Steve Wickham is recognised as Ireland’s premier rock fiddler since the mid-1980s. His distinctive playing has been a major contribution to the Waterboys groundbreaking records over the years.  He will be performing at Wickham Festival 2022 on Friday 5th August with special guest Joe Chester.  You can expect musical mischief, songs and tunes from both their repertoires.

Steve became a member of The Waterboys in 1985 shortly after playing on their seminal album “This is The Sea”. He continues to tour and record with Mike Scott and The Waterboys. Writing songs and music has always been part of his musical life. He continues to explore new musical territory composing for Film and Theatre and other eclectic projects, such as a crossover suite of music with Sligo Baroque Orchestra and Congolese soukous band ‘Tropicana Musica’.

He has recorded and performed with U2, Elvis Costello, Sinead O’Connor, Bob Dylan, Sharon Shannon and many other artists in the worlds of rock and traditional folk music. He made his recording debut with U2 in 1982 on their break through album, War, playing on “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Drowning Man”.

Steve also writes and records with world music group NoCrows. The ‘Crows’ have released six albums to date and continue to tour extensively.

He composed the score for Tom Mc Intyre’s plays ‘The Midnight Court’ and ‘Caoineadh Airt O’ Laoghaire’, both performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. He also collaborated with Michael Harding on his plays ‘Bog Dances’ and ‘Sleeping a Lovesong’.

Steve scored the film ‘Witness to the Future’ (2016), and the documentary ‘Prisoners of the Moon’, both directed by Johnny Grogan.

Celebrating 30 years of touring the UK, The Saw Doctors will play four major concerts in London, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow at the end of this year. Before that they are performing at Wickham Festival on Friday 5th August 2022 in a UK Festival Exclusive. They haven’t played a UK Festival for almost 10 years so this is a real coup for us!

This will be the Irish band’s first visit to the UK in five years. Back in 2017 The Saw Doctors played sell out shows at London Shepherd’s Bush, Manchester Apollo and Glasgow Academy as part of a fifteen date UK tour.

“To quote John Belushi’s character Jake – ‘We’re putting the band back together’. What a relief it is to go playing live again after two years of Covid restrictions”
Leo Moran

Starting out playing in Galway pubs, The Saw Doctors were invited to tour with Mike Scott of The Waterboys, spending six weeks on the ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ tour in the UK in 1989. The Saw Doctors went from strength to strength when their second single ‘I Useta Lover’ spent nine weeks at Number One and became Ireland’s best-selling single of all time, outselling U2 and Sinéad O’Connor.

Over the years, The Saw Doctors have built up a reputation as an unmissable live band with sold out tours and an abundance of festival appearances, including Glastonbury & T in the Park. Famed for their unrelenting energy, a Saw Doctors live show is performed with as much passion and fervour today as at their small-town pub gigs 30 years ago.

“If The Saw Doctors could bottle the sort of bonhomie that can make an entire concert hall feel better, they would have the medicine show to end them all”
Paul Sexton, The Times

“The Saw Doctors are one of the great live bands”
Chris Evans

Blue Rose Code AKA Ross Wilson, appearing on Friday 5th August 2022, was formed and soon started to get rave reviews for early live performances. Through 2009 and 2010 Blue Rose Code shared the stage with many celebrated writers including Bert Jansch, Kris Drever, King Creosote, John Renbourn and James Yorkston.

The debut album, North Ten, was released by Reveal Records (home to Lau, Joan As Police Woman, Kris Drever, Roddy Woomble etc) a perfect fit for an artist’s who’s debut features legendary bassist Danny Thompson (Kate Bush, John Martyn, Talk Talk etc). The first single from the album, ‘Julie’ was released on January 28th 2013.  The ‘Julie’ E.P also features three exclusive non album recordings, including a cover of Gillian Welch’s ‘Everything Is Free’ (a song Blue Rose Code first aired live on a recent UK tour with label mates Lau).

The Mary Wallopers are a folk group from Dundalk, breathing new life into both well known & rare ballads. Travelling the length & breadth of the country singing & collecting songs, they exude a raw energy that could be described as the Clancy Brothers meet John Lydon.

“Isn’t there hope for the country with the mary wallopers in it”
Tommy Tiernan

“The Mary Wallopers’ trademark charm and irreverence is matched only by their staggering talent”
Hotpress

Not only will our Festival patron Johnny Kalsi be appearing with The Dhol Foundation on Saturday, he’ll also be doing a DJ Set on Friday August 5th 2022.

