Melting Vinyl: Bringing the cream of live music to Brighton.

DHP Present:

Sam Lee + Special Guests

TICKETS ON SALE NOW.

Sam Lee plays a unique role in the British music scene. A highly inventive and original singer, folk song interpreter, a passionate conservationist, committed song collector and a successful creator of live events. Alongside his organisation The Nest Collective and fellow collaborators Sam has shaken up the live music scene breaking the boundaries between folk and contemporary music and the assumed place and way folksong is heard. He’s injected a renewed passion into this old material, helping to develop its ecosystem by not only inviting in a new listenership but also interrogating what the messages in these old songs hold for us today. With his forthcoming album, Old Wow, he’s summonsed up a truly compelling and emotional album that takes his work to yet another level. He may not intend to, but Sam Lee always surprises.

Unlike many of those in the current folk scene, Sam was brought up in North
London’s Kentish Town. He forged a unique love of music and nature when
packed off on summer holidays with the children’s charity Forest School Camps,
where kids of all backgrounds go deep into the wild and sing every night around
the campfire. Though his first musical loves were Michael Jackson and Joni
Mitchell, once he connected, aged 25, that the songs he sang as a child during
those formative summers had older roots in our national heritage “I realised I was
as free as anyone else to sing these songs”, it became “an obsession”. Through
chance circumstance, he formed a close bond with the Scottish singer Stanley
Robertson, (nephew of the legendary ballad singer Jeannie Robertson MBE),
and was effectively ‘mentored’ for four years being gifted literally hundreds of
songs and the ancient ‘way’ in how to sing them. After Stanely’s death in 2009,
he became an avid collector of traditional songs, spending time seeking out the
elders of the Gypsy Traveller community recording thousands of songs in
England and Ireland from the last generation to sing this repertoire. It is from this
unique collection, held within his public digital songcollectors.org archive, that
Sam set out through his own albums to “highlight the beauty of these songs
through unusual and contemporary settings”.

Yes, Sam plays a unique role in the British music scene. And now, with Old Wow
he has re-worked traditional songs to create what he describes as “a timeless
bridge, music that can be looking both backward and forwards, and a soulful
accompaniment to an urgent need to fall back in love with nature if we are to
know how to protect it”.