Suzy Bogguss

Amy Wadge and Pete Riley are performing at the Bristol Folk Festival on Monday 7th May. They’re also playing the FolkEast Festival, Lowestoft on August 26^th. We’re currently finalizing tour dates for late summer 1st September to 23^rd and on this they’ll be promoting their new cd which they’re currently ensconced in their studio recording.

The Nightingales (www.thenightingales.org.uk) tour from 29^th May to 10^th June to promote their new album No Love Lost on the Cooking Vinyl label. We are actively searching for UK and International festivals bookings as well as taking dates for an autumn tour from 9^th to 21^st October 2012.

Maika Makovski (www.myspace.com/maikamakovski) is confirmed to play the Great Escape Festival in Brighton Friday 11^th May. Dates 10^th and 12^th of May are open and available for bookings. We are looking for more festival dates for this summer and fall.

Bruce Cockburn (www.brucecockburn.com) returns to the U.K. to headline Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire on Friday 24^th August. He then begins a full-scale tour of the U.K. and possibly (fingers crossed!) selected European dates. The tour period for him August 24^th to September 10^th inclusive and he will be performing solo on all these dates.

The legendary singer-songwriter Charlie Dore (www.charliedore.com) hits the road again this winter with her band. Tour dates are November 20^th through December 9^th . We look forward to experiencing her voice and hearing her new CD Cheapskate Lullabies first hand!

Following her highly imaginative Living Room Tour earlier this year (which included a unique performance in the office mess aboard a nuclear submarine moored in Portsmouth, and a brilliant opening slot for half of the Gretchen Peters tour, Lisbee Stainton (www.lisbeestainton.com) continues to be one hard working singer-songwriter and we are booking dates for her in October 17^th through 28^th. Prior to that she is also opening act for Seth Lakeman on his May tour in mainland Europe!

Lynne Hanson, (www.lynnehanson.com) Canadian singer-songwriter, is returning to the U.K. in September. She was wonderfully entertaining as the opener for half of Gretchen Peters’ Hello Cruel World tour. Her dates for the upcoming tour are 27^th September through 14^th October. If you like “porch music with a little red dirt”, then she’s the artist for you!

Matraca Berg (www.matracaberg.com ) arrives for her debut solo tour of the U.K. in November 2012 which runs between 4^th – 17^th; expect some amazing singing and perhaps a few surprises as well! She was here formerly as one-third of the highly successful Wine, Women and Song tour June 2011. Open dates are disappearing quickly!

We still have 1 or 2 openings on the Steve Forbert (www.steveforbert.com) tour starting up in October 2012. Tour dates are 4^th through 21^st and we’re booking these dates with our friends over at Adastra Agency. Steve is one of the exciting headline acts at the Glasgow Americana Festival on Friday 5 October and his time here includes dates in Ireland.

If guitar virtuosity is your thing, then take a look at a date for 3 Boxes, featuring the brilliant talents of Clive Gregson, Mark Griffiths and Andy Roberts. These guys have toured and played with all the greats. Touring 23rd October to 11^th November to promote a debut album produced by legendary sonic boffin John Wood (Nick Drake, John Martyn, etc.); this CD is aptly called Strings Attached and is well worth a listen!

Legendary Irish group Altan (www.altan.ie) headlines the Ireby Festival 2 June 2012 (www.irebyfestival.co.uk), then returns to tour their new Compass Records CD The Poison Glen 26^th September to October 15^th . The Irish Times states that “Altan has never sounded better or tighter.” The Times is right!

Singer-songwriter Steve Forbert had his first major hit in 1979 when he was only 25 years old, shortly after moving to New York City from his hometown of Meridian, Miss where he had been working as a truck driver Thirty-plus years later, he’s still writing acclaimed songs and has released 14 studio albums, including a Grammy-nominated tribute to another Mississippi legend, Jimmie Rodgers. He performs around the world and even finds time to pursue his latest artistic adventure, this time in photography: an exhibit of his cell phone photographs recently opened at a Nashville art gallery.

Born in Meridian in 1954, Forbert began playing on a plastic guitar, graduating to a real guitar and taking lessons in a converted chicken shack for $1.50 an hour. He formed a band called The Epics when he was 14. They had a steady gig performing at dances at the local mental institution on Saturday mornings. From those humble beginnings Steve eventually moved to New York City to focus on his music, and found that his artful mixture of introspective pop, rock, folk, country and soul could not be ignored by the music industry.

