MARTIN SIMPSON

SOME KIND OF JUBILEE

Fifty Years of Songs, Stories & Extraordinary Guitar Playing

There are guitarists who impress you, guitarists who dazzle you, and then there are those rare players who seem able to make six strings carry the weight of an entire life. Martin Simpson belongs firmly in the latter camp.

Now, for what will be his fourth visit to Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre, one of the great figures of British folk and acoustic music returns to our tiny listening room at an extraordinary moment in his career: fifty years after the release of his debut album, Golden Vanity, and with a brand-new record that Martin himself describes as "my best work to date."

That album, Some Kind of Jubilee, arrives on the legendary Topic Records on 25 September 2026 and feels less like a backward-looking anniversary celebration than the sound of an artist still searching, still discovering and still completely absorbed by the possibilities of a song and a guitar. Recorded partly at Jackson Browne's Groovemaster Studio in Santa Monica and completed back in Yorkshire, it brings together newly written material, traditional songs and radically refreshed pieces from Simpson's own remarkable catalogue.

The company he keeps tells its own story. The album features pedal-steel master Greg Leisz, whose credits stretch through Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan; guitarist Zac Hobbs, cellist Liz Hanks, guitarist Louis Campbell and double bassist Ben Nicholls. Its sixteen songs roam freely across centuries and continents, from The Recruited Collier, Handsome Molly and Mary Hamilton through Richard Thompson's Down Where The Drunkards Roll, songs inspired by Ruby Bridges and Victor Jara, and a beautifully considered reading of Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.

It is a typically Simpson collection. England and America constantly talking to one another. Folk ballads rubbing shoulders with blues, country, protest song and contemporary songwriting. Ancient stories suddenly sounding startlingly modern.

And that conversation between the two sides of the Atlantic has defined much of Martin's musical life.

Born in Scunthorpe, Simpson was captivated by music almost absurdly young. Hearing the immense voice of Paul Robeson at the age of four planted a seed that never went away. As a teenager he encountered blues giants including Jimmy Reed and Big Joe Williams, experiences that helped create the musical vocabulary he has spent a lifetime developing: English traditional music on one side, American blues, old-time music and song on the other. In a fascinating 2026 interview, Simpson recalled deciding at four years old that he wanted, quite simply, to "make people cry for a living."

Half a century after Golden Vanity, he is still doing precisely that.

Because reducing Martin Simpson simply to a virtuoso guitarist misses half the point. The technique is unquestionably there — that extraordinary fingerstyle articulation, slide playing, alternate tunings and seemingly orchestral command of an acoustic guitar — but technique has never been the destination. It is there to serve the story.

That distinction is what makes seeing Simpson in a small room so special. A guitar can whisper. A bass note can suddenly change the emotional temperature of a song. An old ballad can become a piece of living theatre. A story told between numbers can be hilarious one moment and devastating the next.

Jackson Browne perhaps described Simpson's gift best when he spoke of the extraordinary clarity and expressiveness of his playing — how Simpson can hold back the bass strings until their eventual arrival feels almost like an orchestra entering the room.

Across five decades Martin has worked alongside an astonishing roll-call of musicians including June Tabor, Richard Thompson, Bonnie Raitt, Danny Thompson, David Hidalgo, Martin Taylor, Dom Flemons, Thomm Jutz, Jackson Browne and his fellow Sheffield musical traveller Richard Hawley. Yet for all those collaborations, there remains something particularly powerful about Simpson completely alone: one voice, one guitar or banjo, and a room quiet enough to hear every movement of his fingers.

His recent creative run has been remarkable. The 2023 collaboration with Thomm Jutz, Nothing But Green Willow: The Songs Of Mary Sands And Jane Gentry, delved deep into the connections between British traditional song and Appalachia. Then came 2024's magnificent Skydancers, Simpson's 24th album and 12th for Topic Records.

The response was extraordinary. MOJO called Skydancers "Penguin Eggs-good. Seriously", while Uncut hailed its "acoustic finger-picking magic." KLOF described it as "an excellent record from a master of his craft", and Richard Hawley considered it Simpson's finest work in almost half a century.

Remarkably, Simpson himself told KLOF during that period that he had never felt more on top of playing live — quite a statement from somebody who had already spent decades mastering the intimate solo concert.

And now comes Some Kind of Jubilee.

The title may suggest celebration, but this is no comfortable victory lap. Topic Records describes it as a forward-looking work, and that seems important. Martin Simpson at this stage of his life isn't attempting to recreate 1976. He is carrying everything learned during those intervening fifty years into what comes next.

That makes this fourth Barnoldswick appearance feel particularly special.

There are performers perfectly suited to enormous theatres and festival stages. Martin Simpson certainly has the stature to fill them. But there is something else entirely about sitting only a few feet away from a musician of this calibre and watching the machinery at work — the thumb moving independently across the bass strings, the slide hanging in the air for a fraction of a second, a centuries-old lyric suddenly revealing something intensely personal.

Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre was built for evenings like this.

No spectacle. No barrier between artist and audience. Just sixty people in a cellar listening room and one of Britain's truly exceptional musicians sitting close enough for you to see every note being made.

Martin Simpson has been nominated an extraordinary 32 times across the 18-year history of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, more than any other performer, including thirteen Musician of the Year nominations and two wins. Yet statistics and awards only tell you that other people recognise his importance. They don't explain the experience of actually hearing him.

For that, you need the room to become quiet.

You need the first guitar note.

And then you understand.

Martin Simpson returns to Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre for the fourth time — fifty years into an extraordinary recording career, armed with Some Kind of Jubilee, and still finding new stories to tell.

A master guitarist. A remarkable storyteller. A genuine British original.