Welcome to my website
Music
I first got really interested in traditional folk music as a teenager. It set me on a path or should I say paths? that I am still exploring several decades later. It has taken me all over Europe, North America and once, even to China. I have been privileged to meet and hear many great musicians and I have made many friends along the way. It also led to me living in Iceland, where I am one half of the duo Funi, along with my wife Bára Grímsdóttir. We are involved in all sorts of musical activities here in Iceland, and we also travel abroad to perform and lead workshops.
You can visit our website here:
We are always interested to hear from people with ideas for projects and performances.
Contact details are over on the
contacts and links page.
Visual Arts &
Community Arts Work
Many years ago, I spent five years studying at Art Schools in England. On completing my studies, I set out on my life's journey combining painting and exhibiting with touring as a professional musician. In the late 1970s, I became deeply involved in the emerging UK Community Arts Movement, working with all sorts of groups of people, developing ideas and techniques for making work together, rather than as a solo artist working in isolation, either touring as a solo musician or painting in a studio.
As a community arts worker throughout the 1980s to the 2000s, I worked on a huge variety of both large and small scale projects, with groups of people of all ages and abilities, in both urban and rural settings in England. Projects included painted and mosaic murals, photography exhibitions, screen printing campaign posters, mixed artform events and celebrations, theatre performances and live and recorded music.
I have been living in Iceland since 2004 and since moving here, alongside touring internationally and recording both solo and as the duo FUNI with Bára Grímsdóttir. I have also resumed making studio based art works.
Vökufélagið
In January 2024 a small group of folk arts activists here in Iceland got together to form a new association called Vökufélag (Vaka Society).
Vökufélag exists to create opportunities to sing, play, dance and listen to Icelandic traditional music, along with folk music from further afield. By creating various opportunities throughout the year, we aim to build a supportive network of people who share a love for Iceland's unique traditional music. A community where those traditions can flourish and grow and carry on into the future. Our ambition is to build traditions for tomorrow.
2024 sees Vökufélagið organising two main events. On June 2nd, as part of the biennial Reykjavík Arts Festival, we organised a 12 hour day of activities in Reykjavík's oldest performance space, Iðnó. The day attracted a steady stream of people of all ages and the place was really buzzing.
As I write this in late August, we are gearing up for the
Vaka Þjóðlistahátíð
Vaka Folk Festival
Vaka will take place from 13th to 15th September with a full programme of concerts, workshops, sessions, a seminar about the Icelandic rímur (very long narrative singing) tradition and the centre piece event a feast with pop-up entertainments, singing and dancing. More information can be found at:
Here are a couple of videos featuring Vökufélagið folks.
Here's one with Ragga Gröndal and Bára Grímsdóttir. Have a look at all of them. Like and subscribe.
Other stuff...
Gabe Dunsmith, another of the Vökufélagið crew organises the fortnightly Reykjavík Trad Sessions at the Ægir bar in downtown Reykjavík. I try to get along as often as possible. It's a friendly group of people and with a steady stream of people from other countries passing through, there's plenty of variety in the music.
At the same bar, another friend organises Sagnavaka a monthly ballad dance night, where we sing and dance the old ballads, which used to be widespread across northern Europe, including the UK. Nowadays the Faroe islands are the remaining stronghold of the tradition.
Along with Bára, I run monthly Söngvaka (song workshop sessions) through the winter months. Bára is chairperson of Kvæðamannafélagið Iðunn, the organisation founded in 1929, and dedicated to preserving Iceland's song and poetry traditions.
All in all, there seems to be a growing amount of folk arts activity with more people getting involved all the time. It feels like things are on the move here and not before time.
It is always hard to write about oneself,
so I will let a couple of other people say a bit...
“Chris Foster merits legend status, one of the very best in the second wave of the Brit folk revival, as important as Martin Carthy, Dick Gaughan and Nic Jones in the way he has modernised and invested traditional songs with inventive guitar arrangements and potent vocal delivery.”
