Bridget Hayden & the Apparitions / Sam McLoughlin / dbh

Event information

We are thrilled to bring one of Yorkshire's foremost experimental musicians, Bridget Hayden, to Bishops' House backed by the Apparitions. Their new album on Basin Rock is sure to top our folk album of the year lists, forget folk, ANY album of the year.

Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions:

Bridget Hayden is an experimental musician, who invited the ghosts in for the classic folk songs that made up her stunning album, Cold Blows the Rain, released last bleak winter via the Basin Rock label to much acclaim.

The songs that make up Cold Blows the Rain come wrapped in mist and coated with drizzle, those elements shaping the album as much as the voice and the instruments held within, as real but ambiguous as the ghosts that linger in the shadows. The sound of the dark valley floor in Todmorden, West Yorkshire where Bridget calls home.

“The weather speaks the most eloquently about human loss,” Bridget says. “It’s good to feel enveloped by something so much vaster than ourselves. The rain and the tears all become one.”

Underpinned by waves of analogue reverb, and led by Bridget’s stirring and weather-beaten voice, the songs drift and crawl like low heavy clouds on flat-top hills, shaped by the land. The backdrop is equally as arresting, all subtle gloom cast in shadow, a gentle but pronounced swirling of textures, crafted from harmonium and violin courtesy of The Apparitions (Sam Mcloughlin and Dan Bridgewood-Hill).

"Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions start the year with traditional songs as heavy as the sodden moors at midnight. They unfurl at a glacial pace, with analogue synths and delicate banjos buoying up Hayden’s deep, measured voice." The Guardian 'Folk Album of the Month'
"Bridget Hayden’s folk music is the kind that makes you stop and pay attention." The Quietus
"Trad folk songs, hauntingly interpreted.... Hayden has pulled off one of the greatest renditions of them all." 9/10 Uncut 'Album of the Month'
"the English and Irish folks songs in Cold Blows The Wind revel in newfound space: weatherbeaten, but with lungs filled with moorland air" The Wire
"Ominous drones, clanking banjos, filthy weather: a winning combo." **** MOJO
"It’s an album as distinct and vivid as its characters are dark and illusory... like a meeting of June Tabor, Laura Cannell and Alison Cotton." KLOF
"Hayden's voice floats over these ancient songs like a mist on the Yorkshire Moors and the result is an album of sinister, haunting romance." **** The Times
"extraordinarily beautiful" Aquarium Drunkard

"Backed by her Apparations and recorded in in an ‘Odmorden hall, she takes on stone cold classics like Black Water Side, (She Moved) Through The Fayre and The Unquiet Grave and makes them even more haunting and melancholy than usual, her rich and keening voice backed by sparse, droning instrumentation from fiddles, banjos and harmonium, the whole thing deeply evocative and very much a product of the wyrd world of Calderdale. Cold Blows The Rain is a powerful, personal gem." (Lee Fisher at Narc)

As if that wasn't enough there will be solo sets from Sam McLoughlin of Folklore Tapes / Sam and the Plants. and dbh, who together form the Apparitions.