“I love an album launch, me”

Good article and interview in the Telegraph from the Poor Man’s Heaven album launch at Perranporth. Well written, it deftly recaps the Seth Lakeman Story So Far and throws in a few good quotes for good measure.

On assuming folk’s ‘poster boy’ mantle

He rails against the “poster boy of folk” tag that’s been hung on him…”There’s a lot of great music on the folk scene, and I’ll be happy if I can help bring it to a wider audience, but I never want to be its spokesman or public face. This new album is a lot rockier and I’m not massively concerned about what the folk audience thinks of it.”

On resisting the commercialising formulas of a major label

A devout T-shirt-and-jeans kind of fellow, he rejected all attempts to get him to go shopping with a stylist and cheerfully admits he’s miserably failed to write a catchy hit single for them … Fears that Relentless would turn him into James-Blunt-with-a-fiddle have been blown out of the sea by the fiercest, darkest, danciest record of his career.

On Solomon Browne and raising money for the RNLI

“when I was 19, my best friend and his mate died surfing at Polzeath. There was no lifeboat there. I was in a band – Equation – and we did a couple of concerts to raise money to help build a lifeboat station there. Those lifeboat guys… they’re heroes. I just wanted to honour them.”

Full article: ‘Seth Lakeman: to the sea!’, The Telegraph, 3 July 2008 »