BELLA HARDY

Growing up in Edale, in Derbyshire’s Peak District, Bella Hardy’s debut album, Night Visiting, garnered rave reviews for her stark and haunting renditions of traditional songs and tunes, and her own composition ‘Three Black Feathers’ was nominated for a BBC Folk Award (and covered by Jim Moray on his album Low Culture). In 2008, she performed solo in the middle of a packed Royal Albert Hall as part of the first ever Folk Prom and by 2010 she’d made it onto BBC1, performing her own arrangement of Psalm 23 on no lesser an institution than Songs of Praise. Her 2009 album In The Shadows of Mountains won plaudits for its original settings of familiar folk songs and her increasingly accomplished and eclectic own material. Colin Irwin of Mojo magazine describing her as “More than a new generation folk revivalist… Her potential is massive”.