Back in 2019 the wonderful Johnny Kalsi of The Dhol Foundation and The Afro Celt Sound System agreed to be our first-ever Festival Patron. Johnny has performed at Wickham in several guises over the years and says he loves our Festival.

Johnny commented:
After being associated with Wickham Festival for many years, it’s an honour to become the first Patron/Ambassador of this Incredible family festival that has been voted the best Family Festival in the UK. I feel proud to wave the Wickham Festival Flag and I sincerely hope to uphold the reputation of the festival as the “Face of Wickham Festival”.

Yves Lambert is well known for his charisma and generosity on stage, and is considered a reference point when it comes to Québécois folk music. Certain Québécois critics even regard him as a guiding light on the whole subject of Québec’s cultural heritage. Through his long-time association with the band La Bottine Souriante, Yves Lambert was a founding member and pillar of the group from 1976 to 2002. For the past 40 years M. Lambert has been a driving force in giving traditional music the place that it deserves beyond the Québec and Canadian borders. From 2002 to 2021 Yves Lambert released 7 albums, earned 3 Album Traditional of the Year at ADISQ, Group of the Year at the 2008 Canadian Folk Music Awards and Singer of the Year at the 2010 Canadian Folk Music Awards. For his last release “Lâche moi l’tordeur” in November 2021, Alexandre Vigneault, Canadian journalist from La Presse, called him “a National treasure”.

In 2022 he was awarded the “Order of Canada” for his role in the revival, modernization and promotion of traditional French-Canadian music.

Martha Wainwright is beginning again … and we are more than delighted to welcome her to the Wickham Festival stage on Friday 5th August 2022!

The beguiling performer and songwriter returns with Love Will Be Reborn, out in August. Not since 2012’s Come Home to Mama has a Martha Wainwright record been so full of original written material. Wainwright’s fifth studio album follows recent years of loneliness and clarity in search of optimism and joy.

Wainwright wrote the first song—and what would become the title track— of the record a few years ago. It was a very dark time, she says, but the positivity and luminosity of “Love Will Be Reborn” signalled what was to come. The song simply poured out of her.

Much of Wainwright’s songwriting since 2016’s Goodnight City felt too raw. “There were several years where I picked up the guitar, and I was so, so sad and depressing. I would just put it down because I was terrible.” Before writing it out, or writing through it for catharsis, Wainwright had to live it. Album opener “Middle of the Lake” reinforces Wainwright’s path forward as she sings over voltaic chords and percussion, “I sing my songs of love and pain / Winds of change or simply singing, I’m singing in the rain.” Her work never shies away from an existential throbbing wound. “There are a couple major subjects on the record. From what I can tell, there’s really dark and then light,” she says,” It really is reflective of a very difficult period of divorce. Then, after that, it’s meeting somebody new and amazing. And so you hear certain songs about this new love.”

Wainwright enlisted Canadian producer Pierre Marchand for Love Will Be Reborn. “Hole In My Heart” is an upbeat song, with Wainwright singing, “I got naked right away when I saw you / My love was like the rain when I saw you,” as is the track, “Getting Older,” which is about aging and new love. Other songs, she says, “represent me trying to shake away the past a little bit, the ball and chain of that anger, try to escape from it.”

There is no song more gripping than “Report Card.” The song is stripped to essential instrumentals punctuating her anguish. Wainwright expresses on the sombre track a feeling of deep loneliness, evoking emotional nuances particular to parents and individuals separated from their children because of custody arrangements.

Martha Wainwright’s role as an artist has always been to embrace her wildness and sketch out her raw depth. This edge is what makes Wainwright uncompromisingly herself and continues to draw in an audience two decades on. To begin again does not mean starting over. This process of rebirth honours the past to move forward. Love Will Be Reborn captures Wainwright’s heart in transition. In an effort to rise out of some painful depths, as she says much like a phoenix from the ashes of an existential twilight, Wainwright bore witness to what her heart endured to find a new joy once more.

Maz O’Connor grew up in the wild Lake District of the Romantic Poets, studied literature at Cambridge and is now settled in East London. Her roots are in Ireland, and all of these diverse influences work together to make her songwriting something unique. Her exceptional voice provides the perfect vehicle for her powerful songs.

Maz spent her teenage years singing in folk clubs, and in 2014 was the recipient of a BBC Performing Arts Fund Fellowship (Adele was a previous recipient) which paired her as an emerging artist in residence with The English Folk Dance and Song Society. During this year she wrote, recorded and released her album ‘This Willowed Light’, which earned her a nomination for the BBC Radio 2 Folk Horizon Award and appearances at high profile festivals such as Cambridge Folk Festival, WOMAD and Glastonbury. The Guardian called it ‘folk album of the year thus far’.

