Live at the Fox's Den radio show

I had the pleasure of playing live on Bill Horncastle's 'Fox's Den Radio Show', on Friday 4 April. It was the 16th anniversary of their first ever show, which made it doubly special. The show goes out every Friday on Vixen 101.8 and 103.1 FM.

Bill is a huge advocate for playing music by independent artists, and the show is packed with brilliant, weird and wonderful tracks. Over the course of the evening, from 9pm until midnight, Bill's guests play 9 live tracks.

Normally, I only play my own songs, but recently I've been throwing in a couple of covers to my sets that are representative of my influences and musical direction. So in among my original songs, the set list for the show also included 'Girl from the North Country' by Bob Dylan, 'The Highwayman' by Jimmy Webb, and the far more well known 'Knocking on Heaven's Door', also by Bob Dylan.

'House of the Rising Sun' is my favourite. There have been so many different interpretations of this over the decades, and it's another song brought to prominence by Dylan. However, for me it was The Animals version that captured my imagination growing up. I think I was mesmerised from the first time I heard it. Goodness knows how old I was - possibly around 7 or 8 years.

You can watch my live radio version of 'House of the Rising Sun' on this Facebook post: House of the Rising Sun - Live on the Fox's Den Radio Show

Of course, I still love playing my own songs and I've recently been bringing back into my set list some tracks long ignored - slightly different pace, some with a capo for a different key - generally messing about and having some fun with them.

'Let it Rain' from the All My Ghosts album is the most streamed of all my Spotify tracks, at around 13,000. I don't think that's too shabby, although it isn't going to make me enough money to retire on. Below is the Spotify link to the original version:

If you want to listen to a rougher take on Let it Rain, below is the live version played at Fox's Den Radio Show (opens in YouTube). Annoyingly, as I uploaded it as a 'YouTube short', it times out at 3 minutes, missing the last 30 seconds or so.

Anyway, here's to all the independent artists just out there doing their thing. And if you want to share your music more widely, Bill is always on the look out for guests to play live in the Fox's Den studio on a Friday night. You can find out more about the show, who the next live act is and how you can contact Bill, via the web page: Fox's Den Radio Show