12 Silk Handkerchiefs

Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Sam Martyn. Sam is a member of Hull folk band Beggar’s Bridge, the White Horse Ceilidh Band and the Green Ginger Garland dancers, and she also performs solo - when she can find the time! Combining her rich, traditional singing style with piano, low and high whistle, and harmonium, her eclectic repertoire stretches from folk ballads to her own reworkings of musical and popular songs.

Sam says "just the chance to work with Reg, one of this country’s finest singer-songwriters, was in itself amazing, but performing in front of the very people our show was about was something else."

Reg first emerged onto the acoustic music scene in the 1980s with the fast paced duo Panic Brothers and then went on to form the band The Flamingos which featured ex Graham Parker guitarist Martin Belmont, Bob Loveday from The Penguin Cafe Orchestra & Bob Geldof’s Band & Alison Jones of The Barely Works. They recorded one album called ‘Arrested’.

In 1996 Reg decided to go solo and has since released 15 highly acclaimed studio albums. Over the years, solo as well as with many other acclaimed artists, Meuross has toured the length and breadth of the UK and also in the US, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Accompanying his soulful tenor vocal with guitar, harmonica and dulcimer, Meuross paints pictures in words and music that resonate long after the song has been sung. Protest songs, love songs and historical characters all feature in his extensive repertoire.

Brian W. Lavery was born in Glasgow’s East End in 1959. He has been a factory worker, car valet, market trader, waiter, university dropout, VAT officer (very briefly) and latterly a journalist, university tutor and writer. After more than twenty-five years of various senior roles in national and regional journalism he returned to higher education and gained a first in English literature and creative writing at the University of Hull. His book, The Headscarf Revolutionaries (Barbican Press, 2015) – now optioned by a major television production company – derived from a funded PhD at that university, where he taught creative non-fiction. His new book The Luckiest Thirteen, the story of the St Finbarr 1966 Christmas Day trawler disaster established itself as another best-seller for Barbican Press. 

Other works include his programme for BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought series, Courage and Effect, and being commissioned by the Oxford University National Dictionary of Biography (‘the biographer’s Bible’) to write the entry on Mrs Bilocca, aka Big Lil.