Colin Irwin – fROOTS
Spring came and summer's already gone
2024 is going by at a dizzying speed. Here in Iceland, after the bright summer nights, evenings are drawing in and night skies are actually dark once more. As the seasons turn, it will soon be winter again. This song from my Hadelin album sums it up pretty well.
Where are the elephants?
&
Turning Silence Into Song
2023 has seen the publication of Leon Rosselson's long awaited memoir. As I expected it is a fascinating read, and I highly recommend getting a copy. You can buy it online from the publishers PM Press.
A stand out moment in July 2024 was being able to be a part of a concert in London, marking Leon's 90th year. I was honoured to perform his song 'Wo sind die elefanten' the source of his memoire title.
In 2022, I joined in an international online concert celebrating Leon's remarkable song writing. In my view he is one of the greatest songwriters in the English language over the past 60+ years. I have admired Leon's work and performed many of his songs throughout my singing life, so it was a special honour to be invited to be part of this event by the organisers at People's Music Network in the USA.
I chose the song Who reaps the profits? Who pays the price? which I think is one of Leon's very best songs. He says so himself in his memoir too.
Polish - Icelandic musical dialogue
In 2018 Bára and I were invited to give a concert as part of the Szczecin Early Music Festival in Poland. We had a great time, so we were very happy when the organisers Ula Stawicka and Paweł Osuchowski of Fundacja Akademia Muzyki Dawnej (Foundation Academy of Early Music) in Szczecin invited us to be partners in a larger project, running from September 2022 to April 2024.
Í gær og í dag / Wczoraj i dziś (Yesterday and today) was built around three visits to Iceland by musicians from Poland and three visits to Poland by us.
The first visit to Iceland by members of the Szczecin Vocal Project and Adam Strug, took place in November 2022 and included concerts, workshops and rehearsals. It was great to hear Adam singing traditional songs learned from his grandmother, from the Kurpie region of Poland.
At the end of May 2023, we made our way to Szczecin where we delivered a workshop about the traditional hymn singing traditions connected to the Pasíusálmur (Hymns of the Passion) of Hallgrímur Pétursson, and performed a concert, followed by a talk out, as part of the annual Szczecin Early Music Festival.
From September 7th to 11th, we visited Stargard, in Northwest Poland with our friend Ásta Arnardóttir, where we gave a workshop to music school students about the Icelandic langspil, an instrument that they had never heard of. On the 10th we gave a concert, celebrating women in Icelandic folk song, in the old cloister church at Marionowo.
Wczoraj i dziś /Í gær og í dag was to have been concluded with two concerts in Iceland, one in Akureyri and one in Reykjavík in April 2024. The varied instrumental and vocal programme included the first performance of 'Yesterday, today and tomorrow' a new piece by Bára for mixed choir and organ with a text by me.
In the end a blizzard stranded us in Akureyri, the second concert was snowed off and our Polish friends only just managed to get their flight home.
Í gær og í dag / Wczoraj i dziś is funded by the Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway grants programme.
Recordings
Over the years, I have done a fair bit of recording, including seven solo albums and two duo albums as FUNI with Bára Grímsdóttir. My most recent solo album, Hadelin was released in March 2017 and one of the tracks was nominated for the best traditional song award in the 2018 BBC Folk Awards. Scroll down to see some reviews.
CD copies of Hadelin and and my 2008 album Outsiders, along with downloads of earlier albums and individual songs are available from
My solo music and Icelandic albums with FUNI are also available on all the usual streaming sites.
‘The warm tone of Chris’ voice and his captivating guitar playing draws you into the ancient world of storytelling which links generation to generation, culture to culture and humanity back to its humanity.’
Susan Grace - Burton Mail
My latest album 'Hadelin' got some excellent reviews in the folk and world music press.
