November Edition
Hello Whenever I return from a good well organised and busy festival and ponder on what I enjoyed the most, I'm always surprised at what springs to mind first. To be perfectly honest it's rarely the festival headliner and often it's not even the band or artist I was initially most looking forward...
October Edition
Hello The closing few hours of September were spent in the company of North East singer/guitarist Johnny Dickinson, who had been coaxed out of enforced retirement (due to ill health) by Jonti Willis, the organiser of the Roots Music Club in Doncaster. Johnny has been pretty much out of action for...
September Edition
Hello The September edition of the Northern Sky Vaults radio show/podcast - I'm still uncertain what to call it - centres around last month's 52nd Cambridge Folk Festival, featuring music by some of the artists who performed over the weekend. I've been delivering reports from the festival for a...
August Edition
Hello I predicted some time ago that the August edition of the Northern Sky Magazine would be slightly late due to the fact that so much was happening in July. The month began with the Moonbeams Festival up on the East Yorkshire Wolds, which saw appearances by Treacherous Orchestra, RURA and CoCo...
July Edition
Hello Just as we were coming to terms with the loss of Guy Clark last month, June began on an equally sorrowful note when the news came of the passing of Dave Swarbrick, one of the legendary figures in British folk music. Everyone has their own particular Swarb tale to tell, with some more...
June Edition
Hello I first became aware of the Texan singer-songwriter Guy Clark in the mid-1980s when a friend, Mick Swinson, invited me over to plunder his impressive and eclectic LP record collection during a recording session. It wasn't really so much a case of me choosing the LPs, rather a case of Mick...
May Edition
Hello By the time the May edition goes out, together with this month's Northern Sky Vaults radio show, I will probably be on my way to the Wath Festival, which takes place each May Day bank holiday weekend. Over the years I've become personally involved with the festival in various guises; either...
April Edition
Hello A month is a long time in music and fitting everything into a single 90-minute radio show is proving to be slightly difficult. However, it's rather liberating to hone in on what I consider to be the most important aspects of the month in terms of album releases, interviews, concerts and gigs...
March Edition
Hello One of the personal highlights for me in February was to catch the St Petersburg-based six-piece band Otava Yo on their first UK tour, who took audiences by surprise with their almost tongue-in-cheek performances. The band arrived in Sheffield midway through their eleven-date tour complete...
February Edition
Hello One month on from my decision to make Northern Sky a monthly review magazine with an accompanying radio show (also monthly), things seem to be working very much in our favour. Rather than being swamped with weekly (and sometimes daily) updates, our regular readers/listeners can just pay us a...