In 1978, just months after arriving in the big city, Forbert signed his first record deal with CBS Records. His debut album, Alive On Arrival, showcased his distinctive musicality and became one of the year’s most acclaimed albums. After being compared to folk-based stars like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, Forbert still managed to forge his own, more modern path with his hit sophomore record Jackrabbit Slim. The highlight of the album was the #11 Billboard hit Romeo’s Tune: an upbeat song with timeless lyrics sweetened by a poetic sensibility, which has since become Steve’s signature style. Forbert’s intimate verbal imagery, paired with a roots-rocking musical approach, struck a chord with millions of people during the transitional period between ‘70s folk-rock and ‘80s New Wave. His brash-yet-sensitive take on songwriting and his unaffected delivery propelled the album up the charts, leading to sold-out shows and a feature in Rolling Stone magazine and even a high profile cameo as Cyndi Lauper’s tux-wearing, flower-toting boyfriend at the end of the “Girl’s Just Wanna Have Fun” video from 1983.

After a great run on the rock and roll main stage, Steve went looking for new inspiration and found it when he relocated to Nashville in the mid-1980’s, where his new works and his legacy have continued to attract recognition and new fans. Steve was inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame in 2006, and “Romeo’s Tune” was covered by Keith Urban in 2007. More recently he has written songs for the Occupy Wall St. movement and has re-released some of his earlier recordings on CD for the first time. While living in Music City, Steve has further honed his skills as a songwriter and performer and continued to blend folk, rock and country into his unique American sound, and has released a series of critically-acclaimed recordings. His most recent release, 2009’s The Place and the Time (429 Records), was reviewed in The Huffington Post as “all prime Steve Forbert, who is writing at his best.”

A father of three, Forbert is co-writing and collaborating in Nashville on a 2012 recording project, in addition to his regular touring. Still generating the kind of quality music that resonates with discerning listeners, Forbert is one of the few artists who can mesmerize a crowd with nothing but a distinctive voice, an acoustic guitar and his trusty harmonica slung around his neck, letting the purity of his music stand on its own. As one reviewer recently remarked, “Forbert is a hardcore troubadour who, artistically speaking, continues to fight the good fight by releasing one excellent album after another and working his ass off show after show to earn every single fan’s loyalty.”

3 Boxes are: CLIVE GREGSON, MARK GRIFFITHS and ANDY ROBERTS, and, with legendary producer JOHN WOOD (Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, John Martyn, etc.), they have just completed their debut, all-instrumental, album.

All the tunes on the debut album “Strings Attached” are self-penned.

Ironically, 3 Boxes defy any attempt to put them in any one, since their self-penned instrumental material encompasses a vast range of musicality – from folk, blues, swing, ballads and beyond. Their dexterity and interplay creates a raft of rhythm and melody on which to sail far beyond any barriers. Producer John Wood has captured the dynamics of their live studio performances and added a magical third dimension of resonance and clarity.

One of those few was Television guitarist Richard Lloyd. “Rocket opened for us in Cleveland,” he said. “We were walking around after soundcheck saying, ‘That’s one scary group!’ And I was saying to myself, ‘I want to be in that band.’”

Rocket From The Tombs blew apart in August 1975. David Thomas and Peter Laughner went on to form Pere Ubu, taking along rock classics such as “Final Solution,” “Life Stinks,” and “30 Seconds Over Tokyo.” Cheetah Chrome and John Madansky formed the Dead Boys, taking “Sonic Reducer,” “Ain’t It Fun,” “Down In Flames,” and several others.

Through word of mouth and a frenzied trafficking in bootlegs, Rocket From The Tombs acquired an international status out of all proportion to its brief existence. (A band in San Diego even co-opted the name, calling themselves Rocket From the Crypt, and went on to have some commercial success.) Finally, in 2002 a cd of live radio and concert tapes from 1975 was released as The Day The Earth Met The Rocket From The Tombs (Smog Veil Records).

UCLA scheduled a three day festival devoted to the music of David Thomas for Royce Hall, Los Angeles, February 2003. Thomas named it “Disastodrome” so nothing would go wrong. Rocket From The Tombs would open for Pere Ubu on the last day.

“We needed someone to complete the two guitar format,” David Thomas said. “We kicked some names around but Cheetah was adamant that Richard Lloyd was the only man for the job. And as it turned out, Cheetah was right.”

