23
Like all well-established festivals, Wickham attracts its share of big names. This year, among them were The Levellers, Seth Lakeman, and Skipinnish from the folk world. The likes of Suzi Quatro, Curtis Stigers, and Tony Christie helped broaden the audience appeal. However, KLOF Mag was on hand to turn the spotlight on three artists who were still very much in the business of developing their careers. We start with a quick chat with Muireann Bradley.
A conversation with Muireann in August of last year would have been very different to this one. Although recorded mainly during the Covid years, her debut album, I Kept These Old Blues (reviewed here), wasn’t released until December 2023. The combination of her voice, an outstanding finger-picking guitar style and material sourced from recordings by legendary American blues and ragtime artists of the 1920s and 30s made an immediate impact. The album had come to the attention of the team assembling artists for that staple of UK New Year’s Eve television, Jools Holland’s Hootenanny.
The combined effects of the album and her appearance on the show seem to have kick-started a music career for the seventeen-year-old from Co Donegal. A statement she readily agreed with, “I’d probably only played 4 or 5 shows before I got the Hootenanny gig, so my career only really started last year, and then, this year, things have really taken off.”
That take-off has led to many gigs in the UK and Ireland, some in Germany and the Netherlands. Over the summer, the gigs have mainly been at festivals, including some pretty large ones. Daunting for any solo performer, but given that our conversation happened just 15 minutes before her set, I’d have to say she seemed to be taking it all in her stride. Did she approach a festival set any differently from more intimate gigs? Not really, the setlist would be the tracks from her album, and she was pretty confident about those.
That led the conversation neatly towards the issue of new material. Well, embracing the obvious, there’s still plenty of music left in the old American recordings, and she is learning more songs from there as quickly as she can. And what, I wondered, about writing her own? Yes, she is trying to write material in that 20s and 30s style. But it’s very much in the early stages, so nowhere near being ready to perform.
Any thoughts of branching out to other styles and genres? Well, never say never, but “for the moment, I just want to stick with this”. And with that, it was almost stage time, and Muireann was off to the big top to play a gig that didn’t just hold the audience but grew it as her show went on. I lingered at the edge of the tent, torn between listening to Muireann and going to the other big top where one of my all-time favourites, Ranagri, were playing. When I reluctantly started walking away, I was stopped by a couple of guys. “Is she still playing? We’ve been told her guitar picking just has to be seen as well as heard”.
Order ‘I Kept These Old Blues’ via Bandcamp: https://tompkinssquare.bandcamp.com/album/i-kept-these-old-blues
More Wickham interviews to follow shortly with Katherine Priddy and Ryan Young.
