Category: Uncategorized

All Smiles Tonight – Poor Creature (reviewed by The Guardian): Teleology – Peggy Seeger (interviewed by The Guardian and BBC Oxfordshire); Auchies Spikkin’ Auchie – Grace Stewart Skinner (featured on BBC Scotland); Curlew’s Cry – Barry Kerr; Teeth of Time – Joshua Burnside; Shimli – Cynefin (reviewed by The Guardian); Tomorrow Held – Spafford Campbell; Turnstone – Gigspanner Big Band (reviewed by Unicorn Folk) & Varipasi – Edith WeUtonga

There is some encouraging early news about Cambridge Folk Festival 2026 and Frank Turner, Suzanne Vega and Richard Thompson with Zara Phillips have been announced as the headliners. It seems that there is a plan to have more events taking place in Cambridge itself around the time of the festival and tickets go on sale on Wednesday 3^rdDecember at 10am. More information can be found on the festival website HERE.

We are fast approaching the festive season and St Agnes Fountain will be on the road again in December (see Gigs & Tours Listing on the main Unicorn Folk website) though you will be lucky if you can get tickets for most of the gigs which are already sold out including our most local venue Hitchin Folk Club. To compensate you can listen to their just released new album, Flakes & Flurries, on Spotify though at the time of writing it didn’t seem to be quite yet available on the St Agnes website.

On the subject of festive gigs, the Unicorn Diary has just been updated to include 40 plus gigs which are taking place in the region, and a little further afield, during December. If you would like yours included as a FREE listing in the Unicorn Diary then just email info@unicornfolk.uk with the details. The Diary will be updated soon for the new year so any details/listings of events at clubs and other venues will also be very welcome.

Three of those festive gigs involve a combination of Honey and the Bear & Kyson Point performing under the title of Wintersong (see Featured Events on the main Unicorn Folk website) and I have been quite impressed by the latter’s new debut album Underwater Sky. You can hear a couple of tracks from that album on the latest Filby’s Folk podcast which I hope to complete and have loaded under Podcasts on Unicorn Folk by the end of today or Monday 1^st December at the latest. The following edition of Filby’s Folk coming mid-December will be a Christmas edition and feature some of the best ‘folky’ Christmas songs you are likely to hear anywhere.

In the meantime do consult the Unicorn Diary in the top menu Listings on the main Unicorn Folk website and enjoy the festive gigs at your local clubs and venues.

Since the last blog I have reacquainted myself with one of my favourite bands, Blowzabella, and I have done so by attending one of their concerts for the first time since the early nineties before the children came along to interrupt my regular folk clubbing. The concert was everything that I would have hoped for and was also my first visit to Cecil Sharp House which seems to have eluded me all this time despite living in London for many years.

You can read a review of the concert HERE on Unicorn Folk and I would recommend that you go and see Blowzabella whilst you have the chance as the band plan to disband in 2028 on their fiftieth anniversary – and none of us are getting any younger!

I have also been listening to a variety of new music recently including the new album from Elizabeth and Jameson, Way Out West, which I promised to review in the last blog and it’s a good illustration of the range of their music which can be witnessed in concert on a regular basis in the Unicorn Folk region but also nationwide on their current tour. You can find details of that in the Featured Events section on the home page of Unicorn Folk as you can their gig in Royston later this month and can read the review of the album HERE.

Another relatively new collaboration between Seb Stone, Matt Quinn and Lizzy Hardingham resulted in the traditional harmony singing trio called Culverake who are beginning to make a name for themselves and have recently brought out a new album called Unto The Sky which can certainly be recommended.

