The Broadside Hacks Folk Club

Relative newcomers on the thriving UK traditional folk circuit, Goblin Band are a collection of queer, musicians based around Hobgoblin Music, a folk-instrument shop with a branch located in central London. Inspired as much by medieval and early music, as they are by the folk traditions of Britain and abroad, the six-piece set their stall on re-energising timeless, much-journeyed songs for an ever-growing new community of young folk enthusiasts.

Debut EP ‘Come Slack Your Horse!’ - featuring songs dating back as early as the mid-17th century - sees the band doing just that. While some tracks here - such as instrumental opener ‘Black Nag’ or ‘Widecombe Fair’ - express a boundless, escapist joy, and the band’s deeply infectious enthusiasm for traditional music, many tracks across the collection, despite their age, bear startling parallels with the travails of contemporary society.

All proceeds to @queeercaring to raise money for gender-affirming surgery. Donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/gender-affirming-surgery-for-aine

This is an 18+ event

Black Cat White Cat Promotions

Goblin Band: Drive the Cold Winter Away (Fundraiser)

Goblin Band - The Prickle Holly Bush

Goblin Band

Gigs

London

Theatreship

Music from some of London's finest musicians, performed in the Theatreship bar onboard the 111 year old cargo ship. Hosted by Owen Spafford. The events are free to attend and everyone is welcome.

A session is a casual and sometimes impromptu gathering of musicians who have come together to play traditional music. Traditionally music sessions would take place in the kitchen of a local family’s house. House dances were commonplace, with the musicians gathered pumping out tunes for the set dancers. Nowadays sessions often take place in pubs or arts centres and are open to the public.

“The Tune becomes a family tree. It is a conversation piece, a way of renegotiating lost time. Our knowledge of the past is changed each time we hear it; our present time, imbued with yesterday, comes out with bent dimensions. Slipping in and out of nodes of time we find our circles sometimes intersect with others. Yet there is a wider circle we can only dimly comprehend whose congregation is uncountable, whose brains and hands have shaped this tune in ways unknowable to us.” (Ciaran Carson, ‘Last Night’s Fun’)

English Traditional Music Session

What do we know of Milkweed? On the face of it their musical concerns are transatlantic - they follow the rich creative line that runs between British traditional music and the songs and tunes of the eastern United States. In reality their scope is global, and rooted in deep time, with influences from prehistory bleeding into a troubled and troubling anthropocene. As a result their music doesn’t sit easily anywhere, but ricochets between bewitching Appalachian folk music and disconcerting hauntological experimentation.

Their technique is comparable to plunderphonics, except Milkweed’s piracy is of a multimedia, intertextual variety rather than a simply musical one. Antiquarian text bleeds into song, grave dirt is sprinkled on recording equipment, tapes and melodies are chopped and degraded, holes and silences appear unexpectedly. It is the kind of music that locates its own natural faultlines and lays them bare.

Milkweed’s music recognises the planet as a palimpsest and requires us to look and listen more deeply at our environments, the layers of natural and human history that peel away to reveal grotesque, mysterious and beautiful deposits. It is a music of occlusion and discovery which examines how a thing becomes an artefact, and whether an artefact can be psychic as well as physical. The duo remain as inscrutable as ever, but their songs are uniquely engaging, deliciously uncanny gateways to strange times and places.

Milkweed

Milkweed - My Father's Sheep Is Dead

Cafe OTO

This event will feature material from both Dylan's solo and band albums, performed by some of our favourite contemporary singers and musicians, whom he continues to inspire to this day (Brown Horse, Clara Mann, Spitzer Space Telescope + more to be announced).

\-Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, to parents Abram and Beatrice Zimmerman. He and his younger brother David were raised in the community of Hibbing, where he graduated from Hibbing High School in 1959.

Driven by the influences of early rock stars like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard (whom he used to imitate on the piano at high school dances), the young Dylan formed his own bands, including the Golden Chords, as well as a group he fronted under the pseudonym Elston Gunn. While attending the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he began performing folk and country songs at local cafés, taking the name "Bob Dillon." (Despite a popular myth to the contrary, the pseudonym was not inspired by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas — who he later professed to dislike — but by the main character from the popular Western television series Gunsmoke.)

This is an 18+ event.

LNZRT LTD

LNZRT

MOTH

A Complete Unknown: A Tribute to Bob Dylan

Brown Horse

Clara Mann

Spitzer Space Telescope

MOTH Club

Come on down for some picking, fiddling, and boot-stomping tunes at this American folk gig in the middle of London Town.

London based Neo-trad group The Pegwells play a mix of black traditional music from across the Atlantic, from Appalachian banjo tunes to early New Orleans jazz and everything in between.

Hailing from North and South Tyneside, Phoebe and Philippa unite to form Errant Moose. Blending guitar, fiddle, and whimsical harmonies, they play a carefully curated collection of songs and tunes from the Old Time, Bluegrass, and Americana tradition.

Trans-Atlantic fiddle and banjo duo Evie Hilyer-Ziegler (London) & Tennessee Woodiel (Raleigh, North Carolina) perform a collected repertoire of unique old time tunes and other trad treasures with a subtle electronic twist.

This gig is presented by Pick Me Radio and Broadside Hacks <3

Spotted Pony: An Evening of Old-Timey American Folk

Evie Hilyer-Ziegler

The Vermont native, who is now based in London, has collaborated with saxophonist and producer Sam Gendel to reinterpret and regenerate ten songs that he has gathered together as part of a decades-long quest to recontextualise what it means to sing folk songs or make folk music.

The music on Salt River ranges from traditional Appalachian ballad “Golden Willow Tree” to a radical reimagining of Lou Reed’s ”Big Sky,” and was recorded by Amidon, Gendel and percussionist Philippe Melanson, who played together as a trio during sessions at Gendel’s home in Los Angeles.

Having initially encountered Gendel at his now-fabled residency at the Hollywood Italian restaurant Pace, Amidon and Gendel have collaborated on various recordings and concerts over the past few years; but Salt River is their first extended collaboration, sparked when Amidon suggested they delve into his treasure box of collected songs.

As Sam himself describes, “This album is a campfire, but the campfire is around Sam Gendel’s synthesizer. Or maybe it’s a journey through the corridors of my memory, if my memory was transplanted into Sam and Phil’s dreams.”

Taken together, these 10 songs feel like a shared playground of discovery, with Amidon finding new ways for old songs to exist in the company of his two unfettered collaborators.

Sam Amidon (Seated Show)

Sam Amidon - I'm On My Journey Home

Sam Amidon

Sam Amidon (Standing Show)

The Crypt (beneath St Giles Church)

On his new album Wasteland, Jim Ghedi has created something huge. Intense, brooding, bold, at times apocalyptic, and remarkably vast. A profoundly bold sonic statement that is some of the most rich, far-reaching and ambitious work that Ghedi has created to date - pushing the boundaries of what folk music can be in 2025.

Wasteland is a record that is unafraid to plunge into the darkness of the modern world and embrace the weirder, edgier and more unnerving moments that come from doing so. It is an album that captures all the enormity of life from the micro to the macro, zooming in on the personal as well reflecting on broader societal issues.

“Wasteland is about the idea of a place once known or familiar that is now broken down and unrecognisable,” says Ghedi. “It’s about exploring the process of watching someone’s surroundings and environment collapse.” And within that you have a lot going on. “It also explores death, personal loss, grief, mental health and how the natural world provides solace and meaning for that loss and how these worlds blur into one another.”

Jim Ghedi

Arran to Aboyne

Collection

The Broadside Hacks Folk Club