Maz began to explore her own songwriting further, addressing themes of Millennial angst in her second album ‘The Longing Kind’, about which Songlines wrote: ‘There is an inquiring intelligence as well as an emotional sensibility at work here…she plays and sings beautifully *****’. She toured the U.K. and Europe, including opening for such artists as David Gray, Thomas Dybdahl and Rosanne Cash.

An EP of cover songs ‘The Undercover EP’ followed, a collection of some of her favourite songs by other artists, from Bob Dylan to Louis Armstrong, via Greenday. Accompanying shows included appearances at Henley Festival and How the Light Gets In, and a packed London’s Kings Place.

Alongside her own performances, Maz is also busy as a songwriter for special projects, commissions and theatre. She has been commissioned to write songs for UK Parliament and The Royal Shakespeare Company, and is now working on her own piece of music theatre.

Her background in folk continues to inform her storytelling and feminist themes are a constant in her work: from the song ‘Derby Day’, which she was commissioned to write about Emily Wilding Davison and the feminist re-telling of the creation myth ‘Mississippi Woman’ (both on her first album ‘This Willowed Light’), to the songs giving voice to women in portraits who have been silenced as muses (on her second album ‘The Longing Kind’).

She considers new album ‘Chosen Daughter’ – a collection of darker, story songs – a bigger, more concentrated feminist statement. The album was inspired by the stories of her female ancestors, grandmother-mother-daughter relationships, and ideas around female inheritance. It is not protest music, but a very personal album which explores, and celebrates, the feminine.

I doubt any of Bristol’s The Longest Johns ever imagined they would be able to get so far on just four voices.

Born out of a mutual love of traditional folk songs and shanties, they rock maritime songs alongside the more unusual and less traditional folk tunes.

In a few short years they have gone from singing sea shanties in a kitchen to International folk festivals, tours, TV appearances and gained a huge online following.

As the face of the 2021 sea shanty revival with their track Wellerman, the Johns are reaching millions of new fans all across the globe and showing them just how great these songs can be.

In seven years of existence, THE CELTIC SOCIAL CLUB has succeeded in imposing a sound, a style and a name on a well established Celtic music scene. With four studio albums and two live albums so far, They have crisscrossed stages, festivals and continents. These seven Franco-Irish troubadours continue to refine their elegant and daring reinterpretation of the traditions of Celtic music, blended with great amounts of rock energy, of pop harmony and folk melody.

The astonishing journey for this band began in July 2014 and was only meant to be a one off event at the Vieilles Charrues festival. The energy, the desire and the freshness, forged a band from an event. This meeting of adventurers, gathered around a name, THE CELTIC SOCIAL CLUB. A band with a cultural mission: to advance traditional music from Celtic cultures (Brittany, Ireland, Scotland, Asturias) by fusing them with rock, pop, folk and groove.

Organized like a guerrilla group , the collective pops up all across Europe, but may surface in Asia, and has been known to materialize in The United States, even showing up in Central Park, NYC. Having toured the world, The Celtic Social Club’s sights are set on The United Kingdom, which has a history of musical superiority and a lack of tolerance for French artists. The Pogues and the Clash have often been cited in an attempt to summarise the spirit of energetic and ambitious musical mash-ups. Taking the torch from these pioneers, The Celtic Social Club has gradually forged a new and stable path to original territory.

Their fourth album, DANCING OR DYING? was released on October 8th 2021. Irish singer, Dan Donnelly added his voice to his Breton counterparts: Manu Masko, Ronan Le Bars, Goulven Hamel, Pierre Stephan, Mathieu Péqueriau and Richard Puaud. They have levelled up their recording game over the last year and are keen to prove that with the new material, that love they will be a force to be reckoned with

Southern American folklore tells of song-catchers: individuals who possess a spiritual, almost supernatural, connection to the music of a culture. They gather important songs and preserve them, providing voices to give them life and ensuring they’re remembered.

Rumer is such a song-catcher. Songs written by the British singer, like “Slow” and “Aretha,” made her a worldwide million-seller but she also has an unerring instinct for the work of others. On Nashville Tears, Rumer immerses herself in the catalog of Hugh Prestwood, a songwriter whose name is spoken with reverence by his colleagues. An album to savor, Nashville Tears collects fifteen of Prestwood’s finest songs, many never recorded until now, revealing truths of the heart, both intimate and universal, realistic and romantic.