Here are some extracts.
fROOTS, April 2017
Long-domiciled in Iceland and an infrequent visitor to recording studios, Foster’s new solo release comes as an unexpected pleasure. Actually, it’s not really a ‘solo’ album as he’s accompanied by Jackie Oates (viola), John Kirkpatrick (melodeon), Jim Moray (piano), Trevor Lines (double bass) and Martin Brinsford (tambourine). When they all play ensemble – as on The Faithful Plough and Greensleeves (with Foster on hammered dulcimer) they’re a terrific English country dance band.
Songs, however, are Foster’s stock-in trade, and here he revisits some of the greatest examples of the English canon, starting with the daddy-of-’em-all, The Seeds Of Love. Accompanied by his own guitar and Oates’ viola, it’s an utterly majestic performance. Of the three songs that don’t have Roud numbers, two – Once When I Was Young and Who Reaps The Profit? Who Pays The Price? are by Leon Rosselson. Chris Foster is (with all due deference to Messrs Bailey and Carthy) probably my favourite interpreter of Rosselsongs, and the astute booklet notes that reference both Standing Rock, North Dakota, and Hinkley Point, Somerset, further reveal the singer’s empathy with the great songwriter’s work. The final track – Spring Song, is, astonishingly, Foster’s first original composition, proving once and for all the falsity of that old dog/new trick trope.
Huge credit should go to producer Jim Moray for his role in creating an album that marks not just the welcome return of a folk scene favourite but one of the very finest albums of English song by anybody in recent years.
Steve Hunt
www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/reviews
Hadelin is an extremely well considered selection of songs that (in Chris’s own words) “have all sorts of connections with people and places (he) has known over the years”, while referring to “all things that remain a constant, albeit shifting backdrop to the human condition”. Although this is nominally a solo album, Chris has, entirely appropriately, chosen his backing musicians very carefully, to represent the next generation – to whom he’s passing the torch of tradition, as it were – along with others with whom he’s worked over the years, while also inviting Jim Moray to produce the record.
... to get the measure of (and indeed get the most out of) Chris’s performances the listener needs to treat them with the same degree of respect he himself accords to his source material, to savour every nuance and give them time to work their special magic. For there’s something magical about Chris’s way with a song, what I can only describe as an immediate, “living” breathing interpretation (meticulously considered, yet nowhere artificially pointed) that brings its lyric alive and somehow accentuates its relevance. Eight years on from Outsiders, that special interpretive magic is still there; indeed, it’s possibly even more potent since Chris’s voice now betrays something of the pained vulnerability of age but also its resolute defiance while retaining the essential intimacy of direct communication.
Finally, I must mention that the CD has been produced with exemplary clarity by Jim Moray, assisted by Dylan Fowler, and the whole affair is impeccably packaged, the disc being housed in a beautifully designed digipack with full colour booklet.
David Kidman
Stirrings magazine
Chris has lived in Reykjavik for a while now and I was pleased to attend a night a while back on a foggy night at Calver Village Hall when he and Bára Grimsdóttir did a show of largely Icelandic material and at the end he promised more albums of English traditional songs. This is a fine example and it is superb and well worth the wait.
... The tune for a widespread harvest song The Faithful Plough came to him from Velvet Brightwell (1865 - 1960) The ensemble play along like an old country band to this tale of the communal and national dependency on the ploughman and those who work the land.
Once When I Was Young is a Leon Rosselson song about dissociation from nature and love in a world of glass, granite and concrete, which shows what we have to fight to retain human values in a world of corporate greed and control. Never more apt than today as the forces of nationalism and fascism are on the rise again. Who Reaps the Profits? Who Pays The Price? is another Rosselson song ... the it addresses, the assault on the biosphere and human communities are increasingly relevant today as the scramble for fossil fuels and nuclear power continues until we see the sense of renewable and ambient energy sources.
The Trees They Grow So High has a strange slant on child marriage where the young boy is wedded, gives his wife a child and dies all within a few years. “She made for him a shroud of hadelin so fine” and will mourn him. Strangely, Chris found that there is a Saint Hadelin whose day is the third of February, which was the day on which he collected his CDs!
