Bellowhead's Sam Sweeney talks reunion tour opening in Portsmouth, his new solo album and the tragic death of Paul Sartin | Big Interview

During lockdown the 11-piece, festival-headlining, Radio 2-playlisted, multi-award winning band reformed for what was supposedly a one-off online show.

But such was the popularity of the stream the members decided that maybe they could fire up the beast one more time – and so they decided on one more tour, ostensibly to mark 10 years of their landmark fourth album, Broadside.

But then on September 14, tragedy struck. Multi-instrumentalist Paul Sartin – a violinist in Bellowhead – died of a heart attack aged just 51. Paul was a popular part of the folk community, well-known for his work with Faustus and Belshazzar’s Feast, but had also been part of numerous other projects.

His fellow Bellowhead fiddle-player Sam Sweeney explains how it has hit the band hard.

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‘He was 51 and he wasn't ill. It was completely out of the blue. It was completely shocking – and it still is.

‘We had a band chat after a couple of weeks of living with the news, and said look, are we going to do this or not? We sort of all agreed that Paul wouldn't want us to cancel a celebratory tour and he'd want us to go and do it and have a good time.

‘We agreed that we must carry on, because there’s 33,000 people who want to see this band,’ many nights on the 18-date tour have sold out or are close to doing so, ‘the love for Bellowhead is still enormous. When we did that silly lockdown video, just to cheer our fans up, it got a quarter of a million views in a couple of days. People still really like Bellowhead, and love the joy and happiness we brought to them, so we thought, let's do it, let’s make this tour work.

Celebrating Paul

‘Of course it will be incredibly hard, I can't imagine not having Paul right next to me on stage in between Rachael (McShane, also violin and cello) and I, but I think we will get through it. It was going to be a celebration Broadside as a record and us getting back together, but now it has this further aspect of celebrating Paul's life and what an incredible musician and brilliant human he was. It will be heavy, and intensely sad, but I hope we can also have an element of celebration of Paul's life and his music. It's not even really hit home yet, I don't think. On the night it happened I was so shocked, and then grief comes in waves.’

When we spoke the band were due to go into rehearsals, and Sam explains: ‘That will be as much about getting used to the fact that he's not there as much as remembering how the songs go. But music is incredible, it's one of music's super powers, it heals and brings people together. While we'll be sad and a lot of the fans will be sad, I think it will be a very cathartic and healing experience for a lot of people too.’

Sam will be pulling double-time on the tour too – he is also the opening act with his own band and a new album, Escape That, to promote. An acclaimed musician in his own right – he won Musician of the Year at the 2015 Radio 2 Folk Awards – he has also recorded and toured with Jon Boden’s Remnant Kings, Kerfuffle, Leveret, Eliza Carthy, Sam Carter, Fay Hield and many more. When we speak, the first reviews have started to appear for the new album.

‘For me, and for those who follow me, it's quite a different record. I appreciate for some people it will still just sound like a folk record, but it's quite a departure for me in terms of what I've done before and how ambitious it is in pushing the boundaries of fiddle music, so I'm delighted that the first reviews have been glowing.’

A more ‘me’ than ‘folk’ record

So it’s not a ‘trad folk’ album, then? ‘No, it's definitely not. It marries a lot of my musical passions – folk music has been my living and has been since I left school, but I don't actually listen to any,’ he laughs. ‘This record is all based around hooks and riffs that I improvised over some chords, then I took the riffs I thought would be catchy and made them into things which could be perceived to be folk tunes. Really, I don’t think of it as a “folk” record as much as it’s a "me" record – it’s as much pop as it folk.’

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He also wrote the whole thing himself using an unusual method. ‘I made it my mission not to touch the violin at all when I was writing it. I've been playing the fiddle since I was six and it's my job, but I find it incredibly limiting to write on it. And I think if I were to write on it, I would end up writing stuff that sounded very folky because that's my true north, if you like. I can't really play any other instruments – I own a lot, I've got 11 guitars – but I can't really play them, so I wrote the majority of it on electric guitar, bass guitar, and then bits of synthesiser-stuff. The result is stuff that doesn't sound like fiddle tunes and some of it was quite hard to translate from my brain to the guitar back to the fiddle, but I think that makes it quite a unique sound.’

It was an approach born of trying to motivate himself during those long months of lockdown. ‘I think the lockdown was really hard for musicians – if you can't play music with people or for people, there's not a lot of point in making music, certainly in my head, anyway. So I didn't play music for about six months and then I was like: “Come on Sam, for god’s sake, challenge yourself, we don't know how long we're going to be in this for, so do something!”’

Don’t Worry, Trains

The enforced separation from others also filtered into the album in another, unexpected way. ‘You know how we all associate bits of music with certain people or places? What I ended up doing was forming really strong associations between these musical ideas I was making and people and places I wasn't able to be with or had fond memories of. Those people and places and memories they ended up being the prime inspiration for the evolution of each track. Each tune is written about a certain place or person, and that also makes it a really personal record.’

Do the inspirations of your songs know?

‘Some of them do – the last track is called Don't Worry, Trains, and that was because my nephew, when he was about three, he was obsessed with Thomas The Tank Engine, and if there was anything the matter with anybody at any point he would just look at you and say: “Don't worry, trains,” as if it would sort out any problem. And Yoddin, that's my niece. Her cousin couldn't say Robin, which is her actual name, so she is now known in our entire family as Yoddin, so that's a little tune I wrote for her.’

The album uses the same line-up as on his previous album, 2020’s Unearth Repeat – Ben Nicholls on electric and double bass, Jack Rutter on acoustic guitar, Louis Campbell on electric guitars and Dave Mackay on keys. ‘That was my first sort of foray into doing a band record, but that album actually came out during the first lockdown, so it never really felt like it came out, and we only finished touring that record this May – the whole thing was delayed by two years.’

The band planned to record the album in a five-day session at a studio in Wales, and things were going well until producer Andy Bell was struck down with Covid, forcing them to down tools. Even though band and producer were working in close confines, the band stayed negative. Andy has since made a full recovery. They reconvened a few weeks later at a studio in Sheffield to finish the record. ‘The whole thing was recorded in a little over five days which is actually pretty quick for a record of that scale.’

Sam will be joined by Louis, Jack and Ben on the tour.

‘It's going to be pretty knackering, doing a full 90 minute Bellowhead set and a half-hour support – it will be pretty crazy, but it will also be the biggest audiences my band has ever played to and will ever play to!’ he laughs.

‘I'm very excited about it. I promised myself I'd do couch to 5k before the Bellowhead tour and lose a stone-and-a-half and none of that's happened. I'm fairly out of shape, so I don't know if I'll be jumping off any speaker stacks this tour, but we'll see...’

Bellowhead supported by Sam Sweeney are at Portsmouth Guildhall on Thursday, November 10, doors 7pm. Tickets £31-£47.70. Go to portsmouthguildhall.org.uk.