If it’s music you’re after, check out the playlist we’ve put together and give yourself a taster of what’s to come.

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Exeter will host a six-day celebration of new live performance work from the South West and beyond. Over fifty performances are to take place across the city at venues including Exeter Phoenix, The Bike Shed Theatre and The Cygnet Theatre as well as pub venues such as The Hourglass, The Globe and The Rusty Bike.

One of Exeter Phoenix’s highlights includes an inventive and quirky play, The Last Post, in which seventeen audience members watch a nostaligic love story about the wonderful art of letter writing, in the back of a mobile sorting office in the Phoenix carpark.

At the Bikeshed Theatre, Fellswoop Theatre follows last year’s award-winning and Edinburgh sell out success Belleville Rendez-vous with a dark and intriguing drama, Ablutions.

The Hourglass hosts an adaptation of Dickins’ Great Expectations by a founder member of Cornwall’s Kneehigh Theatre, David Mynne, as well as an eccentric, vintage comedy about a cross-channel swimming champion, Swimmers.

Whilst at the Cygnet Theatre, dance fans can experience a beautifully evocative performance with live music in Buttercup and contemporary dance from performers trained at Rambert and the Royal Ballet in Piano Moves.

David Lockwood, Director of The Bike Shed Theatre says;

‘Exeter Ignite is a wonderful opportunity for artists to try out new work, often before they go up to the Edinburgh Festival. It is also a chance for people in the city to have some fun, try something new and take part in something a little different.’

Click here to see Ignite events taking place in other venues across the city

‘The main influence of my cooking comes from Jerusalem where I lived until 1998. I learned my best dishes andsome secrets from great family kitchens whilst growing up and helping out. I try to use lots of flavours and a wide variety of ingredients in each dish. Our food should never be boring!’

The new menu features Lebanese falafel and hummus, oriental soba noodles, jerk chicken and lentil moussaka alongside tasty daily specials that have recently included juicy steak sandwiches and delicious hotpots.

All profits from the Exeter Phoenix Café Bar go back to the Exeter Phoenix charity, so you can now enjoy tasty food, knowing that you are supporting your local arts charity.

Browse our new menu here >>

By Jackie Butler, Western Morning News.

On a clear and bright April day, June Tabor is busy sowing seeds and tidying up in the big garden of her home in the Welsh borders.

In a few days’ time the queen of contemporary folk singers takes to the road on a concert tour with her latest musical project – an inspired jazz-tinged trio called Quercus featuring saxophonist Iain Bellamy and her long-time collaborator and pianist Huw Warren, both celebrated musicians in their fields.

But first there is much catching up to do outdoors.

“The weather has been so strange; we had heavy snow and a lot of things didn’t get done,” says June. “I have to stuff seeds into every kind of nook and cranny now.

“I try to grow as many things to eat as I can. For a long time I lived in London and didn’t have anywhere to grown things, but my I used to help my mum in the garden; I never learned what to do, but it was just there in the back of my memory.

“Once you get hooked on that kind of thing, it never leaves you.”

The same sentiment could be expressed about June’s other obsession – singing songs.

While these two things may be wildly disparate, they both involve her taking an essence and nurturing it into beautiful maturity.

“One is a connection to things like home and soil and weather, and the other is something that is virtually in isolation,” she observes.

“Singing is in the moment; it’s unique to the space and the audience and how you perform on that night, the inspiration you get from the people you are playing with. It is very ephemeral, and totally real at the same time.”

Quercus is a combination that came together organically. June and Huw both admired Iain’s playing and they first got together to perform at the Berlin Jazz Festival a few years ago. The band’s eponymous album just released on the ECM label was actually recorded live when they toured back in 2006.

The trio create a melee of traditional folk, jazz and chamber music, weaving these elements together through poignant words and enchanting melodies, delivered with deep-rooted heart and soul.

“Huw and Iain come from a jazz background and I don’t. We are not trying to bend music into unnatural shapes; we are making something unique to us as a trio.

