Spiers & Boden return to Worthing with folk rarity - a “murder-free” album

As Jon says: “It was a long-planned reunion. It's something that we were always going to do and it was just coincidence that it happened at the same time as lockdown. We had been planning to do it for a while and the reason we didn't before was because Bellowhead had just got busier and busier. But it had always been the plan to come back.

"But also we needed a new album and that was another reason it took us a while. We had not made an album of new material for a while and then we did Fallow Ground. It took a long time but we're really pleased with it and it's certainly standing up to repeat performances. We did have a good feeling about it at the time, and we found that, almost without meaning to, we had made a very joyous album which I guess is actually what we were associated with but maybe less so in our own minds. We would be thinking ‘Oh, there is a lot of murder in that song!’ And that's the nature of doing traditional songs. They don't tend to be particularly cheerful but I think of all our albums this is the one where nobody actually dies so I think Fallow Ground is pretty rare for a folk album in that sense! And I think that's one of the reasons why I enjoyed it so much.”

Returning to the duo post pandemic, Jon senses that things are pretty much back to normal now: “On our previous tour I suppose it was difficult to compare because we hadn’t done it for a while but maybe numbers were just a little bit lower than what we’d been talking about beforehand but I do think that things are gradually picking up now. I think during the pandemic we were all consoling ourselves on the myth that once everything opened up there would be this huge boom of everyone coming back to music, and that really hasn't happened. I think it's just been a much more gradual return to the habit of going out and listening to live music. The thing is if you don't do it for a while it just doesn't occur to you to do it again and then once you have gone to one gig again, then you realise why you liked doing it but certainly getting back to it all has been a gradual process.”

There’s won’t be a new album just yet, though: “We used to be very much on that two-year cycle of making albums but I do think everything has changed. People just don't buy albums in the way that they used to.

"We're trying to work with that in mind. I'm certainly not saying that we will stop doing albums, but maybe you realise it's a bit of an artificial pressure to be thinking all the time that you've got to have an album every two years. Plus the fact we're still enjoying this one and people are still enjoying listening to it.”

Tickets online via https://wtm.uk/events/spiers-boden/