Cambridge-bound musician Sam Kelly: ‘Our frustrated songs were written in lockdown’
Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys is a young folk collective that has developed a significant following over the last few years, both in the East of England and further afield.
“One of the best bands on the scene”, according to Cambridge favourite Seth Lakeman, the Lost Boys are led by BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-winning singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Sam Kelly.
Renowned for their carefully crafted and emotionally delivered pop-driven folk music – which includes original material and new arrangements of traditional folk songs – Jamie Francis (banjo), Graham Coe (cello), Toby Shaer (whistles/fiddle), Archie Moss (melodeon), Evan Carson (drums) and group leader Sam have been an explosive force since busting onto the scene in 2016.
After their 2017 album Pretty Peggy garnered them a nomination for best group at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2018, Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys returned with a new album, The Wishing Tree, in August.
The band has previously shared the stage with the likes of Ed Sheeran, Seth Lakeman and Kate Rusby, and is well known for its fun and exciting live shows – something the Cambridge audience will get to witness first-hand when the sextet performs at the Junction, with support from Katherine Priddy, on November 6, the first night of its Album Launch Tour.
Speaking to the Cambridge Independent from “just outside Scunthorpe”, the Norfolk-based musician admits that it was “nice, in a way, to have a little break”, as far as touring was concerned – “to just focus on a few other things for a while, I suppose, pick up old hobbies... but not ideal in terms of actually earning money to stay alive! So it’s nice to be getting back to it.”
The group was able to get together last year and play a few festivals, in the gap between the two lockdowns. “We were keeping in touch through various mediums,” says Sam, 29, “and ended up actually managing to record an album in September last year. So we didn’t have too bad a year, really, which seems mad.”
Sam, who studied music at university and who says he’s now been doing it full time for nearly 10 years, adds: “We spent about a month locked down in a studio in the middle of nowhere in Yorkshire; we sort of had our own little bubble so we were very lucky.”
He reveals that the writing of the songs for the album had been an “ongoing process for a few years”, noting: “There are some songs that we wrote during lockdown and there are some that we’d been working on because it had been four years since our last album, so some have just developed over time... The more angry and frustrated-sounding ones generally were written in lockdown!”
Sam says that after his home town of Norwich, Cambridge is the “second place on the list for any tour of ours, just because we love playing there so much. We’ve played at the Cambridge Folk Festival four or five times, we’ve played at Cambridge Folk Club a few times...
“It’s one of those cities where we’ve played there all the way through our journey, in different venues, and watched our audience slowly build up. We absolutely love coming back to Cambridge.”
Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys will be appearing on stage at the Junction’s J2 on Saturday, November 6. Visit junction.co.uk for more information. For more on Sam and co, go to samkelly.org.
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