Ken Langsbury has sung all his life and still knows songs from his childhood and his time with the King’s Dragoon Guards in Malaya. He was a member of the popular harmony group, The Songwainers and fool for Old Spot Morris. He’s also a very fine storyteller. He’s never stopped singing and never will! Bernie and Ken have been friends and collaborators for well over 50 years. Bernie Cherry was born near Rochester in Kent. He has been singing since 1966, mostly English traditional songs from places he’s lived and people he’s met. He was an early member of the Old Swan Band and founding foreman of Old Spot Morris. He’s currently a musician for Abingdon Traditional Morris Dancers.

Goblin Band are a four piece English trad/folk band based in London. With harmony singing and a range of folk instruments, Goblin Band delivers an unruly alternative expression of English traditional music. The band formed from sessions of the same name run out of the Hobgoblin Music shop in central London, organised by a collection of young queer folk obsessive friends and shop employees looking to forge their own way into folk music. This gave rise to a band of multi-instrumentalists firmly rooted in the folk music of Britain, interpreted via the socialist tradition concerned with folk’s relationship to the history of the working classes, capitalism, and colonialism. Through a fusion of harmony singing, fiddle, squeezebox, hurdy gurdy, recorders and more, Goblin Band deliver a charismatic alternative expression of English traditional culture in a way which is at once riotously joyful and deeply sincere.

"They can play and they can sing and they’re fearless...When I saw Goblin

Band singing recently, I just thought, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

- MARTIN CARTHY

Description supplied by the event organiser.