The Life Of A Man likens our time here like the leaves on a tree and was collected by Chris from Jumbo Brightwell in Leiston. The shift of gear at the end of this version was inspired by New Orleans marching bands at funerals and lifts the solemnity into an apt optimism as they get a move on. The instrumental version of Greensleeves that follows was from a Somerset fiddler in 1907 and continues the notion that death is the beginning of another natural cycle; so why should we grieve?
Mike Wild
Living Tradition magazine
Chris has emerged from the fastnesses of his Icelandic home with a CD that’s heavily redolent of his Somerset roots... And it really is good; these are real, meaty songs that tell strong stories, and Chris’s distinctive voice and engaging phrasing enhance the quality of his material. It is in the nature of story-songs to be lengthy, and with songs like The Holland Handkerchief and Rosselson’s Who Reaps the Profit? Who Pays the Price? It takes a singer of considerable ability to hold his audience for the length of the song, let alone for the duration of a CD that includes several such songs. This never appears to be a challenge for Chris, whose ability to ‘carry’ a song has only improved over the years.
The entire CD is complemented by musical input from a stellar cast of musicians – evidently Mr Foster generates a good deal of respect across the folk world. I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing him sing ‘live’ for some years, but I’ll make sure I don’t miss him next time he’s touring. I suggest you do the same – you certainly will if you’ve heard this CD.
John Waltham
R2 Magazine
I didn't know what to expect from this album, certainly not a set predominantly of English ballads with two Leon Rosselson songs to add extra spice. Nor did I expect to find Jim Moray in the producer's chair and the cast of luminaries, including Jackie Oates, John Kirkpatrick and Jim Causley, called in to assist.
It was the second track that really made me sit up and take notice. The full band arrangement of 'The Faithful Plough' could have been lifted from Battle of the Field and Chris pays a similar homage later with the unaccompanied 'The Trees They're All Bare', arranged in the style of the Coppers for six voices by Bára Grímsdóttir.
Chris performs a remarkable feat by rescuing 'The Life of a Man' from its usual fate as a lugubrious dirge and the two Rosselson songs, especially the dystopian 'Once When I Was Young' are still as pertinent as they ever were.´
Dai Jeffries
Chris Foster’s status as one of British folk music’s major players is secure. His two records for Topic in the late 1970s (Layers and All Things In Common) ensured him a place alongside the likes of Martin Simpson, June Tabor and Nic Jones as one of the leading lights of the acoustic boom of that period. Although music took a back seat in the 1980s as he followed other artistic projects, he continued to release solo albums, his last being Outsiders (2008). Foster will be 70 next year, and after a shapeshifting career, he could be forgiven for settling down and producing something a little more prosaic. But that is not his style, and Hadelin sees him once again pushing the boundaries of traditional music.
Most of the songs here are traditional, but Foster is at pains to point out that they are not meant to be museum pieces. Indeed, the album opens with a recording of birdsong, giving the impression before we even hear the first note that Foster is concerned with new life, seasonal change and vernal fertility. Fittingly, the song itself, The Seeds Of Love, was first collected over a hundred years ago and first sung by Foster in the 1960s. It is an object lesson in how things change and how they stay the same. Foster’s voice has the recognisable crack of age, but even this gives the song a new kind of life, and the subject matter carries more than a hint of the timelessness of music and of love and the universality of natural processes.
... Hadelin ends with Spring Song, and it will come as some surprise to the casual listener that this is the first and only song that Foster has ever written, especially given that it sounds so natural, so universal that it could almost be a traditional piece. ‘Hail the hum of hedge and hive, it’s good to be alive,’ he sings with a combination of verbal freedom and authorial control that many seasoned songwriters would envy. Spring Song ends the album just as The Seeds Of Love started it: with birdsong. Time, Foster seems to be saying, is circular rather than linear, and to celebrate its passing in song is the most natural thing in the world. He has the uncanny ability to make everything he does appear easy, assembling or arranging songs like an artisan builds a drystone wall – a piece at a time, and with the gaps and cracks providing as much of the character as the solid, tangible elements. And like drystone walls, these striking songs will become part of their surroundings, and will surely stand the test of time.
