Brothers Brad and Phil Cook and friend Joe Westerlund met at a high school jazz camp in Wisconsin, before moving to North Carolina and forming the band DeYarmond Edison. After fellow member Justin Vernon left to find solo success as Bon Iver, the trio regrouped as Megafaun, mixing rich, three-part harmonies, banjo-twanging Appalachian folk and [...]

Abi Bliss meets the pitch-perfect post-folk Lancastrian

“So long as I can remember I’ve always had tunes going round in my head. And then when I got older, it made sense to make sense of those noises, to put them out in some kind of form, because I always used to just hum constantly and not [...]

Ralph McTell takes Simon Heptinstall by the hand

He wrote and sang one of the best-known British folk songs of all time, has been a pivotal figure in British folk for 45 years and was one of the main reasons I took up playing guitar as a teenager (the other was inevitably to do with girls). [...]

Hazel Davis meets the baffling, bonkers force behind Gandalf Murphy

Joziah Longo, or Joziah Of The Circus as he signs himself, is a hard one to pin down. Not in person – he’s surprisingly amenable – but as a performer. The bandname – Gandalf Murphy And The Slambovian Circus Of Dreams – is tricky enough to [...]