In June 2003 Rocket From The Tombs took to the road for the first time, playing in 6 cities to great acclaim.

David Fricke, editor of Rolling Stone, wrote, “No on else in American rock, underground or over, in 1974 and ’75, was writing and playing songs this hard and graphic about being f**ked over and fighting mad. No one else is doing it now.”

Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune wrote, “Rocket From the Tombs is not just the great lost proto-punk band of the ’70s. It’s one of the best bands of the 21st Century too.”

A cross-country tour of 26 dates was organized for November-December 2003. A live-in-the-studio album called Rocket Redux was recorded by Richard Lloyd as a concert-sales-only merchandising item. (A commercial release followed on Smog Veil Records in February 2004.)

From the beginning Rocket From The Tombs has been a volatile union of incompatible individuals drawn together like moths to flame. The tour was fiery and excruciatingly intense. True to form when it finished in a snowy parking lot of a Red Roof Inn outside Washington DC. Everyone vowed that this was really the end of the band, period, forever, and don’t-call-me… but committed to an appearance at the Punk Kongress in Germany in September 2004 all showed up and all was forgiven… again. Individual projects delayed further planning but in 2006 Rocket From The Tombs got together in Cleveland for a writing session and played a series of dates over the summer. Then another flux of incompatibility intervened and nothing happened for awhile. And then there was another writing session but another flux and then more nothing happened. Etc.

In January 2009 the band got together again in Room 146 of the Red Roof in Mentor OH, rehearsed for a few hours and recorded a new single. I Sell Soul / Romeo & Juliet (Hearpen HR150) was released April 6 2010.

In August 2010 a new album, Barfly, was finished, David Thomas producing at Suma, Painesville OH. It was released September 13 2011.

The band decided to replace Richard Lloyd in the touring group for an undetermined period of time. Clevelander Gary Siperko, from the MOFOS and cow-punk band The Whiskey Daredevils, stepped in. A short US tour in December 2011 followed. At the end of the tour Cheetah Chrome announced that he was retiring from the road. He will remain in the group as a non-touring member, contributing material, recording, and from time to time, hopefully, appearing on stage. He was replaced by Buddy Akita from This Moment In Black History, possibly the best Cleveland band of the last 5 years.

Rocket From The Tombs is:
David Thomas – singer
Gary Siperko – guitar
Buddy Akita – guitar
Craig Bell – bass
Steve Mehlman – drums
Cheetah Chrome (non-touring member) – guitar, vocals

If Matraca Berg has made a name for herself, it’s been for the gorgeous honesty she brings to longing, desire, survival and sometimes even fighting back. Certainly, “If I Had Wings,” the smoldering opener of Berg’s The Dreaming Fields, finds its heroine grappling with the notion, “Mama said call the preacher, I just called the law/ We all knew sooner or later, it was gonna’ be him of me…”

“It wasn’t about me, obviously,” allows the Hall of Fame songwriter a tinge sadly. “But being from the South, working class deep Southern roots – between that and the work I’ve done with Magdalene House and the stories you hear there… It puts a whole other spin on what you know.

“There are really very few women that I don’t see a part of myself in, no matter what they do, what their station of life. We all as women share things; you tend to know each other, have recognition on a cellular level, which defies words. You don’t even have to talk about it, you just know… and that’s the glue that holds us together.”

Matraca Berg has served as a cartographer for the hills and valleys of women’s souls, doubts, loves and sorrows for her whole life. It is how she earned her first #1 at 18 and Grammy nomination at 22. That emotional transparency can be heard all over The Dreaming Fields: in the terror of fading beauty that is “Silver & Glass,” the memories and loss that permeates “Racing The Angels,” the lost way of life that grounds the title track, even the world weary traveler seeing the commonalities in “A Cold Rainy Morning in London in June.”

The Dreaming Fields is rumination on loss. In many ways, it’s also an elegy – for her grandparents’ Wisconsin dairy farm, the innocence that has no chance in our modern world, certainly the wildly creative hippie community that once was the silent cornerstone of Nashville’s Music Row.

“It’s about good-bye, and it’s about grief. I’m one of the few people who was born and raised here,” the willowy brown-haired woman offers. “I grew up around Hall of Fame songwriters – Harlan Howard, Dave Purvey, Red Lane were around our house. It felt like they were my family, and those hallways and all that laughter and picking was my home.

