Annemarie Kropf is bowled over

As someone with no children, I can only imagine that the first few weeks after giving birth would be full of sleepless nights, lots of head scratching, and many attempts to bathe myself. For Kate Rusby, three months after giving birth to daughter Daisy meant a December UK tour to promote [...]

The Unthanks get a folkingcool reprieve

This isn’t the review I expected to write. Not yesterday, and definitely not at 10 o’clock tonight when I had tears in my eyes and insufficient breath in my lungs to sustain uprightness. I’d been all but floored by a Ewan MacColl number of staggering beauty that really showcased what [...]

For some reason I fished out Beth Rowley’s 2008 album Little Dreamer earlier. I didn’t like it much when it came out, consigning it to the pile of what fellow folkingcoolite Stephen Taylor calls Hootenanny (that is, music especially written for appearance on Jools Holland). But I put it on anyway cos I was in [...]