Manchester’s finest folk-hip-hop troubadour is to spread his sweetness on telly boxes all over the country tonight with a folkumentary on Channel M.
The fly-on-the-wall documentary is part of the series ‘Hitting Home’ produced by students at Salford University.
It’s been a tough weekend here at FFS HQ, but through bitterly fought arguments, desperate whittling down and some pretty poor attempts at using maths to help us choose, the FFS Schmercury shortlist for 2009 is ready for your listening pleasure.
As many of you will know, Alessi Laurent-Marke, able captain of Alessi’s Ark, does much more than writing scintillating, magical folk songs. She’s the worthy purveyor of a delectable variety of handmade and lovely things via her blog, and she’s rather keen on having a scribble with the ol’ felt tips.
After five years in the wilderness, Kings of Convenience have finally announced the details of their new album, Declaration of Dependence, which is due for release in the autumn.
Mancunian rocker Liam Frost has enlisted Martha Wainwright to enhance and adorn a track on his upcoming album, We Ain’t Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain (after legendary beat poet Charles Bucowski). The Duet, entitled ‘Your Hand in Mine’ is available as a free download here, and gives listeners a thrilling sneak preview of the album, which is due out on September 28th.
We at FFS are not impressed with the Mercury Prize nominations this year. Not one bit. So we’ve decided to create our own: The FFS Schmercury Prize. And cos we’re not jingoistic types we’re allowing artists from the WHOLE world.
For Folk’s Sake have teamed up with Yellow Bird, which asks indie artists to design t-shirts for charity, to offer two FFS readers the chance to win a t-shirt by their chosen band.
Artists involved in the project include Bon Iver, The New Pornographers, The Magic Numbers, The Shins and Au Revoir Simone.
FFS first became aware of First Aid Kit thanks to the YouTube video of their beautiful cover of Fleet Foxes’ ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, which has been seen over half a million times. Following on from its success Johanna and Klara have decided to recording a series of covers suggested to them by their Twitter followers.
Ivor Novello nominees and all-round nice chaps The Leisure Society have signed to Full Time Hobby.
The record label announced this week that they’ll be rereleasing TLS’s lovely album The Sleeper as a double CD pack on 5th October. The second disc will be an eight track EP consisting of B-sides and demos including the band’s cover of Cars by Gary Numan, which they played at the Wilkommen Collective’s Union Chapel show.
Organisers of the lovely Bloom Festival have announced a change of venue for 2009, and the weekend-long event will now be held at Chepstow Racecourse.