Folk Bands and Artists
The Bonfire Band
http://www.thebonfireband.co.uk
The Bonfire Band has changed line-ups quite a bit over the years, but is currently languishing as a bluesy three-piece. Marcus Penrose plays double bass, Jonnie Walker plays drums and is also in charge of all our recording and Ben Faulkner plays electric guitar and harmonica. We’ve spent the last couple of years rehearsing and recording in Jonnie’s basement, which he has built into a studio, full of tape machines and old ribbon microphones and a pit that we dug for Marcus to stand up and play his bass in. We’ve been working on our live sound and also recording, and slowly but surely we’re getting somewhere, as we release ‘My Fathers Son’ our first album from the basement. ‘War & Peace’ is a collection of more folky songs, largely recorded solo. After these last two years of rearrangement and consolidation, it feels like we’ve got a head of steam up and we’re just entering a period of high productivity, so hopefully more recordings will come thick and fast in the next however many months and years.
About
We have just released our 5th and 6th albums; ’My Fathers Son’ and ‘War & Peace’ are available now on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and elsewhere online. Physical copies are available from the ‘Shop’ page on this site. Have a listen to a couple of tracks from each by hitting ‘Listen’.
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The Bonfire Band has changed line-ups quite a bit over the years, but is currently languishing as a bluesy three-piece. Marcus Penrose plays double bass, Jonnie Walker plays drums and is also in charge of all our recording and Ben Faulkner plays electric guitar and harmonica. We’ve spent the last couple of years rehearsing and recording in Jonnie’s basement, which he has built into a studio, full of tape machines and old ribbon microphones and a pit that we dug for Marcus to stand up and play his bass in. We’ve been working on our live sound and also recording, and slowly but surely we’re getting somewhere, as we release ‘My Fathers Son’ our first album from the basement. ‘War & Peace’ is a collection of more folky songs, largely recorded solo. After these last two years of rearrangement and consolidation, it feels like we’ve got a head of steam up and we’re just entering a period of high productivity, so hopefully more recordings will come thick and fast in the next however many months and years.
Most of our shows are played in London at the moment, but we love playing further afield when we get the chance. We have occasional one-off, listening shows, but we mainly play our regular pub residencies that we get to play long and hard, and really work on things – we make sure the audience can either listen or carry on having a drink and a chat with us in the background. If you’d like to be kept up to date with our gigs/tours/releases you can keep an eye on our ‘Gigs’ page, or subscribe to our mailing list or follow us on Facebook/Twitter by visiting the ‘Contact’ page.
The band plays all original material. Each line-up has its own way of playing, so we’ve always written and arranged different versions of songs for different line-ups. Each line-up also feels it should have its own set of recorded material to represent it, so gradually we’ve managed to record albums to that end. Songs will subsequently appear on more than one album, but mostly they will be very different sounding versions, and we think worthy of their re-recording. So far we have released six albums; War & Peace (solo), My Fathers Son (trio), It Gets Lonely Being Free (solo), Shelley’s House (four-piece), Recordings from The Plough (trio) and One Man Can’t Carry Half a Piano (duo).