I have also been listening to Mikey Kenney’s new album, his fourth, called Tiny Little Light, which the press release describes as the “… culmination of ten years of attempting to create harmony between the two sides of his musical personality; the experimental, psychedelic, freak-folk, alternative singer-songwriter and the informed, rooted and academic traditional fiddle player.” It is certainly an eclectic album but I am finding that it does repay more listening. You can listen to a track or two from the album on the latest edition of Filby’s Folk also available from today and the first since Sunday 17th August owing to my involvement with and recovery from Royston Arts Festival which took place in September. There are also tracks to listen to from Blowzabella, Culverake and Elizabeth & Jameson, all mentioned above, along with some from the UK Folk Album Charts, together with tracks from a currently available bargain CD from Fairport Convention, a live recording from their 2017 Cropredy Festival.

Elsewhere on the main Unicorn Folk website you will find there have been a few changes so that the main menu system is a bit more logical and, of more importance to advertisers, there is a new price list which offers significant reductions and makes it much more cost effective for cash-strapped folk clubs and festivals to advertise.

If you are a folk fan then you can plan all your festive folk activities in this region by using the Unicorn Diary. If you are organising folk events do let Unicorn Folk know if we have missed anything and you would like to have your event listed for FREE in the Diary – just email the details to info@unicornfolk.uk.

It’s been a while since the last blog but Royston Arts Festival and the necessary aftermath of checking invoices, gathering feedback, holding a post-festival review and thanking participants is now pretty well done and dusted. Longer term, three podcasts came out of the arts festival, the first a preview of the arts festival itself containing a fair amount of music from various artists taking part. The second focused on the festival concerts taking place in 2025 with particular emphasis on Tin Giants, Bird In The Belly and USA duo Hungrytown. The third features many of the artists which took part in Royston MusicFest over the last ten years including The Trials of Cato, Katie Spencer, Thursday’s Band, Chris Fox, Black Scarr and a host of other luminaries on the regional folk scene.

All three podcasts can be found HERE on Unicorn Folk under the heading ‘Specials’ in the index page to the Filby’s Folk podcasts and the MusicFest podcast can also be found on the Royston MusicFest website where you can also find 5 concert videos filmed for the 2020 online only (Covid-affected) festival. I plan to start adding to the catalogue of Filby’s Folk podcasts very soon but from now on will do so on a more irregular, rather than a weekly basis, primarily when I think I have a good number of songs from new albums to intersperse with more traditional folk and folk rock music.

The title of this blog, an old Kink’s number, is explained in the fact that an almanac is a regularly published listing, sometimes actually a calendar containing information, but in this sense refers to the Unicorn Diary which has just been updated to include gigs in this region from October to the end of December, so providing a source of reference when planning your festive folk activities. Despite being most of the way through October already there are still 94 gigs listed between now and Christmas, and as usual, the Diary can be found with the other Listings on the main Unicorn Folk website.

Rather than pick out a few local gigs of interest I will let you find them by consulting the Diary and instead draw attention to some other stuff of interest. Elizabeth & Jameson have a new album Way Out West which they are promoting with a tour and you can catch them at Baldock Folk Club tomorrow evening or, if that’s too short notice, at Royston Live on Thursday 27^th November. I hope to be reviewing the album soon but it’s always a good evening listening to those two and you can see their tour details in the (newly rechristened) ‘Featured Events’ section of Unicorn Folk.

Veteran folk rockers, or ‘frockers’ as I suppose they might call themselves, Fairport Convention are out on the road again for their Autumn Tour before they temporarily split up to join their various Christmas bands. The link to their tour details can also be found in the ‘Featured Events’ section of Unicorn Folk.

Do have a look at the new ‘Featured Events’ section of Unicorn Folk which you will find contains posters for a couple of charity fundraisers and Unicorn Folk is always happy to support this type of folk related event free of charge.

There is a new Review of a Ninebarrow concert that I went to recently to read HERE and, although not writing an official review, I am looking forward to visiting Cecil Sharp House this coming Saturday 25^th to see Blowzabella in concert for the first time in a long while. They are on a short tour at the moment covering just a few dates a link to which can be found in the Gigs & Tours Listing on the main Unicorn Folk website.