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The Brighton Magazine

Selected Brighton Magazine Article
Tuesday 29 January 2013


Brighton's Folk Glitterati Need Your Votes At This Year's Spiral Earth Awards:

Brighton's very own Levellers and Nick Burbridge feature among the nominees of this year's Spiral Earth Awards.


The British folk-orientated website, which represents the 'roots of music', is a well respected bookmark for both the creatives and fans among the homegrown music scene.

Nick Burbridge - novelist, poet, dramatist, journalist, short story and song writer - has long been a Brighton magazine favourite.

He was the founder, in 1986, of the folk-rock band McDermott's Two Hours who at their peak, performed regularly at festivals like Glastonbury, Reading and Womad. 


They have, so far, released six McDermott"s Two Hours albums (versus The Levellers or in their own right) with another soon to come .. produced by the award-winning Al Scott (think Eliza Carthy, Levellers, Seth Lakeman, Asian Dub Foundation, Electric Soft Parade and many more).

The Brighton Magazine has described Nick Burbridge as being 'to Brighton, what the Copper family are to Rottingdean.'

Burbridge mused on the compliment: "I don't know if I belong in their ranks. My work is fashioned deep behind the façade. 

"It draws on the grit of personal experience: entanglement with mental illness, havoc wreaked by hard drugs and homelessness; sexual thirsts inappropriately met; the search for an abiding faith. 

"Yet it's set firmly in the context of family and working life. And it celebrates our unique urban landscape, caught between the downs and sea, which ensures, however lost we are in our own meanderings, the natural world arrests us."  


Last year he joined forces with Tim Cotterell for Gathered, an unplugged album of articulate contemporary songs rooted in the traditional Celtic idiom.

Burbridge said at the time: "In this city (Brighton), as in every other through the land, we live in crucial times, at the edge of an era where the corrupt political monster we have reared raises its head against us, with teeth bared," 

"It's easy to point to injustice, and celebrate insurrection, on distant shores. Much harder to admit we are responsible for giving power to those prepared to attack the rights of the most vulnerable among us – poor, young, workless, and disabled."

To vote for Nick Burbridge (songwriter) and the Levellers (album and festival) CLICK HERE. Voting closes on 14th March.


by: Mike Cobley



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