So Folk East looks like a great line-up of folk and roots music. Te festival circuit has always been quite welcoming ground for you – it’s kept you busy, hasn’t it? Absolutely, yeah, yeah; it’s something we’re doing every weekend and we’re always very busy working every weekend throughout the summer, so yeah, it’s familiar ground for us.
I was wondering what kind of relationship there is between yourself and other folk artists on the scene, because you must find yourselves often on the same bill… Yeah, quite often you’re meeting up again with people that you know well, or have worked alongside, so yeah, you’re always crossing paths with all sorts of people, especially people like Show of Hand, Bellowhead and people like that.
For many, their first introduction to you was when you played with your brothers as Te Lakeman Brothers – did having each other around at the beginning give each of you the fortitude to form your own musical identities? I guess it does, yeah, it spurs you on; I think at that age a lot of the foundations are laid and it’s an important time and it was an exciting time for us because we were
16 /August 2012/
outlineonline.co.uk
If anyone tells you that folk music is in any way a gentle affair, direct them towards Seth Lakeman’s best-loved offering, ‘Kitty Jay’ – better still, take them to see it live. When you hear the impassioned song and see the smoke rising from Seth’s furious fiddle playing, the momentum and vigour is as strong as any rock number. It’s with this ability to spin a yarn and promote it with unbridled energy that has seen Seth secure his place at the top of festival bills like Folk East…
bouncing off each other.
I first encountered you supporting the Levellers actually about 7 or 8 years ago; you toured with them quite extensively – did touring with such an established band teach you a lot on the road? Well I’ve toured with a lot of artists – Te Pogues, Tori Amos, Billy Bragg and Te Levellers were one of them and yeah, I think you learn a lot from their stagecraft, and really how an audience react, so yeah, I did learn a lot from working with them.
You’ve been lucky enough to travel with your music, and I wondered whether you’d encountered, or even been inspired by different countries’ folk and roots music?
Yeah absolutely, I think that’s the privileged part of playing and taking your music to other shores. I haven’t necessarily written songs about other countries or other cultures, but I was certainly inspired; like when we went to Libya, I was inspired by the rhythms and a song that I wrote about 2 or 3 years ago called ‘Blood Red Sky’ was written after I’d heard those rhythms and percussions when we were working with the north African drummers there. So I guess yeah, things do influence your music.
Folk is a genre with a passionate fanbase and you’ve experienced a reaction from both ends of the spectrum really, from people heralding your success to others denigrating your explorations into other sounds –
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