Folk roots duo Ninebarrow play Shoreham

Ninebarrow – featuring Jon Whitley and Jay LaBouchardiere – play Ropetackle Arts Centre on Saturday, September 19 at 7.30pm (www.ninebarrow.co.uk/gigs).

After their steady rise to the top of the national folk roots scene over the last decade, duo

Ninebarrow play Shoreham as part of their national tour this autumn.

Jon and Jay both relinquished their respective full-time jobs as a teacher and GP back in 2016 and took a leap of faith into the music business – a gamble that almost immediately paid off. In 2017, they were nominated for a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award: one of the highest accolades in the world of folk music.

Since then the Dorset-based duo have continued to combine their trade-mark harmony singing and instrumentation, delivering original songs that are inspired and rooted in the landscape and history of the British Isles.

Named after Nine Barrow Down in Dorset’s Purbeck hills, over the course of 12 years and six studio albums the duo have earned themselves a strong reputation for their engaging and

empathetic songwriting, their imaginative reworkings of traditional songs and their deft musicianship.

In their latest studio album, those harmonies have been fused with more than 40 other voices

from Hampshire’s Hart Voices (based in Fleet) and Surrey’s Chantry Singers (from Guildford) to create The Hour of the Blackbird which sees 13 of Ninebarrow’s finest back catalogue songs renewed and enhanced by the vocals of sopranos, altos, tenors and basses under the musical directorship of Roy Rashbrook, a member of the choir of St Paul’s

Cathedral.

Jon says: “Jay and I had sung together in a school band that had very little to do with folk, but we started singing together in a folkie capacity when Jay started coming to some folkie sing-alongs. It was one of those things where people started saying to us ‘Your voices sound quite good together! You should do this more often!’

“We just started doing it for fun, very much as a hobby. We just enjoyed going around the folk clubs. We first started singing together in about 2012. I suppose our voices are close enough in range, but they do not exactly overlap. Jay tends to take the higher line and I take the lower line. I think we just got lucky!

“We carried on doing this as a pretty serious hobby for the next four years to the point where we had to start thinking about the window for taking it further. The problem was combining it with a day job. Jay is a doctor and I was a primary-school teacher. We were both working all day and then rehearsing or gigging at night and at the weekends and touring during the school holidays. It got to the stage where we were thinking that we probably could not sustain it much longer. We had to make the decision… and we decided to chuck in the day jobs. There were a few spreadsheets to crunch out all the numbers!

“We took a leap into the dark and I tend to look at things very conservatively and assume that things will go badly! But it has been quite amazing really.

“I think our approach to the folk tradition is slightly different in that we really harness the history and folklore and traditions of Dorset and make that really central to the stuff that we write ourselves. The narratives within the story really drive what we do.”