Oysterband
21.30 - 21.30 - 22.45

Oysterband:   Classic songs from every era of a long and mighty career.

Oysterband, the 5-times BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-winning outfit that brought passion, power and not a little poetry to folk and roots music, enter their fifth decade as vital and creative as ever, with some of the finest songs in the modern folk canon to their name:  Put Out The Lights; When I’m Up (I Can’t Get Down); Blood Wedding; Everywhere I Go; The Oxford Girl; Granite Years; Native Son; A River Runs…..these and many others from their vast back catalogue will feature as they embark on another year of international touring and festivals.

Theirs has been a unique and fiercely independent career.  Oysterband still play with that spirit of the punk ceilidh band that roared through people’s lives all those years ago.   But the growing depth and sensitivity of their songwriting, coupled with the strength of John Jones’ voice and their remarkable musicianship, have lifted their music into a richer, more acoustic era.

Their occasional collaboration with folk diva June Tabor has produced two cult-classic award-winning albums, Freedom & Rain and Ragged Kingdom.  The latter and their hugely influential album Holy Bandits were voted nos. 4 and 5 among the Ten Best Albums of the last 30 years by the public in a poll by fRoots Magazine in 2016.

Oysterband are:

John Jones  -  voice, melodeon

Alan Prosser  -  guitars, voice

Ian Telfer  -  violin, keyboard, voice

Al Scott  -  bass, mandolin, voice

Adrian Oxaal  -  cello, guitar, bouzouki, voice

and the newest member, formerly of Bellowhead,

Pete Flood  -  drums, percussion, voice

After 45 years on the road, the legendary Oysterband are calling time, and, as they say, put it, they are hanging up their travelling shoes. If you’re going to call time, you may as well do so with a big splash, and I’m pretty sure that news of Oysterband and June Tabor reuniting for a tour is enough to excite fans.

Aptly named “A Long Long Goodbye”, Oysterband will revisit some of their favourite haunts to perform a career-spanning set, including highlights of their collaborations with their longstanding creative compadre June Tabor. Alongside an appearance at this year’s Cambridge Folk Festival, the band will head out on a string of seven shows alongside June Tabor this October (details below).

In a statement about the upcoming tour, Oysterband said:

“We’re hanging up our travelling shoes, but we’re taking a year or so to say goodbye to our lovely live audience.  And we mean to enjoy every minute! It’s been a long, tough, joyful journey, but the time has come. In the words of our own song “Granite Years”, we’re waving you a long, long goodbye… Come help us celebrate!”

Their collaboration with June Tabor in 1990 produced the cult favourite album Freedom & Rain, and it was renewed 21 years later for Ragged Kingdom’ one of the best-selling folk-rock albums of the new millennium. The album opened to Bonny Bunch Of Roses, which our Neil McFadyen described as galloping from the speakers like a messenger from the battlefield, giving us the first hint of the vocal explorations and engaging arrangements on offer. On that album, they also featured a cover of Joy Division’s masterful swansong, Love With Tear Us Apart. In our 2012 interview, John Jones told us:

“It was a song we’d wanted to do for some time. There’s a thread of Oysterband listening that’s outside of its own evolution, that’s into Tom Verlaine and Television, the Velvet Underground, a dark, hard, driven music that we’d also heard in Joy Division. We don’t play that music [live] but we like it. Just as we recorded Love Vigilantes by New Order, you hear something … something beautiful, bittersweet.”

A Long Long Goodbye - Announcement   https://youtu.be/Uo64Rl7JaMc

Website:  https://www.oysterband.co.uk/