The Roy Palmer Lecture for 2025, the tenth in the series, will be given by the well-known folk performer, John Boden as part of the Whitby Folk Week, 16-22 Aug 2025 (day, time and venue to be confirmed). The subject of his lecture will be:

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The Folk Revival - a view from the middle

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Jon Boden, lead-singer of Bellowhead, was born in March 1977 when folk-rock was at its zenith and rubbing shoulders with the mainstream. In October of that year Never Mind the Bollocks was released, and punk took the wind out of the sails of the folk revival for two decades.

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30 years later Eliza Carthy was recording with former punk Paul Weller, Kate Rusby was recording with pop star Ronan Keating and Bellowhead’s single 'Roll the Woodpile Down' was played daily by Chris Evans to millions of radio listeners.

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Today not only is traditional folk conspicuously absent from the daytime radio playlists but the BBC Folk Awards have been dropped, fRoots magazine is no more, hardly any broadsheets review traditional folk records, and Spotify has killed off many independent folk record-labels.

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Is this the end of the folk revival? In this informal lecture Jon reflects on the ups and downs of an extraordinary cultural movement and makes the case for optimism with the green shoots or revival constantly pushing up through – young singers and musicians who are now the generation below him, and who were born a hundred years after Cecil Sharp heard John England singing ‘The Seeds of Love’.

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Jon Boden began performing English traditional song and tunes in 2001 with melodeon player John Spiers. Bellowhead grew out of that duo and went on to become the most successful traditional folk band of a generation. He also performs solo and with his band The Remnant Kings who focus more on Jon’s own songs from the trilogy of post-oil concept albums Songs ‘From The Floodplain’ (2009), ‘Afterglow’ (2017) and ‘Last Mile Home’ (2021), In 2010-11 he produced the mammoth online project ‘A Folk Song A Day’ for which he recorded 365 traditional songs with notes on each. Jon studied Medieval History and Literature at Durham University, Composition for Theatre at the London College of Music and has received honorary doctorates from Durham and the Open University. His website is www.jonboden.com.

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We are, once again, grateful to Whitby Folk Week for agreeing to host this talk and for their assistance with the arrangements.