The Imagined Village and more for Molten Festival

eFestivals.co.uk, Wed 17th Sep 08

The new Molten Festival held in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham from Friday 26th September until Sunday 2nd November 2008 have announced the line-up for its Month of Sundays variety shows.

The Blockheads

The confirmed acts include The Blockheads, The Imagined Village, Norma Waterson, Martin Carthy & Chris Parkinson, Dr Das, She'Koyokh, Hui Ling, Trippplicate, Clare Teal, Shappi Khorsandi, Arthur Smith, The London Gypsy Orchestra, Afrikan Boy, Reginald D Hunter, Bantu African Orchestra, Barking & Dagenham Youth Dance, East London Chorus, Broadway Youth Theatre, Shafeek Ibrahim, and the students of Performing Arts at Barking College.

Sara Doctors, Molten Festival Producer, said, "The Month of Sundays present a unique combination of big name acts, quirky entertainment and top local talent. From Arabic dancers to folk stars, from stand up comedy to Klezmer bands, these Variety Shows are the most exciting line ups Barking and Dagenham has seen."

Tickets are priced at £17/£15 or £45 for all four shows for with a special Month of Sundays pass and can be purchased at The Broadway Theatre, Barking Box Office on 020 8507 5607 or booked online by clicking here.

Molten Festival also includes accessible arts activities, workshops, outdoor spectaculars, fireworks, giant mechanical birds, human Catherine wheels and bandstand music, street theatre and lots of free events.

All eyes are on Eliza

By Bill Francis, getbracknell, 15/ 9/2008

Eliza Carthy, the winner of two Mercury prize nominations and innumerable other accolades in her 15-year career, returns to the Concert Hall, Reading on Friday.

Eliza has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists including Paul Weller, the Wainwrights, Billy Bragg, Nick Cave and Joan Baez.

She also featured on vocals of this year’s BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards’ winning track Cold Haily Rainy Night by the Imagined Village, which picked up the award for Best Traditional Track.

A truly inventive and innovative singer and fiddle-player, Eliza is a gifted musical conceptualist confirming her position as, arguably, the most impressive and engaging performer of a generation and the winner of an unrivalled seven BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.

In 2003 she became the first traditional English musician to be nominated a BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music, for Anglicana. For her new album and the current tour, Eliza is accompanied by Willie Molleson on drums, Emma Smith on double bass and Phil Alexander (Salsa Celtica) on keyboards/piano accordion.

Eliza will showcase original material from her forthcoming album Dreams of Breathing Underwater, due for release via Topic Records in 2008. Powerful, vital and exuberant rhythms, absorbed from her travels around the globe, characterize this highly original, self-penned music.

Yorkshire-born and now Edinburgh-based, Carthy grew up immersed in the world of traditional music. She divides her time between touring and recording with her legendary parents, Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, and numerous pioneering solo and band projects.

Describing herself simply as a ‘modern British musician’, Eliza Carthy is only just beginning to reach the height of her musical powers. She has become one of the most dazzling and recognised folk musicians of a generation, having revitalised and made folk music relevant to new audiences, capturing the most hardened of dissenters with intelligent, charismatic and boundary-crossing performances.

- Tickets cost from £12 and the performance starts at 7.30pm.

For more information, call the box office on (0118) 960 6060 or log on to www.readingarts.com

Imagine there's a village...

By Stuart Thompson, Dewsbury reporter Published Date: 05 August 2008

Cambridge Folk Festival 2008

Martha Wainwright clearly isn't up to speed with the right apparel for a folk festival. Instead of the seemingly ubiquitous open-toed sandals, boots or flowered wellies beloved of just about everyone – on or off-stage – at the 44th Cambridge festival, she's opted for a fetching pair of silver stack slingbacks allied to garish pink stockings.