“My last Grammy nomination was for Gretchen Wilson’s ‘I Don’t Feel Like Loving You Today’,” she continues quietly. “Which was me picking up where Harlan Howard left off. He was like a favorite uncle, and the way he wrote was just so… heartbreakingly good! Classic country songs, real simple and unadorned and perfect – and I didn’t want that to forget that.

“I never thought that greatness, that classic country would get washed away in the mainstream… but it became more of an industry, more about writing with someone because of the manager or publishing company – clocking in and out almost, which is everything the Nashville I grew up on wasn’t!

“I felt a lot of grief from that… I never thought I’d land in the margins and wouldn’t understand what was going on. That wasn’t the Nashville that I knew; I might as well have been in L.A. because I felt as far away.

Certainly the redemption delivered by the river in “Oh, Cumberland,” a bittersweet song that first appeared on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol 3, is endemic of the more bucolic nature of middle Tennessee that Berg longed for. “Part of that was a friend of mine who’d moved to L.A. who lost and lonely… I wrote it as much for her, as for me… because you can’t help but miss the essence of where you’re from. Even if you’re called somewhere else, I think Tennessee girls yearn for that comfort which is that kind of country.”

While his early gigs didn’t pay much, he struck up friendships with a number of noted musicians and began studying with his hero Reverend Davis. Bromberg’s guitar skills didn’t go unnoticed, and he began accompanying a number of village folk acts both on-stage and in the studio, including Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Richie Havens. Bromberg was playing guitar with singer Rosalie Sorrels when she was booked to play the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival in Great Britain; Bromberg played an impromptu solo set after Sorrels was done, and he went over well enough that he was offered a deal with Columbia Records as a solo artist. Bromberg’s self-titled debut was released in 1971, and featured the song “The Holdup,” a radio favorite that Bromberg co-wrote with George Harrison. Between 1971 and 1976, Bromberg recorded six albums for Columbia and toured extensively as well as maintaining a hectic schedule of session work, lending his talents on guitar, Dobro, mandolin, and fiddle to albums by Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, the Eagles, Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, Gordon Lightfoot, Bonnie Raitt, Doug Sahm, and many more. (Bromberg also produced an album for Dylan that has yet to be released in full.)

In 1977, Bromberg signed a new record deal with Fantasy Records, and issued his first album for the label, Reckless Abandon; three more albums of new material followed, but in 1980 Bromberg decided he was tired of the rigors of touring and took a sabbatical from the road, occasionally playing sessions for friends and staging occasional live shows but devoting most of his time to studying at the Kenneth Warren School of Violin Making in Chicago. It wasn’t until 1990 that Bromberg released a new album, Sideman Serenade, and it was 2007 when his next studio set appeared, Try Me One More Time, which earned a Grammy nomination as Best Traditional Folk Album. In the meantime, Bromberg had established a successful business building and repairing violins as well as dealing in quality instruments, and in 2002 he opened a shop in Wilmington, Delaware, simply called David Bromberg Fine Violins. In 2011, Bromberg returned with a new and ambitious solo album, Use Me, in which he performed new songs written at his request by some of his favorite tunesmiths, including John Hiatt, Guy Clark, Dr. John, Keb’ Mo’, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos.

Although best known as one of the UK’s most respected singer-songwriters, Charlie Dore has a multi-faceted career that includes acting in film, TV and radio, comedy-improvisation and composition for film and TV.

Having studied Drama at Arts Educational School, Tring and London, Charlie worked for 2 years in repertory in Newcastle at the Tyneside Theatre Company, starting in the touring company, Stagecoach, where she performed in theatres,  schools, streets, a psychiatric hospital, Oxford University and the Swan Hunter shipyard canteen, later progressing to the more conventional auditorium where she appeared in several shows directed by Michael Bogdanov, including a rock musical version of the Bacchae, ‘Orgy’ by CP Taylor, ‘Oh What A Lovely War’ and  Joe Orton’s What The Butler Saw’.

Moving back to London, she worked in fringe theatre and then joined Thames TV’s long-running series ‘Rainbow’ for 18 months, writing and performing songs with Julian Littman, who she’d met at drama school, and Karl Johnson, an actor-musician from the Tyneside Theatre Company.

A friend, blues guitarist Sam Mitchell, asked Charlie to dep for him at Obelisk, a Westbourne Grove pancake house he played at on Monday nights. Dore co-opted Julian Littman and Karl Johnson to help pad out the long sets required and the band grew, eventually including Karl’s brother Stuart Johnson on banjo and Dobro, and various guests on fiddle, mandolin and guitar. This was the basis of her first band, Hula Valley. The band played a selection of bluegrass,  western swing and hillbilly music as Dore was yet to resume her own song writing.

