Spafford Campbell

Event information

Real World Records signed fiddle player Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell, twenty-something mould-breaking and conservatoire-trained virtuosos, in May 2025. They release their album Tomorrow Held on 1 August 2025. It is a work comprising of eight largely instrumental tracks that fold in elements of jazz, post-rock and chamber classical music while raiding the folk music toolbox. Call it what you want: post-folk. Trad-noir. Folk nihilism.

“We realised that we both wanted to push accepted sounds into new territories,” says the Leeds-raised Spafford, a nominee for BBC Young Composer of the Year Award and a scholarship student at London’s Royal Academy of Music. Born to writer parents — his mother’s extended family also sing English folk songs — he grew fascinated with the drone-based fiddle stylings of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh of Irish superstars The Gloaming. For a while he toured with a vintage village green fair called Giffords Circus.

“Our music reflects our backgrounds,” says Campbell, who studied at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music and performed as a sideman to Sam Lee, Sam Sweeney and iconic singer-guitarist Martin Simpson.“Owen’s fiddle playing has a wonderfully deep underpinning in tradition, which is sort of ever-present, so if we are trying to craft a sound with its own energy, that trad undertone can’t really ever get completely lost.”

While redolent of Talk Talk’s moody, experimental 1988 opus Spirit of Eden, and riven with a Bon Iver-ish sense of transcendence, Tomorrow Held is a work greater than the sum of its parts — parts that include effects pedals, ambient cassette loops, flashes of electric guitar, some electronic processing on fiddle and impressionistic accompaniment from Alex Lyon on bass clarinet and Ben Nicholls on double bass.

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