Folk Bands and Artists
Undying Heads
Coimbra
Undying Heads are Frank Ryder and Sam Wilkinson, they play an eclectic mix of original acoustic folk, pop and country music. Their music takes influences from many sources and is impossible to pin down to one genre.
Frank and Sam met in January 2018, and Undying Heads was born from the travelling and busking scene in Lagos, Portugal. In 2018 they played the huge Freekuency festival and Total Resistance festivals in Portugal and then toured the UK and Ireland playing at The Magic Garden in Battersea, Landed festival in Wales, Left Bank Village in Hereford and plenty of other venues. They released their EP ‘Live at the Horsedrawn’ at the end of 2018.
In 2019 they toured the Algarve and west coast of Portugal. They played folk clubs, beach bars and campsites and also got involved in hosting open mic nights, helping and encouraging other musicians with little experience of playing live. They released their debut album ‘Can’t Be Late’ in July 2019.
Due to the pandemic they haven’t played a gig since February 2020. They spent the first lockdown in Morocco and wrote seven of the twelve tracks from their new album while there. In August 2021 they released their second album, ‘A Break in the Country’.
Undying Heads are based in Portugal but as they travel frequently they visit other countries often on their travels and are always keen to travel to new places for gigs. Sometimes guest artists join them for occasional songs, recordings or whole gigs.
Thanks for your interest and we hope you enjoy our music. Please contact us via email or telephone for all enquires. Carry on reading for a more information about Frank and Sam.
Frank is a singer songwriter from Dublin, Ireland who plays guitar and mandola. Frank says “I remember being fourteen years old and having a copy of a Lynyrd Skynyrd album, and seeing this gang of long haired’s singing about whiskey, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and life on the road. For me growing up in suburban Dublin that was a glimpse of something outside. It excited me.”
So, how did Frank escape the suffocation of a repressed Irish childhood? He travelled. Much of his youth was spent trekking around Europe, and he has lived for periods in France, Germany, Spain and Portugal. He read too: the anarchist writers and philosophers, the libertarians, anything to do with the Sixties counter-culture.
In the early 1990s Frank (then going by the guise of Frank X. Hibbet) was part of the band Far Canals, based in Galway, Ireland. They released two albums and one EP with Hunter S. Records. The bands anarchic, anti-establishment ethos was reflected in many of their songs which railed against the police, drug laws, organised religion and political corruption. Influenced by punk and blues, the Far Canals combined unusual guitar arrangements and distortion pedals to produce a highly distinctive sound. The group disbanded in 1996.
Frank also played many gigs as a solo act, he was the support artist for Julian Cope on his ‘An audience with the Cope tour’ of Irish Castles in 1993. Frank has also been a live sound engineer and he worked for a number of artists playing in the Galway area.
In 2000 Frank moved to Barcelona for four years where he took a break from playing instruments to make electronic music and to become a DJ, where he wrote and performed under the name 3bass. Frank then moved to the mountains of central Portugal. After meeting two guitarists in there he picked up his guitar again and started The Rocking Horse of Oisin which still play occasional gigs at festivals and venues in Portugal.
Sam is a singer, mandola player, bodhran player and percussionist from Cirencester, UK. Sam started singing at age 15 thanks to a youth club initiative to get teenagers into playing music. She was in a new wave band called Enzone who played a few gigs, their best one being at The Barge Semington in Gloucester to a packed house.
Sam was always mostly disillusioned with ‘chart’ music feeling it didn’t reflect her life or say anything to her. During the 1980s she found Paul Weller & Billy Bragg who she connected with much more and she also got turned on to Psychobilly music, a fusion of Punk and Rockabilly.
During the 1990s reggae, dub, rave music and the new age travelling scene had a big impact on Sam. In 2004 Sam joined anarcho punk band, Drug Sniffin´ Dogs for a while. In 2005 she went on to sing in the Gloucester Community Folk Choir which was a great lesson in singing technique as well as a brilliant way to learn some obscure folk songs from around the world. In 2010 Sam moved permanently into her campervan & travelled extensively in the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Holland, Spain & Portugal.
After meeting Frank she was inspired to take up singing again as well as learning the bodhran and other percussion. In the 2020 lockdown she took up the guitar again and learnt the mandola, something she shares in common with Bill Bailey as well as one of her hero´s, Jeremy from The Levellers.
Thanks for your interest and we hope you enjoy our music. Please contact us via our website, email or telephone for all enquires.
Genre: Alt Folk,Anti-folk,Celtic Folk,Contemporary folk,Country,English Folk,Folk / Rock,Folk-Pop,Folk-Punk,Freak folk,Indie folk,Neofolk,Progressive folk,Protest song,Singer-songwriter