Of course, the crowd loves her dress sense – and loves too her splendid set which showcases her melodically memorable, and rockier than anticipated, songs. Strikingly beautiful was her cover of Pink Floyd's See Emily Play extra touching for the fact that its late composer, Syd Barrett, lived for many years as a recluse a mile from the festival site. Wainwright's Saturday night spot was just one of the highlights at an event whose line-up this year arguably bordered on the conservative, but was ultimately no less successful for that.

'Legendary' is a much over-used term in contemporary music, but it begs to be applied to New Orleans's Allen Toussaint. In a career of over 50 years as performer, producer and songwriter he has worked with just about everyone, and his languorous piano work shines on his own compositions, including a splendid 'Brickyard Blues', a song which should have helped to make a superstar of the great Frankie Miller in the mid-70s, but somehow didn't.

Saturday also saw excellent sets from American bluesman Eric Bibb, Canada's k.d. lang and, most impressively, from The Imagined Village, a multi-media project featuring, among many others, Billy Bragg, Martin and Eliza Carthy, and dhol drummer Johnny Kalsi. It's a celebration of the multi-ethnic pot-pourri that is contemporary English roots music, and it works – gloriously.

After 25 years, you know exactly what you're getting from Billy Bragg, but his solo spot still enthuses a crowd more than willing to accept his personal brand of power-pop polemic and humour, while on the Friday his Imagined Village cohort Eliza Carthy showed why she has been at the top of the English folk tree for well over a decade.

Also beloved of the Cambridge audience is flautist and piper Michael McGoldrick, who has appeared here over the years in countless bands. Now leading his own group, it's their superb playing which helps McGoldrick to truly soar into the 'world class' category.

Flying the flag for the southern hemisphere were Australia's The Waifs, the unexpected hit of this event in 2003 and back this year to show they have lost none of their winning ways with top tunes, beautifully played and sung.

Among the other stand-outs were Quebec's Mauvais Sort, a four-piece whose accordion-driven songs prove highly infectious, Dublin's Kila, who succeed in melding all sorts of world music influences into a glorious, danceable whole, and the quirkily memorable 6 Day Riot, a young band clearly going places.

Add on Sunday sets from the evergreen Joan Armatrading and Sheffield songster Richard Hawley, and it's clear that Cambridge is still getting it well and truly right.

Show of Hands hit the festival trail

By Nadine Bateman, Portsmouth today, 29 July 2008

They've been described by Peter Gabriel as 'one of the great English bands', and Jools Holland says their music is 'wonderful'.

Devon's Show of Hands – widely recognised as the finest acoustic roots duo in England – set off early on their UK festival season this year, and will have notched up appearances at no less than 26 events by the time the summer's over.

Just days after completing their UK spring tour singer songwriter Steve Knightley and multi instrumentalist Phil Beer headed to Kent for the Sweeps Festival in May - the first of a summer full of performances that ends at St Ives Festival in Cornwall on September 14.

As well as returning to favourite flagship festivals such as Trowbridge, Fylde, Sidmouth and Towersey they will make their debut at 14 others, including WOMAD last weekend.

Folk group performing live for church cash campaign

A Church fundraising campaign sees its latest event take place next week with outstanding folk group Sheelanagig performing live. Aslackby Church fundraising efforts have been going well with their Film on Friday series. But on Friday April 11 at 7.30pm Sheelanagig will play in St James' Church, as part of their extensive spring tour.

At the end of December 2008, the band was listed as one of the best five live gigs in The Independent. Their acoustic world folk style combines Western swing with Arabic melodies, and klezmer with Irish reels. The five strong band has two albums behind them, the most recent, Baba Yaga's Ball, recorded at Peter Gabriel's Real World studios.

Last year they played on the Avalon Stage at Glastonbury and will be there again this year. Their festival highlights include The Big Chill, Trowbridge, Shepley Spring Festival, Lamar Tree Festival and Broadstairs Folk Festival to name but a few. They play regularly in Scotland, Ireland, Denmark and Italy where they performed last year at the Ferrara International Buskers Festival - and now Aslackby church.