Pure Local Extra – Steve Wride and Iona Crahart

Newport Folk Club is a folk collective which meets up every week to perform folk music. Anyone can come to watch or play. Other than the collective, Steve and Keith are a duo known as The Crumble Brothers who perform some well known songs acapella style. Iona is a part of a folk duo with her Dad (Tim) known as The Blessed Crow. They make their own music, usually protest, spiritual or folklore. Iona is the singer of the duo but she also knows how to play Irish drums.

The first song we listened to in the show was “Newport Rising” by Iona’s duo. A light protest song, as the name suggests, about the Chartist movement. This movement was very important in Iona’s life. She told us that the quote “You’ve put a sword in our hands and a noose round our neck” had a particular influence on the song.

We then discussed upcoming events for our artists. For Steve and Keith, a few festivals are coming up. The Folk Festival in Newport on the 6th of April, full of 10 acts, many of which are connected to the folk collective. Another is the Festival of the Sea from 31st of May to the 1st of June in many different venues throughout the city. As for Iona, she is going around many folk clubs in Wales. She’s got gigs coming up in places like Pontardawe and Tredegar Park folk festival.

We then got 2 live performances from Steve and Keith. The first being an acapella cover of Rave On by Buddy Holly. Steve explained that they saw an acapella version of it and decided to do their own. Similarly, the second song they performed was Stormy Winds by Waterson:Carthy. Like the first song, they saw a version of it and decided to do their own. The duo don’t make their own songs and would rather cover pre-existing ones.

This is only a little bit of what happened in the show, you can listen to the full thing here