 'like' the page, post a link on your wall and spread the word.

The album will be out on 28th November. More news on that to follow.

Thanks for reading. Please indulge our preposterous scheme!

Folk Police Recordings are very pleased to welcome Ewan D. Rodgers to the label. 

Ewan was brought up in a small Yorkshire town and currently lives in Brighton, where he has been performing regularly for the past year. Ewan is an accomplished, self-taught musician; his main instruments include guitar, 5-string banjo and diatonic accordion. Ewan lists British folk and blues players such as Davy Graham, Bert Jansch and Nic Jones as his main musical influences, however a closer listen to his performances reveal influences from as far away as the Appalachian Mountains, the sheep-stations of New South Wales and the Shtetls of old Eastern Europe.

The forthcoming album, Tomorrow Might be Monday, includes several original compositions as well as re-interpretations of traditional French and Eastern European folk songs performed on Diatonic Accordion, guitar and musical saw. In addition to his studio recordings, Ewan's live performances continue to provide stripped down folk and blues, old-time banjo and the odd disgruntled sounding rag.

If you're quick you can catch him at the Green Door in Brighton this Wednesday 14th September supporting the mighty Otis Gibb.

Ewan D. Rodgers website

Folk Police Recordings are very pleased to welcome the wonderful Jack Blackman to our world. Jack is a Midlands-based singer, songwriter and phenomenally good finger picking guitarist. His style is influenced by the folk guitar giants (Jansch, Renbourn, Graham, Carthy et al) and the country blues pickers (Son House, Charlie Patton, Blind Blake, Gary Davis), but he manages to transcends these influences to create something that's truly his own. He's been playing for seven years, ever since he found his dad's old Jedson Telecaster copy in the attic when he was ten, and over the past three years has been gaining a reputation as an excellent live performer, playing regular gigs and festival slots up and down the country - which has included being invited to share stages with various luminaries of the British blues and rock scenes - as, of course, befits a Midlander.

Look out for Jack's first full length album, River Town, from which the featured track Stranger is taken, due for release this Autumn - and visit our live page for details of where you can see Jack playing.

Sedayne writes:

Each year we do a special one-off free show as part of the Fylde Festival - same time, same venue (The Mount Hotel, 3.00pm on the Saturday). This year, on the back of Folk Police's OAK ASH THORN CD and other things Bellamist, we thought it might be both pertinent & proper to celebrate Peter Bellamy's Kipling settings in a sequence which includes new arrangements alongside approximations of some of the classic recordings of yore in Folkish All-Live Stars-In-Your-Eyes Style...

For example, everyone who has covered A Tree Song (everyone from Badger in the Bag to The Unthanks indeed) has taken it at a reflectively wistful pace quite unlike PB's rollicking original which he fashioned in the manner of a rousing Wassail. Naturally (even though we're fans of both BitBag and TU) we've gone for the Wassailing. We've also used PB's classic power-trio arrangement of The Liner She's A Lady as the basis of something at least analogous to the original. And whilst Sedayne's rough fiddling is not even in the same league as Chris Birch, Ross's canny anglo more than makes up for it and Rapunzel's banjo gives it a necessary sparkle - but the chorus is the crux of the thing and in field-tests so far it's gone down a storm. Indeed, we hope to inspire a fair bit of joining in - lots of opportunities for fulsome choruses, not least on Frankie's Trade and Mandalay.

We're doing this very much for the Love of it, and in the spirit of this we've opened a Soundcloud page on which we'll eventually be featuring all of our covers of the Kipling:Bellamy canon - each with notes, lyrics and a suitable illustration, and all of them Freely Downloadable. So far, there's 9 up there, with the rest following on in the coming weeks. Don't expect anything too slick, although with a fair wind they do the job quite nicely - and come the gig we'll have them burnished to a homely sheen allowing for other commitments Fylde-wise & elsewhere. So please, check it out & hopefully see you soon in Fleetwood on a five-knot tide with the forts a firing...

http://soundcloud.com/earthboundkiplingbellamy

Bellamy: Kipling with the Tradition

 Ron Baxter (MC & swoonsome croonin)
Ross Campbell (singing & assorted anglos)
Rachel 'Rapunzel' McCarron (singing, guitar, banjo & drum)
Sean 'Sedayne' Breadin (singing, fiddle, citera & kaossilator)

Saturday 3rd September, 3.00pm
The Mount Hotel, Fleetwood.

Admission Free

No, not all of them together, lovely as that would be... We have two new albums out in September - Mancunian folk electronica trio Harp and a Monkey's self titled debut on the 12th, closely followed by Fleetwood's skewed trad duo Rapunzel and Sedayne's Songs From The Barley Temple  on the 26th. You can  pre-order both albums from the Folk Police web store and listen to samples from Rapunzel and Sedayne's album here and Harp and a Monkey's album here. From September, you'll also be able to buy the albums from your local record store and the usual online sources and as downloads from iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and so on. Both albums are already starting to pick up great reviews. Folkwords write that Harp and a Monkey "make each unrestrained song a perceptive portrait of memory, reminiscence, hope and expectation... a realm populated by strange sounds, mordant observations, ghostly images, caustic serenity and pitiless parables. The result is inspired musical imaginations, restless melodic storytelling and expansive horizons." Meanwhile, Spiral Earth write, "Songs From The Barley Temple weaves it way through trad and original numbers with a soft intensity and a tidy amount of darkly disparate methodology... New life is breathed into ancient verse once more. So much more than just keepers of the flame, this is living and breathing folk art".

Pre-order from the Folk Police web store.

We are very pleased to welcome Brighton's Foxpockets to the world of the Folk Police. The band create a woozy, enchanting and slightly scary melange of otherworldly sounds - one part sea chantey, one part re-imagined early music and one part psychedelic folk. Think of the Incredible String Band lost in the Wildwoods, singing about the things that lurk unseen in hedges... 

We'll be reissuing Foxpockets' very limited edition mini-album, The Albatross and the Coracle, later this summer, with new recordings to follow in 2012. The band are about to embark on a mini tour of Wales (see live page for details) with further gigs to follow. 

And can we nominate banjo player Sam Tetley as the man with the best folk name of 2011?

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