Description:
"beautiful voice, excellent band" Robert Plant
"don't miss" The Observer
"folk legends, who've been making beautiful music for years, contemporary folk music with heart wrenching, exceptional vocals" The Magpie's Nest
The Line Up:
Julie Murphy - voice
Ceri Rhys Matthews - guitar, flute, pipes
Tomos Williams - trumpet
Christine Cooper - fiddle
Fernhill, from Wales, make new, beautifully lyrical and intense folk music which they have played to audiences all over the world. Central to their sound is the voice of Julie Murphy, described by Time Out as “a must hear, must see singer”, her fans include music legends like Robert Plant and Danny Thompson, both of whom have recorded with her. In Fernhill she is surrounded by wonderful musicians; Ceri Rhys Matthews whose percussive and open guitar playing underpins their music is also a fine piper and flute player is a key figure in the renaissance of Welsh traditional music. Tomos Williams is a young trumpet player from Aberystwyth whose subtle and inventive improvisations have contributed hugley to Fernhill’s sound. His main musical influences are be-bop and hip hop. Christine Cooper is an exciting young folk fiddler from Tenby whose fresh and soulful playing has brought a new energy to the group.
Fernhill's international appearances include Womad, Celtic connections, Festival De Cornouaille, Telemark, Kaustinen, major concerts in Athens, Rome, Brussels and Tokyo plus British Council tours of Southern and East Africa, Vietnam and Poland.
Intimate enough with tradition that they are unafraid to stretch it's boundaries they have appeared at UK festivals as diverse as Greenman, Womad, the Oxford folk festival, Whitby Musicport and Glasgow's Celtic Connections.
Radio One's Huw Stephens is a fan of their music and invited them to play at the first Latitude festival and to headline an acoustic night at Cardiffs' SWN festival in 2008.
The group's 2007 live album 'Na Pradle' made the MOJO top ten folk album list that year. The album captures highlights of an intimate concert in Prague recorded and broadcast by Czech radio 3 during a tour of the Czech republic in 2006.
"Na Prádle is extraordinary, as transfixing to the CD listener as it clearly was to the Czech audience. Julie Murphy’s commanding voice cuts through the Divadlo na Prádle ( Theatre at the Laundry) with passion, power and grace." Colin Irwin, fRoots
"captures a performance of outstanding purity and conviction, one that might be fernhill's greatest statement yet." Christopher Rees, Western Mail
"one of the finest voices of these Islands" Mike Harding, BBC Radio 2
"fernhill have been making beautiful music for years now, and I've loved every album. It's folk music but not as we know it; Julie's voice is stunning" Huw Stephens, BBC Radio 1
