The Lake Poets is Sunderland based singer-songwriter Marty Longstaff. Following an appearance at Cambridge Folk Festival this weekend he plays a number of dates in the North-East during August and September. A show in Times Square, Newcastle on 6th August at which he will be supporting Brian Wilson is followed by intimate sets at Fausto in Sunderland on 18th and 20th. He then performs at the NE Volume Festival on 9th September at Stockton Arts Centre and plays a Launderette Sessions event at the Gala Theatre in Durham on 23rd.         

Anticipating his Cambridge Festival bow, Longstaff says that “I have wanted to play there ever since I first picked up a guitar and wanted to be Martin Carthy, Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson, John Martyn and Joni Mitchell all rolled into one. I can’t wait to let my songs loose at such an important and special gathering of like-minded people and I know that I will enjoy every moment of being on stage and being at the festival itself.”

As for the Newcastle show, he adds : “Sharing the stage with Brian Wilson is a dream come true. I can only hope that my songs will mean as much to others as Brian’s mean to me and millions of others around the world. Me and the band can’t wait to play!”

The late summer will also see Longstaff begin recording his second album for release in early 2018. His autumn 2015 debut, ’The Lake Poets’, achieved excellent reviews and spawned the singles ‘Your Face’ and ‘Edinburgh’. Since first being aired on BBC 6 Music, the former has quietly gone about racking up over 7 million plays on Spotify, while the latter was playlisted by Radio X.

Recorded in Nashville’s famed Blackbird Studio and produced by Dave Stewart (Eurythmics, etc), the eleven songs that comprised the album saw Longstaff’s shimmering, pure voice sit atop intimate, sparsely beautiful arrangements. Autobiographical lyrical content that was rich in painting the big picture about love and mortality by way of a keen eye for the small details of life also incorporated a heavy dose of social realism, such as in ‘Vane Tempest’ and its story of how the Miners Strike affected his father. The decimation of the North East and family struggle was also writ large in ‘Shipyards’.