“It defies categorisation; all the songs tell stories. It is music that deserves attention. All I can say is listen to it,” she says.

While it is clear that June, now 65, owner of a distinctively deep, rich-toned voice and twice the winner of Singer of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, has no love of the mechanics of gigging or recording, her passion for telling stories through song will never fade.

“I don’t write songs; I have never written one. I have ideas about what songs should be about and then I tell people who come back with something magnificent,” she says. “What I do is interpret and breathe life into them and take them in a slightly different direction.”

June gets enormous joy from discovering new, and old, songs to sing. Her professional journey began as a late teenager in the mid-1960s, inspired by folk singers Annie Briggs and Belle Stewart. She sang in folk clubs while she was a student at Oxford University and joined her first band there. An early appearance at Sidmouth Folk Festival established her as a burgeoning talent.

In 1976 her first solo album, Airs and Graces, was released to great acclaim. There have been 17 more since then, and her back catalogue also contains many weighty collaborations, including work with Martin Simpson, Maddy Prior, Fairport Convention and the comic Mrs Ackroyd Band. Working with the folk rock ensemble Oysterband has also proved fruitful and enjoyable on two separate occasions. The first was in 1990 when they recorded and then toured the album Freedom and Rain together.

Two decades later they joined forces again for the universally acclaimed Ragged Kingdom – an album mainly of traditional folk songs and featuring an astonishingly arresting cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart. It was this partnership that lured June out touring again.

“I wasn’t doing that many gigs any more, then the album with the Oysterband happened. Gigging with them has been wonderful,” citing one of their final shows together at Exeter Cathedral earlier this year as “a lovely lovely gig”.

June may have been singing professionally for more than 40 years, but she is never complacent about it.

“I do still feel nervous on stage. You need something to keep you sharp. I wonder will I remember the words, will I do justice to the song I am performing,” she says.

“To me all the songs we play are really special. I want to perform them to the best of my ability and for the audience to get as much out of them as I do. The best performance is when it sounds like a song is being sung for the first time. That is so important. If you think it is just another song, then you are doing it a disservice.”

Buy tickets to see Quercus play at Exeter Phoenix on Tue 23 April >>

Entries for the exhibition will be accepted until the deadline of Friday 14 June, and more information on the application process can be found here >>

Kevin Hunt

Kevin is an artist and curator and was director of The Royal Standard, an artist led gallery, project space and social workspace in Liverpool between July 2007 and January 2011. He co-curated Cave Art Fair which ran alongside Liverpool Biennial in 2012.

As a practicing artist, Hunt makes sculpture using found, redundant objects, particularly furniture which is reconfigured into something new.

Visit his website here >>

Day + Gluckman

The curatorial collaboration Day+Gluckman have a reputation for working with artists with a rigorous approach to practice and context. Their aim is to develop long-term relationships with artists and seek and initiate opportunities to exhibit, explore, curate and commission.

Since 2008 Day+Gluckman have been programming the Collyer Bristow Gallery, London and are reponsible for the ongoing Sinopticon project which featured in multiple venues across Plymouth in 2012.

Visit their website here >>

Matt Burrows

Matt joined the Exeter Phoenix team in 2009, having previously worked in various roles in both the commercial and public art sector, including roles at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London and Spacex Gallery in Exeter. He oversees all the exhibition spaces at Exeter Phoenix with a primary focus on the Phoenix Gallery’s programme of contemporary art.

Visit the Exeter Phoenix gallery pages here >>

By Jackie Butler, Western Morning News.

When folk star Jackie Oates was a little girl, her mother used to sing her lullabies, soothing her gently to sleep at the end of each day.

Jackie’s favourite was a sweet and simple ditty called Alexander Beetle – an AA Milne verse set to music – and it now takes pride of place on her new LP Lullabies.

It’s a unique and delightful collection of songs – some more universally familiar than others – that have been sung to different generations of little ones at bedtime.

Little Boy Blue sits alongside Shakespeare’s Philomel from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Paul McCartney’s Junk and The Worthy Wood Carol, penned in the 1920s by an Exmoor gypsy.

