Gerry Colvin is back in Bognor Regis for 2024 South Downs Music Festival

With the Regis Centre still unavailable, Gerry will be giving one of the marquee concerts instead. Friday, September 20 sees Fred's House and Mark Harrison take to the stage, and then on Saturday, September 21 Gerry will be supported by Olivia Stevens.

Tickets are £12 per evening or £20 for both evenings. Both evening concerts start at 7.30pm.

It’s a festival Gerry loves to play: “I have done the festival a number of times before and it's just fantastic. The thing that I love is that it feels like the whole town is involved. A lot of the folk festivals that we do are brilliant but they are basically huge fields with a huge stage and people coming from all over the country. They are great but they feel slightly unreal but the South Downs Music Festival is generally in the town and yes, you get people coming from all over the country but the point is that it is the town that is involved.”

Gerry is full of admiration for Roger Nash and Simon Goodale who make it happen: “For all the festivals it is usually one or two people who are the driving force, and they are the main people who make it pleasurable. And obviously they are running to a budget, but they're not thinking about profit margins all the time in the way that other places like theatres or arts centres have to. Basically Roger wants to give the people of Bognor a good time.”

And that's exactly what Gerry wants to do. He jokes that his is one of the few bands that realise that folk doesn't have to be boring: “Folk is the original music and every type of music has come from that. It is the only music that has always been non-sexist and non-ageist and absolutely culturally diverse. It's a tiny niche but a huge umbrella and the folk music that we record is not about wrecked ships in the 17th century or mining disasters in 1860. It's about what is happening now.”

And the great news is that folk is in a good place: “It has taken off exponentially because of people like Ed Sheeran on the God-like genius that is Taylor Swift. They have nodded to the influence of folk music in what they do. And I do think people are less scathing. Folk had a reputation that it was all about fingers in ears and tankards and woolly jumpers and little cliques but that has all gone now and there's a new generation of folk artists now that are reinventing the old music. And I do think Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran have helped with that. You can go along to a folk club now and talk about the latest George Ezra. I think people are much more open about it all than they used to be in all the years I've been attempting to do this.

“I was writing in Nashville and I was writing pop and country music but then I was introduced to folk by Nick Quarmby and by Phil Beer in about 93 or 94 and it just felt like a breath of fresh air and I've loved it ever since.”