wed 11/12/2024

Bellowhead, Bristol Old Vic | reviews, news & interviews

Bellowhead, Bristol Old Vic

Bellowhead, Bristol Old Vic

Award-winning, floor-shaking 10-piece bring funk'n'punk to folk

Bellowhead: 'Riding their eclecticism with brio and intelligence'

Bellowhead are 21st-century genre-busters: punk music-hall madness born out of British folk, seasoned with a zeitgeist-friendly dose of multicultural spice. Sounds gimmicky? Well, not at all, as Bellowhead’s greatest quality, apart from being an outstandingly enjoyable live act, comes from the way they ride their eclecticism with brio and intelligence, inventing as they go a new folk music for our times.

Bellowhead are 21st-century genre-busters: punk music-hall madness born out of British folk, seasoned with a zeitgeist-friendly dose of multicultural spice. Sounds gimmicky? Well, not at all, as Bellowhead’s greatest quality, apart from being an outstandingly enjoyable live act, comes from the way they ride their eclecticism with brio and intelligence, inventing as they go a new folk music for our times.

The combination of funk and jig, English dance music and African-inspired syncopation is blindingly obvious, and yet no band has done it quite like this before

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Comments

Great review. Just one quibble: there are eleven musicians, not ten (I appreciate that with all the jigging around they can be hard to count).

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