Thomas Blake
Reykavík Grapevine
English folk ballads don’t get much attention these days on a musical stage saturated with grunge-hip-techno-disco-pop. But here to give them the attention they deserve is Chris Foster, a Somerset native who has lived in Reykjavík since 2004. Chris’s work preserving and promoting traditional Icelandic music—and reviving old Icelandic instruments such as the langspil and fiðla—is worthy of praise in its own right, but for his album release concert at Mengi, Chris returned to his roots.
Though pop culture’s obsession with all that is glitzy, ostentatious and cacophonous threatens to relegate the ballad as a form to dusty Oxford archives, Chris insists ... that these songs “are not museum pieces.” Instead, “they refer to the natural world, the rhythm of the seasons, birth, life, death, love, betrayal, the ebb and flow of the struggle for justice and human rights.” In digging up old songs and painting them in a new light, Chris effectively reclaims the ballad and insists they are worthy of singing.
... In a world beset by wars and oppression, the ballads open a window into how we might mourn. Take this verse, for example, from The Trees They Grow So High:
She made for him a shroud of the hadelin so fine
and every stitch she put in it,
her tears came trickling down,
crying,
“Once I had a bonny boy,
but now I have got never a one,
so fare you well my bonny boy forever.
The song tells of an arranged marriage between a woman of 21 and a man of 16, whose sudden death leaves his widow stricken. Though the lyrics may appear antiquated at first glance, the song’s power lies in the rawness of its emotions and its capacity to bring grief to the surface of life. Ballads force us to confront our own darkness as well as the darkness of the world, and in that way can function as instruments of healing.
Chris sings with such deftness that you can hear in his voice his sense of home, his drive for justice and his deep love of life. He is an artist in the truest sense: one who is dedicated to his craft, who understands the power of story and song.
Gabe Dunsmith
Folk Wales
Way back when, I used to look on a Chris Foster set as something extra-special, where you came away really energised and totally convinced that you had your good moneysworth. Then Chris emigrated to Iceland, where he married the traditional singer Bára Grímsdóttir and settled in the capital city of Reykjavik, where he and Bára play as the English-Icelandic duo Funi and conduct workshops and week-long courses on the fascinating, ancient and mysterious Icelandic music and song, which remained hidden and obscured by the other, stronger higher-profile folk cultures.
Now Chris has come back with a mighty bang and has released the wonderful album Hadelin; it was recorded in Dylan Fowler's marvellous green oak Stwdio Felin Fach in Abergavenny, with producer Jim Moray playing and Dylan engineering, and the 11 tracks include John Kirkpatrick, Martin Brinsford, Jim's sister Jackie Oates, Jim Causley, Dylan's partner Gillian Stevens, five-string double bassist Trevor Lines, Bára, Amy Dawson and Simon and Libby Metson as among the stellar musicians. It seems as though Chris's sojourn in The Land Of Ice And Fire has generated into a stunning collection of mesmerising pieces which will grab you by the throat and just demand to be listened - that's how good they are.
Mick Tems
EDS - five stars
Chris Foster made his first album in 1977; Hadelin is his seventh. From the opening bars, it is apparent that Chris' guitar playing and voice continue to develop; the renditions are as strong as ever. His first love, English traditional music, remains his passion.
This album will be a joy for all who value the storytelling element of English songs. Throughout, the lyrics are clear. Chris's rich voice narrates the story, while his innovative guitar accompaniment sounds deceptively simple, adding a subtle dimension difficult to achieve. These elements are particularly effective on the opening track, The Seeds of Love, and Rosie Anne. Jackie Oates plays the 5-string viola on both.
Jacqueline Patten