Primary network connections between the Newcastle folk scene, with the lowlands, highlands and islands of Scotland.
The Northeast of England has attracted young folk musicians from across the UK and further afield for decades now, instrumental in this was a project founded there in 1988 “Folkworks, a dedicated folk arts development agency based in Newcastle… the organisation was to have a considerable impact on the subsequent teaching of folk and traditional music both in Britain and beyond.” (Price 2017)
Many of the people in my primary network directly benefitted from the Folkworks project as young musicians. Although I didn’t personally get involved with their programmes, I studied contemporary and jazz music alongside some of the young musicians who were, in the Sage Gateshead weekend school for young musicians. The legacy and ongoing work of this project is still very noticeable to me in the local folk music scene today, with some of my peers teaching as part of their programmes.
A later development of this in the region included the Folk and Traditional Music degree founded in 2001 (Newcastle University 2022), one of the first of its kind. Shortly after the degree programme started, Folkworks was integrated into the North Music Trust at the Sage Gateshead building in 2002. (Price 2017) I was studying at an undergraduate level on a different programme focused on jazz, popular and contemporary music. The Folk and Traditional Music degree attracted musicians from across the UK and further afield, including Alasdair Taylor from Inverness, one of the founding members of Elephant Sessions. This was where he met local bass player Seth Tinsley (John 2022), I had worked with Seth previously in a technical role for a show he was playing in another band.
After being a fan of Elephant Sessions for a couple of years, I was delighted to be asked to mix live performances for them at a few festivals and events in North America. This was long after I completed my undergraduate studies but was one of the experiences that inspired an interest in Scottish music. Particularly because they were fusing traditional influences with genres I was more actively participating with, including indie rock and electronica. This departure from tradition and making something new using that influence was the thing that really grabbed me.
Anecdotally, various participants described to me the Folk and Traditional Music degree as not being particularly encouraging of innovation, suggesting its primary purpose is to share and encourage traditional music making. The academic studies referencing the course to date suggests there may well have been some contradictions between pedagogies, but many of the modules of the course actively encourage improvisation and composition of new material, at least. (Keegan-Phipps 2008)
A formative personal connection I developed from my work as a sound engineer, was with another Scottish band called Eabhal. This was one of the village hall connections from my work hiring out a PA system for Newcastle bands, including those with more rural roots nearby. The original line up of Eabhal met studying music in the Outer Hebrides on Uist, they were my first primary connection to music from the area.
One of the members of Eabhal grew up in Allendale in the Northeast of England, and some of their repertoire at the time included local songs describing a history of land rights in the area. This combined with their community connections to the area contributed to them being able to sell tickets locally, making them a popular choice as a guest act so we worked together several times incidentally before they reached out to employ me directly in 2019. At this point they had started working with a Gaelic singer, Kaitlin Ross.
Two years later when I received funding from Arts Council England, I had the opportunity to develop my own creative practice and decided to focus on the intersections between folk music and dance music that had been inspiring me in recent years. This funding included a reasonable budget for new collaborations, so I approached Kaitlin and three other musicians from a traditional folk background, some of them had completed the Folk and Traditional Music degree and I had noticed similar interests in making new music with some of their previous projects.
We spent a week playing together and recording our ideas, some of them contemporary arrangements of traditional Gaelic songs collected by Kaitlin. These collaborations led to forming a band called the Cosys Ex collective, who started performing live soon after. Many of these musicians were already based in different cities and are much in demand as professionals in their respective scenes. As part of working out how this collective might operate with a diverse pool of musicians, depending on availability and budget, it became important for me to learn these Gaelic songs myself.
The funding had at this point ran out, but using the skills developed and recordings taken during this time, I began to teach myself the songs using a creative method of sampling the audio, splitting and playing it back at a slower speed using Ableton Live. This allowed me to learn the vocal sounds relatively quickly, although this method was not always completely accurate, I was aided in correcting inaccuracies by my collaborators including Kaitlin whenever we had the budget or time to work together again.
The role of technology has been influencing traditional music making for generations now, whilst songs are still passed down orally in some cases many song collectors have been using recorded mediums to play back not only their inspirations but their mentors. For example, using simple phone recordings to collect tunes and songs has become increasingly popular as technology becomes more accessible to everyone.
After publicising Cosys Ex collective, I was approached by an organisation called Borneo Bengkel. They had received British Council funding to deliver a larger project called the Living Archive, featuring musicians connected with the Northeast of England and Borneo . I co-curated this project in the UK including members of Cosys Ex and other musicians connected to the regions, it was a project designed to encourage cross-cultural collaborations in a digital medium with artists drawing influence from traditional backgrounds.
Photo of Cosys Ex collective performing at the Allen Valley Folk Festival in 2025. Image credit: AM Photographics
Reference List:
Price, M. (November 2017) ‘Chapter 4. Folkworks: Tradition in the Making,’ Changes in the Teaching of Folk and Traditional Music: Folkworks and Predecessors Newcastle University. Available at: https://1library.net/document/qmrx9l4y-changes-teaching-folk-traditional-music-folkworks-predecessors.html (Accessed 10/2/2026)
Newcastle University (5th April 2022) Newcastle University’s Folk and Traditional Music degree turns 21. Available at: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/archive/2022/04/folk21st/ (Accessed 6/3/2026)
John, Emma (11th April 2022) Scottish Folk-Fusion Band Elephant Sessions Achieve Their Musical Destiny Available at: https://thebluegrasssituation.com/read/scottish-folk-fusion-band-elephant-sessions-achieve-their-musical-destiny/ (Accessed on 6/3/2026)
Keegan-Phipps, Simon (2008) Teaching folk : the educational institutionalization of folk music in contemporary England. Newcastle University. Available at: http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/263 (Accessed 10/2/2026)