Apart from celebrating the songs themselves – a cache of gems rich in the folklore of the cradle with all its superstitions and customs – Jackie’s aim is to encourage parents to follow suit and revive a fast-fading tradition.

“I loved being sung to. I still find the experience very moving and comforting. And a lullaby has the ability to take you into another place,” says Jackie, whose own clear and pretty voice brims with a delicate, rustic honesty, offering the perfect ambience for soothing delivery.

“There are several songs I know from childhood and when I hear them they can really take me by surprise,” adds the award-winning singer and violinist who came from a music-loving Staffordshire family whose summers were spent at Sidmouth Festival; her brother is the boundary-pushing folk singer Jim Moray. Jackie’s love for traditional songs was fuelled and nurtured while she was a student in Exeter.

She chose to live on in the city for several years after graduating, honing her musical craft in the company of community musicians, becoming a key member of the Westcountry folk circle.

The 29-year-old is now settled in Oxfordshire with her champion Morris dancing partner Jack Worth, but she is delighted to be returning to her old stomping ground this month as part of her UK tour airing the new album.

The 15-track LP, released two weeks ago, represents the tip of a very deep iceberg of English lullabies that she uncovered during extensive research into the genre.

“As a folk singer I found it interesting that when you initially search for English lullabies, there don’t seem to be very many of them,” says Jackie, who is a member of the all-star multi-cultural folk band Imagined Village, and the fresh English face of Lush natural cosmetics.

“I asked around all my friends in the folk world and there were only two or three traditional ones that we could all sing. There are many more, of course, but they are hidden and hard to come by.”

“If you go to Ireland or Scotland, lullabies are much more a part of the musical heritage.”

Her first port of call was Cecil Sharp House in London, which holds the largest archive of traditional folk materials. She discovered that most were American in origin. Determined to dig out some old English examples, Jackie began trawling the vaults of Devon song collector Sabine Baring Gould, and any other collection she could find, including the Oxford Song Book. Gradually her search started to bear fruit, and it is still an ongoing project.

She sings each new find and then notates it so that it can be lodged in the archive at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

“It’s quite an undertaking,” she admits. “But I am really enjoying the discipline of it. I’m up to 180 songs now and I’m hoping to double that.”

Along the way, Jackie picked out a shortlist of songs that she wanted to record.

“I wanted to make an album that brought to life these hidden lullabies and encourage parents to sing them to their children,” she says.

“Singing a lullaby is very pleasurable for the singer, too. And it can be cathartic, too – you can vent all manner of things in a lullaby because it’s not just about the story, it’s about the person singing, and creating that bond of warmth.

“I felt I had to achieve a balance between showcasing the unusual and creating something that people would like to listen to.”

That meant filtering out the dark side of the lullaby world.

“I didn’t want to scare the children,” she says.

“A lot of old lullabies were all about moaning about your life and a way of expressing about the things that had upset you, but without upsetting the child because they didn’t understand the words.”

In between concerts, research and recording, Jackie teaches violin and it was her young pupils who became guinea pigs when she was choosing the songs to include on the album.

“Before I recorded anything I played the songs to them to gauge their reaction,” she says.

The tracks were recorded late last year at sessions in Bath and Reykjavik in Iceland, and feature a feast of guest artists, including guitarist Chris Serjeant and, on piano, Belinda O’Hooley, whom Jackie first met when they were both members of Rachel Unthank and the Winterset.

The Icelandic connection came about through Jackie’s friendship with Bara Grimsdottir and producer Richard Evans.

“Bara is a brilliant singer and she had a great repertoire of lullabies. And Richard’s best friend was out in Iceland. I’ve always wanted to go there, and it just made sense to fly out there with a little recording deck for five days,” she says.

“We had a brilliant time and I made so many new friends; music is brilliant for that – if we had just gone as tourists it would have been a totally different experience,” adds Jackie, who says she will be bringing an Icelandic langspil – an instrument akin to an Appalachian dulcimer – on the current tour.