Andreas Tophøj and Rune Barslund are among the leading Danish traditional musicians of their generation.

Specializing in fiddle and accordion but also encompassing viola, whistle and vocals, they have married their roots in the Jutland peninsula with playing experiences from residing in Ireland, Finland and North America and encounters with musicians from other cultures to create original compositions that carry on the Danish tradition while looking out across the world.

Tours in Germany, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Finland have honed their communication skills as an entertaining and accomplished duo. An award for Track of the Year – for their The Danish Immigrant EP – and an Artist of the Year nomination at the Danish Folk Music Awards have acknowledged their musical ability and composing talents.

It is in live performances especially that these musicians shine, sharing music and stories that stay in audiences’ memories long after the last note has sounded.

As music fans we’re only ever given fragments of lives well lived, and we scrabble vicariously through them. Skinny Lister, though, have really given us as much as they can since 2009, passing the growing flagon of their experiences with every album and tour. They’ve led an endless parade gathering fans old and new, from the respected folk circuit to the riotous Download Festival, igniting pogoing mosh-pits at each. Over the past ten years they’ve travelled from rain-soaked London to the vast arteries of the USA, upgrading from narrow boat to Salty Dog Cruise, played huge tours across Europe and North America with Frank Turner, Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly as well as headlining themselves across festivals, sweatboxes and ever-larger venues.

After three albums taking confident steps into an ever larger world, their fourth offering, The Story Is… (produced and mixed by Barny Barnicott – Arctic Monkeys, The Enemy, The Temper Trap) takes the tales of the everyday, the minutiae of our lives, and turns them into potent pop that rings oh so true. Skinny Lister have opened their lives up more than ever before on this record, allowing us in and giving everyone a space to express joy, to deeply relate to the lines that strike a chord, and to throw ourselves into living with renewed abandon, hope, happiness and excitement, with stories enough to fill several lifetimes.

Steve Knightley (born 1954) is an English singer, songwriter and acoustic musician. Since 1992 he has been one half of possibly the UK’s most successful Folk/Roots duos – Show of Hands. His partner Phil Beer is widely regarded as one of the world’s finest acoustic multi-instrumentalists.

A constant throughout Knightley’s work is his ability to root his songs in geographical place, notably the West Country where he still lives. His gift for talking to people, listening to them and distilling the encounter into song is evident throughout his work; a talent that was highlighted in the Carlton TV documentary Stairway to Devon (2000) for which he toured the county talking to local craftsmen and performed a song inspired by those meetings at the end.

Informed by a love of folk ballads, Knightley writes historically accurate songs that resonate with contemporary meaning. He has an extraordinary ability to conflate time and space to bring history vividly, smack bang into the present. It’s an ability that fuels his reputation as an ‘issues’ writer. The seminal Country Life (the title track of Show of Hands’ 2003 album), earned him the moniker ‘The gravel voiced spokesman of the rural poor’ and a nomination for best song at the 2004 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.

The late, great Ronnie Lane’s band Slim Chance will be at the 2022 Wickham Festival on Friday 5th August 2022

Playing the songs of Ronnie Lane…

After leaving the Faces, Ronnie Lane formed his own band, Slim Chance.  They are a tight band of good friends, which has evolved around three original members of Ronnie’s band – Steve Bingham, Charlie Hart and Steve Simpson. They are now regularly joined by Brendan O’Neill, Billy Nicholls, and Geraint Watkins, and together they deliver a unique and entertaining show, both joyous and of a high musical calibre.

The Slim Chance extended family consists of a host of wonderful musicians whose contributions will always be greatly appreciated: Jim Cregan, Colin Davey, Alun Davies, Des Horsfall, Malcolm Hoskins, John Lingwood, Frank Mead, Nick Pentelow, Jim Russell, James Walbourne and Graham Walker.

Ronnie always jokingly claimed that he found the musicians for Slim Chance in the pages of Exchange and Mart. In 2010 Charlie Hart and Steve Simpson trawled the streets of South London and miraculously found three more ex-Slim Chancers who were all keen to sign up again to the quest for Ronnie’s musical holy grail. By gigging round the country the line-up has gelled into a fine band and become a powerful entity in its own right.

The aim is to create a show which celebrates the range of Ronnie’s later music: to take this show to people in village halls and clubs, festivals and theatres at home and abroad; and eventually, joined by numerous friends, to resurrect the Passing Show itself.