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Over
the past four decades, Jez Lowe has been one of the UK’s
busiest singer-songwriters, playing for audiences the
world over, either solo, (with guitar, cittern, mandolin
and harmonica accompaniment), or with his long-time band
The Bad Pennies. He has taken his songs of North-East
England to concerts and festivals all across Europe,
Canada and the USA, as well as building a sizeable
following in Australia and New Zealand. Along the way he
has gathered a long list of awards and nominations,
including from the BBC Folk Awards and the Sony Radio
Awards. His pace and enthusiasm for writing, performing
and touring shows no sign of waning.
Jez
Lowe’s self-penned songs are among the mostly
widely sung wherever folk and acoustic music is
performed around the world. Over the last couple of
decades, the likes of Fairport Convention, The
Dubliners, The Unthanks, Wizz Jones, The McCalmans, Mary
Black, The Duhks, Bob Fox, The Young Uns, Enda Kenny,
Cherish The Ladies, Tom McConville, The Clancys and
scores more, have queued up to adopt his songs for their
own repertoires.
No wonder no less than Richard
Thompson has called him “The best singer
songwriter to come out of the UK for a long time”,
and personally invited him to play at Thompson’s
Meltdown Festival at London’s South Bank Centre in
2010.
Jez
Lowe’s contributions to the on-going BBC Radio
series The Radio Ballads has cemented this reputation,
with a Sony Radio Award among the many accolades coming
its way. The project culminated in a live BBC Radio 2
broadcast In November 2018 to commemorate The Great War
Centenary that featured Jez alongside the BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra and narrator Michael Morpurgo.
Jez is also known for his collaborations with
fellow artists, notably a long-established partnership
with Canadian songwriter James Keelaghan, and a recent
duo stint with ace guitarist Steve Tilston that resulted
in a best-selling album, “The Janus Game” in
2018. Most notably,as part of The Pitmen Poets (with Bob
Fox, Benny Graham and Billy Mitchell), Jez has helped to
rekindle the fire in the tradition of mining songs and
culture of his native region in a series of sell-out
theatre performances around the UK.
As
BBC Radio DJ Mike Harding said recently, “No-one
else writes or sounds like Jez Lowe”, and chances
are, even if you’ve never heard the man himself,
you’ll have heard his songs, sung at festivals,
club-gigs, open-mikes or on CD, by the great and good,
the professional and the enthusiast, the young and
not-so-young. What higher accolade could a songwriter
hope for?
‘Jez
Lowe is one of our finest songwriters.’ BBC
Radio 2
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