Jon Boden (born 17 March 1977) is a singer, composer and musician, best known as lead singer and main arranger of Bellowhead. His first instrument is the fiddle and he is a proponent of "English traditional fiddle style" and also of "fiddle singing", both of which he employed in Bellowhead, in the duo Spiers & Boden, and previously as a member of Eliza Carthy’s Ratcatchers.
Boden has been the recipient of 11 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, more than any other musician. He was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham University and the Open University in 2019.
Boden also fronts his own band the Remnant Kings, put together in 2009 to perform his post-apocalyptic song cycle Songs From The Floodplain. He has also made contributions as a fiddler, singer and guitarist, to three albums with Fay Hield & The Hurricane Party.
In 2010 he launched a project to record and deliver A Folk Song A Day on line, aiming to inspire others to build a repertoire of songs and engage in social singing.
Boden holds a master's degree in Composition for Theatre and has worked on theatrical productions, including two plays with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2012 he was commissioned to create a stage show based on The Ballad Of Little Musgrave And Lady Barnard as part of the Benjamin Britten centenary celebrations.
Education, early work
Boden grew up in Winchester, England, where he attended Henry Beaufort School and Peter Symonds College. He has a BA in Medieval Studies from Durham University and a master's degree in Composition for Theatre from the London College of Music. He has also received honorary doctorates from the Open University and Durham University.
He first started writing for the stage along with friend Chris T-T when still at school and he wrote his first musical whilst at sixth-form college. At Durham University he composed music for a number of plays and wrote a musical for his college. While at Durham he met Ben Naylor who subsequently went on to become a theatre director and with whom Boden has worked many times since.
Spiers & Boden
When Boden first met John Spiers in the Elm Tree pub in Oxford, Boden had little experience of folk clubs. The duo quickly established common ground and started playing together, soon establishing themselves on the live folk club circuit. They were signed by Fellside Records and their debut album Through & Through was released in 2001. The following year they toured with Eliza Carthy as part of her Ratcatchers band.
They released three further albums for Fellside, Bellow in 2003 and the companion discs, Songs and Tunes both released in 2005. Spiers & Boden then signed to Navigator Records releasing the themed Vagabond in 2008 and retrospective album The Works in 2011. The latter marked their 10th anniversary as a recording duo. They toured that year and collaborators from The Works joined them on stage, with a finale at London's Shepherd's Bush Empire featuring many guests.
In Spring 2013, Spiers & Boden undertook the Backyard Songs tour, playing material relevant to each show's locality and inviting audiences to contribute local songs, dances and folklore. Their farewell tour was announced the following year in March and May 2014 and the duo's activities were put on hold.
Boden plays fiddle and sings lead vocal in Spiers & Boden. He was the first person to use a "stomp box" with English traditional music - an idea he and Spiers borrowed from singer-songwriter Rory McLeod. Boden also plays acoustic guitar in Spiers & Boden employing a percussive finger style reminiscent of Nic Jones and Martin Simpson, but using the tuning of CEBEBE.
Bellowhead
The folk big band was conceived by Spiers & Boden whilst stuck in traffic en route to playing a gig in Essex as a way to take the duo's show to the bigger stages and festivals. Initially, Boden arranged and orchestrated an hour's worth of material for the 10 piece band, all based on existing Spiers & Boden material, in time for Bellowhead's debut at that the 2004 Oxford Folk Festival. This was followed by recording the five track E.P. Onymous, which they released independently.
Adding sousaphone player Gideon Juckes to the lineup in 2005, the band then signed to German label Westpark Music and recorded their debut full-length album Burlesque. These first two releases established Boden as the principal arranger for Bellowhead. He continued in that role, arranging around two-thirds of all the songs Bellowhead recorded.