As well as the evening show at Exeter, Jackie is running an afternoon workshop at the Phoenix for parents and their children aged up to four.

“When I was living in Devon I travelled around giving folk singing workshops and it’s something I love doing,” she says. “I have tailored this one to be about more unusual lullabies.”

Jackie Oates’ Lullabies tour comes to Exeter Phoenix on Wednesday, April 24.

For more info and to buy tickets, click here >>

By day, Hield is a Teaching Associate in Ethnomusicology at Sheffield University.

The Northern character and her own team of merry men unravel timeworn tales of folklore and allusion, scattering tones and grades of sensitivity and melancholia.

In light of her guise, Hield yields an endearing scroll of talent more vivacious than the trees of Sherwood Forest. Various accolades in hand, including a nomination for the Horizon Award at 2010’s BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and a completed PhD thesis “English Folk Singing and the Construction of Community”, Hield engages with insight and aptitude. Most notably, ambitious 13th Century Greek fable ‘Sir Orfeo’ uncovers pioneering levels, combined with traditional vocals. Called by triumphant tones of fanfare, it is easy to picture a further team of merry men jigging along in support of Fay Hield & The Hurricane upon a live performance of ‘Sir Orfeo’.

Accompanied by partner and beloved Bellowhead frontman, John Boden, the troop commit to “the music of the people”. Rejecting the drums, bass and guitar, Hield tells of “people reacting with each other to make amazing music”.

Hield’s sweet vocals, juxtaposed with undertones of a darkly comic mood, stir a murkier lead in ‘Naughty Baby’. ‘Naughty Baby’ warns of mother Bonaparte destroying the child limb from limb and eating him “in one gulp” if the infant doesn’t fall silent. Although far from the standard guidance of contemporary babysitters, there is a somewhat consensus for the sentiment of finally snapping with defeat at a crying baby. Fay Hield commits to muse with “elements belonging to others or surrounding people”, travelling through time with tales of individuals and relationships reborn with a reminiscence that feels no more than a day old.

Tickets for Fay Hield & The Hurricane at Exeter Phoenix on Wednesday 27th March can be obtained by phoning 01392 667080 or by clicking here.

Preview by Laura Potter

We’re offering a free CD to the first 5 people to book tickets for selected music events*

Call Box Office on 01392 667080 and quote ‘CD GIVE-AWAY’.

EVENTS INCLUDED IN THE OFFER:

Wed 27 Mar | 8pm | £12 (£10)

FIRST 5 TO BOOK WILL RECEIVE THE NEW ALBUM ORFEO (2012)

Leading proponents of traditional tunes, this band’s material is fresh and original, yet rooted in centuries old tradition. The showmanship and musicality on display are second to none.

‘Hield’s command of her material is unerring and the outcome compelling’ ★ ★ ★ ★|
THE OBSERVER

Thu 18 Apr | 8pm | £14

FIRST 5 TO BOOK WILL RECEIVE EITHER JAMES YORKSTON’S, I WAS A CAT FROM A BOOK (2012) OR THE PICTISH TRAIL, SECRET SOUNDZ VOL 2

The two much-lauded members of the Fence Collective, collaborate with the Irish folk singer, Seamus Fogarty, to create a rousing blend of contemporary folk music.

‘A beautifully shaded work… Innovative arrangements’
BBC REVIEW (on Yorkston’s new album)

Tue 23 Apr | 8pm | £16

FIRST 5 TO BOOK WILL RECEIVE THE NEW ALBUM (RELEASED APRIL 1 2013)

June Tabor’s gripping voice is woven with Iain Ballamy’s glorious saxophone and Huw Warren’s piano to create exquisite chamber music, drawing on the trio’s repertoire of original folk songs.

‘One of Britain’s greatest interpreters of popular song’
THE GUARDIAN (on Tabor)

*Offer only valid when purchasing two or more tickets, CDs available to give away to the first 5 bookers for each event. Subject to availability. CDs will be available to collect along with your tickets on the night.

Check out this video from our sold-out Slamboree night: