Bellowhead: 'It’s such a joyous experience being onstage'
Bellowhead were one of the most successful bands to have sprung out of English folk music in the 21st century, winning numerous awards and even breaching the top 20 of the UK charts.
Yet in 2016 they split up after Jon Boden, their Sheffield-based lead singer and fiddle player, decided he wanted to resume his solo career.
The band have reformed periodically since then, and this month sees them on the road again to mark the 20th anniversary of their debut album, Burlesque.
Looking back at the roots of the ten-piece band, Boden recalls how he and melodeon player John Spiers were on tour as duo. “One of the features of the early Noughties folk scene was English folk festivals were doing great and they were booking a lot of English folk acts of our generation, but what we did notice was there would be English folk acts early on, down the bill, but the headliner would always be Canadian or Scottish or Irish or world music or the more pop end of things, so there was talk going around about how it would be good to get some bigger bands together," he says.
“Me and John were in a traffic jam when we actually started going, ‘Right, can we actually do this?’ We were quite early on in our career, we’d just done one album, but we’d a really strong response to that and we were being booked at lots of folk festivals, so it was the arrogance of youth. In a traffic jam we started writing down what our ideal band would be and it just grew from there.”
Inspired by La Bottine Souriante, the Québécois big band, they sought to recruit a brass section. Disco fan Spiers also wanted strings. “That’s where the idea of having the brass and the string section came from – we could have players who could play folk tunes on the fiddle but then could start being a disco string section as well. Then we phoned around and asked a few people,” Boden remembers.
Their first booking was at the inaugural Oxford Folk Festival. “Tim Healey asked me if I could think of any English traditional bands who would work as a headliner for Saturday night and I said, yes – a band that doesn’t exist yet that we will put together for you. So that made it a lot easier to put the band together because we had this definite gig that was quite impressive. It meant we could approach Paul (Sartin), Benji (Kirkpatrick), Rachael (McShane) and Giles (Lewin).”
Singer/cellist/fiddle player McShane was a friend of Boden’s then partner Fay Hield from the folk degree at the University of Sheffield; the brass players were found by word-of-mouth. Conservatoire-educated drummer and percussionist Pete Flood was suggested by Boden’s mother, who worked with Flood’s mother at Oxfam. “It was lucky happenstance, really. All of the brass players were people that Pete had worked with,” Boden says.
“We didn’t meet until a few months before the festival, we turned up and did a quick rehearsal and the photo shoot, and then we had a big rehearsal the day before the first gig and on the day. It was terrifying,” Boden remembers. “It was crazy looking back at it and I was unbelievably stressed about it, but it was a very sympathetic audience, fortunately. There were some ropey moments but they could see that we were onto something.”
Five albums followed between 2006 and 2014 – two of which, Hedonism and Broadside, went silver, selling more than 60,000 copies. By the time of their last album, Revival, they were signed to a major label and had been garlanded with eight BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Yet Boden realised “the sun was beginning to set at that point”.
“It’s not like Revival was a failure, it got to number nine in the albums chart and we went on the Paul O’Grady Show, but it was clear that it was going to sell less than the previous two albums. Because of the way major labels work, they only back winners, when it was clear it wasn’t going to sell 100,000 records they moved onto the next thing. We knew that was the deal, that was fine, it was worth a punt for everyone, but for me that was the moment to go, there’s not much point throwing everything at this because its moment in the sun has maybe come to an end.
“Also, by that point I’d written 60 arrangements for Bellowhead. I never stopped loving the performing, that was always an absolute joy, but as a composer and a songwriter and arranger I definitely felt I didn’t want to be writing any more stuff for Bellowhead. I’d been there, done that. What I really wanted to do was do some more songwriting. I’d done an album in 2009 of my own songs, which had gone fantastically well were it not in comparison to Bellowhead. One of the few rules that we set ourselves when we started Bellowhead was we’re just going to do traditional songs because there’s so many options, you can do it in any style, in any vibe...so there was no way I was going to make an album of my songs with Bellowhead, that would not have worked and would’ve been a bad idea. I basically wanted to focus on songwriting and to do that I needed to leave Bellowhead.”
Neverthless he would never leave behind entirely. During the Covid pandemic, they reunited for a streamed concert and toured in 2022 and 2024. On their 2026 tour they will be remembering the singer, oboe and violin player Paul Sartin, who died of a heart attack in 2022, and helicon player Ed Neuhauser, who passed away from cancer in 2025. Both losses were “devastating”, says Boden. “It’s going to be tough being on the road without Ed and well as without Paul.”
Tickets for the tour have sold well, which Boden says he is “delighted” about. “It’s our third tour since we came back so we can’t really call it a reunion tour any more,” he chuckles. “We’ve never played the Royal Festival Hall before, so that’s pretty exciting, and that’s sold out. Even with the sadness of losing Ed and Paul, it’s such a joyous experience being onstage with Bellowhead.”
Boden even opens the door to another album. “It is perfectly possible,” he says, but admits to feeling “a slight nervousness that people think they want a new album more than they actually do”.
The other issue is logistical. “Getting everyone together can be quite difficult. On the plus side, because wwe tend to write songs individually and then bring them to the band more or less fully formed to workshop them a bit, that does make it a bit easier, but you’ve still got to schedule for 11 people to be in the same place at the same time for two weeks to record, so you’ve got to decide it a long time in advance. It’s possible but I’m not sure.”
Bellowhead play at Harrogate Convention Centre on November 13 and Sheffield City Hall on November 21. https://bellowhead.co.uk/live