We’re back from our summer break and our first gig was a great set at the lovely Greenside Festival in The Yorkshire Dales – just look at that moon and that bonfire!

Leather’o has a full diary of gigs going into the autumn (well, maybe room for one or two more…). They will all be in the Forthcoming Gigs sidebar on this website and will be on Facebook nearer the time – see you there!

The festival season is upon us and we’re delighted to be playing at the Folk Festivals in Filey, Cleethorpes, Goodmanham and The City of York Folk Festival at The Black Swan. Later this year we will be playing in York’s Rowntree Park, at the Greenside Festival in The Dales and the Langdale Folk Weekend in the Lake District.

We’ve been working on some new tunes! Over the past few gigs we’ve been introducing several big, exciting sets from the new tradition, two from Scotland and our first French Canadian set.

We’re also working on a couple of new tunes of our own in the Celtic tradition – they’ll be ready soon. 

So, with all those new tunes, it’s time to find some new songs too, and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing – we’ll have two new songs in the set later this month, both about sex and death, like they always are…

We recorded a few tunes for Beverley FM 107.8 a week or two back. They will be broadcast on Max Roberts’ Tuesday night Folk Hour, which is syndicated across several other independent local radio stations.

Thanks to Bob Mitchel for this photo of our mandolin player, Jack Woods.

Many thanks to Colin Bailey at Rock’n’Reel magazine for his four-star review of our recent CD Six!

The highlight of 2018 for Leather’o was recording and releasing our new CD Six. It was very well received by the reviewers and tracks from it were played on at least half a dozen local radio stations, including BBC Radio York. It also led to us playing live on two independent local radio stations and BBC Radio Leeds.

We played at some great new venues, including our first appearance at The Musicport Festival in Whitby. We were delighted to again play at two of the Black Swan Folk Club events this year, including on the main stage at the City of York Folk Weekend. We were also very pleased to play at The Little Festival on Parliament Street during the York Food Festival. In all, about 50 gigs this year.

There were some truly memorable nights, including an absolutely packed-out St Patricks night, an open air gig in the middle of our blazing hot summer, a freezing cold one outdoors at a beer festival, a bizarre Breton dance night in an Irish pub down in the docks in Brest and some great sessions from Hull in the east to the Dales in the west – no tour this year as most of us were busy all summer with a long road trip and a wedding in Italy.

We also put a lot of new tunes and songs into the set in 2018, some of which made it onto the CD.

Billy Hickling formally joined us at the beginning of the year on percussion, bringing his unique energy to the band – he’s also on theCD!

2018 was the year that the band’s website finally got a makeover with a new look and more up-to-date technology behind the scenes – many thanks to our webmaster Oli.

Members of the band often crop up on other people’s recordings or in other bands around the York scene. For the first time this year, we took the whole band along to play on someone else’s album – look out for the new Rich Hardcastle Band CD in the new year and Leather’o playing on the song Dancing Room Only.

As always there were a few scrapes… On one occasion our support act fainted part way through her set and had to be helped away. There were one or two slightly disappointing venues and the odd dodgy festival PA, but all that was more than made up for by great venues where we hadn’t played before and great crowds to play to, like The Head of Steam in Hull and the legendary Green Dragon in The Dales.

Thanks to Graham for booking us to play every month at our favourite York pub, The Snickleway, to Phil Snell at Limbo Studios for recording us, and to all the audience who came to the gigs, listened to us on the radio and bought the CD. Here’s to a great 2019!

We played live on the Durbervilles Folk Show on 
BBC Radio Leeds at the weekend. For the next few weeks you can listen to the show here – we play our Dirty Linen Set, the traditional song Black Is The Colour and our arrangement of a tune we call Davies and Bennett.

Many thanks to David and Lee Durberville for welcoming us to BBC Broadcasting Centre and for doing such an amazing job – the sound quality and mix was fantastic.

Thanks also to BBC Radio York for playing two tracks from our CD Six on their recent Saturday Night BBC Introducing shows!

Just a couple of photographs from soundcheck on The North Sea Stage at Musicport last month. That’s The North Sea, behind Rach…

Another great review of our CD Six, this time from Folking.com:

“Risipit/Bim Bim Hora is all gypsy fiddle and is absolutely splendid proving how well Leather’o can play, as does the closing Weasel Set…”