Fay Hield

Born and raised in Yorkshire, folk artist and academic Fay Hield seemed destined to carve a career in traditional folk music.

Growing up in the famous Bacca Pipes Folk Club in Keighley, Fay formed a bond of community and tradition that would go on to inspire.

Working with traditional materials, and developing them with new compositions, Fay explores the feelings they evoke and how they relate to her experience in the contemporary world. Universal ideas of death, love, motherhood echo through time and space.

The songs on Wrackline, Fay’s latest album, play with these difficult ideas through the eyes of an unobtainable other, whether that be the dearly departed, a fairy from another realm, or the thoughts of animals, gives us space to work through very real social problems. Shifting between lighthearted stories about drunks sitting with pigs, to darker questions about infanticide, Fay breathes life and meaning into old stories presenting them with a fresh twist. .

In these uncertain times, Fay continues to perform live and online in various formats from solo, through to a four-piece including long standing musical collaborators Sam Sweeney (fiddle), Rob Harbron (concertina, guitar and harmonium) and Ben Nicholls (double bass).

A singer who seems to have been born knowing how to carry a tune, but with the rarer gift of knowing how to go straight to the heart of a song. She combines vision, inspiration and outstanding musicianship into a fresh and original exploration of how we use songs, stories and music to understand what it means to be human. Fay breathes new life into timeless stories.

Expect to be enveloped in music, woven through magical stories and teased into thinking about your relationship with the world around you.