Some Words From Joshua Burnside

Award-winning alternative folk musician Joshua Burnside’s music carries many influences. With an obvious passion for tradition - he also carries elements from Americana to electronica, world music to found-sounds to pop, and beyond. All of which creates a particular resonance that rings through his music.   

As he will be playing a very special sold out gig with singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Jarlath Henderson at The Duncairn, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to post a short chat with Joshua, in which he kindly took the time to answer a few questions by email. His responses give a fascinating insight into how it all started, and the turns in the road that helped forge the musician he is now.

We asked Joshua to give an example of one of his own compositions through which we could trace his folk influences “You can hear a kind of summation of different folk influences in the song A Man of High Renown I think,” he explained. “There’s Irish trad, Americana, European folk music and other little bits and pieces in there.”

“There wasn’t actually a whole lot folk music played in my house growing up,” he pointed out.  “Apart from Americana and country like Dylan and Cash etc. Growing up in Presbyterian Comber meant that I was in effect, robbed of aspects of our shared Irish cultural heritage. But I remember being played Dónal Lunny’s track ‘April the 3rd’ in GCSE music and I had never heard anything like it. I played it on repeat when I got home and maybe that’s where my love for Irish folk music began. Unfortunately, the troubles politicised Trad (or ‘fiddly-dee’ as it was pejoratively nicknamed) so it was never around me growing up. It wasn’t until I went to University in Belfast that I really began to listen to trad and Irish folk music.”

“One album that has been a massive influence is the self-titled ‘Andy Irvine/Paul Brady’ 1975 classic. Paul Brady’s version of Arthur McBride is one of my all-time favourite recordings. I’ve heard that it wasn’t even his best take too, and that a better one was deleted by mistake during the recording session. I like to think that maybe the lost take was too good for human ears and would have driven us insane to hear it. And that maybe some higher power destroyed it for our benefit.”

Images by The Duncairn’s resident photographer Stanislav Nikolov