As the band grew and changed shape and name, from Prairie Oyster to Fresh Oyster to Charlie Dore’s Back Pocket,  original material started to flow and the band played the London pub and club circuit, regularly appearing at The Hope and Anchor, The Half Moon, Dingwalls and the Rock Garden.During this period the band personnel was still changing and included, among others, Charlie Gaisford, Keith Nelson, Gus York and Pick Withers on drums, who was also playing with the early Dire Straits. She was spotted by Island Records and signed to a solo recording and publishing deal as the UK’s answer to Emmylou Harris by Chris Blackwell in 1978, later that year being flown to Nashville to work with producer Audie Ashworth at his Crazy Mama’s studio. Dore continued to work with Littman, her guitarist and co-writer and the first album,’Where To Now’, featured many of the Nashville A-team, including Charlie McCoy, Reggie Young, Sonny Curtis and David Briggs.

Island employed Joe Boyd to re-mix the album, but thought the album ‘too country’ and drafted in UK producers Alan Tarney and Bruce Welch to re-record several tracks, including ‘Fear of Flying’ ‘ and Pilot of the Airwaves’, which went on to become the enduring radio classic, along the way reaching no 13 on the US Billboard chart, earning Dore the Record World New Female Artist of the Year, an Ascap award and charting in Canada, Germany, Australia and Europe. Although a massive airplay hit, hovering in the top 3 for many weeks, the single reached only No 66 in the UK charts and Dore left Island for a deal with Chrysalis.

Chrysalis teamed Charlie with veteran producer Glyn Johns, but in an almost uncanny mirroring of the Island scenario, the company weren’t happy with the rootsy result and Charlie was flown to Los Angeles to re-record the entire album with producer Stewart Levine at the helm.

The second album, ‘Listen’ featured most of Toto as the studio band and although Charlie remained a fan of both producer and band, she is well documented as saying that the re-making of the album represented an identity crisis for her as both a writer and performer. She toured with her UK band throughout ’81-’82, representing the UK in Tokyo at the Yamaha Song Festival and won the Silver prize at the Seoul Song Festival with her song ‘Sister Revenge’.

In 1983 she starred opposite Jonathan Pryce and Tim Curry In Richard Eyre’s award winning film, ‘The Ploughman’s Lunch’ and during the 80′s more acting work followed, including leading roles in ‘Hard Cases’  and ‘A Killing On The Exchange’ for ITV,  ‘South of the Border’ for BBC and two productions, ‘Whistle Stop’ and “The Big Sweep’ with the iconic People Show company, the UK’s longest running fringe theatre group.

Charlie also appeared in Eric Idle’s comedy for BBC radio,’Behind The Crease’, directed by Harry Thompson. This was a second collaboration, the first being a duet with Idle, ‘Harry’, which Idle had written and performed with Dore as a jokey birthday present for his friend Harry Nilssen. Nilsson loved the song so much he surprised Idle by including the original recording on his 1980 ”Flash Harry’ album.

During this time she started to have success as a writer for other artists, initially scoring a US No 4 with ‘Strut’, co-written with Julian Littman for Sheena Easton and going on to have her songs recorded by a diverse list of artists including Tina Turner, George Harrison, Celine Dion, Paul Carrack, Ricky Ross, Worlds Apart and Jimmy Nail, for whom she wrote ‘Ain’t No Doubt’, a UK no.1.

In 1990 she co-founded comedy-improvisation troupe, Dogs On Holiday, which hosted and performed at it’s own Soho venue, The Hurricane Club. The club, which ran successfully for 6 years on Saturday nights with a mixture of improvisation and stand-up, played regular host to the emerging careers of comedians such as Mark Lamarr, Harry Hill and Jo Brand and also enjoyed a guest visit from Robin Williams, who joined the team onstage for the an evening of improvisation.

In 1995 Dore ventured back into the recording studio to record her own album, ‘Things Change’ (Black Ink/Grapevine),which included the original version of ‘Refuse To Dance’, featuring actor Alan Rickman (this song was later covered by Celine Dion on her multi-platinum album ‘The Color of My Love’). The album also included “Time Goes By’ which was remixed by Italian team Souled Out and produced a European dance hit, reaching no 6 in Italy and no 1 in Israel.

