Queer Folk Showcase
We are absolutely thrilled to be collaborating with Queer Folk , who have curated a fabulous concert for us at Saltburn Folk Festival this year.
Queer Folk was created to amplify the voices of LGBTQIA+ performers, foster collaborations, and encourage the building of LGBTQIA+ community within the folk, roots, and traditional music scene.
They aim to raise awareness of LGBTQIA+ history - past and present - by highlighting queer narratives within traditional music, dance and story, and seek to encourage the creation of new music and art that reflects LGBTQIA+ experiences. They are committed to making this work inclusive, accessible and anti-racist.
They are doing fantastic work, so please do check out all of their advocacy and initiatives, as well as the individual work of the artists performing in this showcase:
Sophie Crawford (she/her) is a folk musician and performer from London. She recorded her debut album ‘Silver Pin’ in 2018 with Oliver Coates and her second album ‘People I Have Known’ in 2020. She played on the Grammy nominated album ‘Amelie the Musical’ in 2020 and toured with the show from 2019-2020. As an actor musician she was the first woman to play the Songwoman in ‘War Horse’ on the West End and has toured internationally with ‘Translunar Paradise’ with Ad Infinitum. She runs the Harrison Folk Singaround and the poetry and music night and podcast Patterned Ground.
George Sansome (he/him) is a folk singer and guitarist based in Leeds. His debut album was released in 2020 and was listed as one of Songlines magazine’s “Essential 10 Folk Albums of 2020”. George is a member of BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award nominees, Granny’s Attic, with whom he has performed across the UK and Europe for over 10 years. He performed in Mick Ryan’s 2019 folk opera, ‘Here At The Fair’, and guested (guitar and euphonium) on Pete Morton’s 2020 album, “A Golden Thread”. In 2020 he was invited by Janis Ian to record for her Better Times project.
Amy Thatcher is an accordionist based in the North East of England. Her 20+ years experience as a performer and composer in folk and traditional music has taken her to stages across the UK and beyond with the likes of Kathryn Tickell, The Shee andWe Are The Monsters. Amy’s most recent project, Amy Thatcher and Francesca Knowles, started in 2021 - the accordion and percussion duo breaks with tradition while adopting it as a foundation for playful experimentation. Their live show has both raucous energy and sympathetic intensity - drums, synths, keys and vocals, for an unapologetic brew of colourful composition. The March 2023 album showcases the pair's undaunted attitude to kicking off a genre revolution.
Effervescent folk played on a newly invented bagpipe. Hair tingling, philosophical and dance inducing melodies inspired by European folk traditions, humans, queerness and the universe.
Malin Lewis is a queer Bagpiper, fiddler, composer, instrument maker and BBC Young traditional musician of the year finalist 2022.
Malin premiered their New Voices commission ‘Halocline’ with a seven piece band at Celtic Connections 2023 to a sold out Strathclyde Suite, Royal Concert Hall. Halocline will become Malin’s long awaited debut album named for the layer between salt and fresh water Halocline is a sequence of compositions reflecting on the liminal spaces between Malin’s outer and inner worlds as a trans person.
Malin plays a set of unique self-made two octave Smallpipes that help create their unique sounds.
Recently Malin has been touring the UK with Making Tracks international Residency, Recording film music in Berlin, studying folk music in Helsinki and learning the tradition of the extinct Finnish Bagpipes as well as writing and performing music for ‘The strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart’ at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.
British Uruguayan folk singer Alex Etchart (they/them) mixes British, Irish & South American traditions with original writing to tell stories of queer love, diaspora dreams & intergenerational resilience, inviting audiences to sing along to spells that engender community joy & care.