Always busy and in demand as a songwriter and collaborator, over the next decade she continued to produce hits for a string of artists including German pop idols No Angels, Lisa Stansfield, Hayley Westenra, Status Quo and an unlikely second track for Celine Dion, the quirky ‘Rain, Tax (it’s inevitable)’, co-written with another long-standing collaborator, Terry Britten, which appeared on the multi-platinum selling ‘A New Day Has Come’ album.

Between 2001 and 2003 Dore and Littman provided the score for two series of  BBC drama ‘Two Thousand Acres of Sky’ and the film, ‘Roman Road’ (Zenith 2004). During this time she also collaborated with Simon Rogers, one half of underground dance dons Slacker, to produce ‘Space County’, a collection of ambient country music.

In 2005 Charlie released ‘Sleep All Day and Other Stories’, a return to her acoustic country-folk roots, followed by ‘Cuckoo Hill’ in 2006. Both albums won her excellent reviews as well as the International Acoustic Music Awards Grand Prize for the song ‘Looking For My Own Lone Ranger’, from the Cuckoo Hill album. After years of writing commercially for others she had finally rediscovered her own voice and found her audience. ‘File under treasure’, wrote Charlie Gillett in the Observer Music Magazine.

2009 saw the release of ‘The Hula Valley Songbook’, a collection of American hillbilly, western swing and popular favourites of the 1930′s, based around the set list performed by her first band and originally recorded by artists such as Jimmie Rodgers, Al Bowlley and Milton Brown. Charlie toured the UK with her band, Julian Littman, Dudley Phillips, Steve Simpson and Jake Walker, collectively known as the Hula Valley Orchestra, also opening for Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra for several of his summer concerts.

In October 2009 Dore’s cover of ‘Here Comes the Sun’, a Hawaiian reggae version produced with Littman, was included in Mojo Magazine’s tribute album, ‘Abbey Road Revisited’. This was this biggest selling edition of the magazine to date.

Charlie’s album, ‘Cheapskate Lullabyes’ was released on June 13th 2011 and won ‘excellent reviews across the board’.  Her seventh album and first set of originals since 2006 is an eclectic collection of genre-defying musical styles which she describes as ‘borrowed from folk, country, Django Reinhardt and the Beatles’. Lyrically, the subject matter ranges from infidelity (‘His Wife’) to debt (‘Cheapskate Lullabye’), via drink (‘A Man Walks Into A Bar’), death (‘Australia’), desire (‘Liontamer’), therapy (‘Fifty Pound Father’) and difficult step-children (‘Milk Teeth’). Live dates with THe Hula Valley Orchestra included Charlie’s first appearance at Glastonbury, Summertyne and Cropredy festivals.

Gretchen has also now announced for the following UK festivals:

June 22,2012     Isle of Wight     Garden Stage

June 29, 2012    Cornbury Festival     River Stage

June 30, 2012   Maverick Festival     Peacock Stage

July 27, 2012    Cambridge Festival     Stage Two

July 28, 2012     Cambridge Festival     Stage One

We are expecting more festivals and dates to be added over the next few days.  Watch this space!

If you are interested in making an offer or discussing a proposal, please contact nigel.morton@moneypennymusic.co.uk.

We are pleased to say Gretchen Peters is at last getting the commercial, critical and artistic recognition she so richly deserves. The responses across the media worldwide to her lastest CD release “Hello Cruel World” have been stunning! These include outstanding reviews in a variety of publications ranging from Q, The Sun, Maverick Magazine, Uncut, Billboard, Sunday Times and Financial Times. On U.K. national radio, not only has Gretchen had a session broadcast on Bob Harris’ radio2 country music program in January, she has an upcoming appearance on radio2 Simon Mayo’s feature Drivetime. Across the whole of the U.K., local stations and press have followed the example set nationally. All this activity is helping to make her current tour of the U.K. and Europe (March 1 to April 5) her most successful to date, with sold out shows in advance at a number of venues. Finally, we are pleased to announce that Gretchen has also confirmed to perform at the legendary Isle of Wight Festival, Garden Stage on June 29. She is also playing Cornbury Festival on River Stage June 29 and Cambridge Festival Stages 2 and 1 July 27 and 28. Finally, she is appearing at Southern Fried Festival July 29. We expect to announce even more soon.

All the best for 2012!