Boundary-breaking Findlay Napier heads to Corby

Returning after supporting Eddi Reader in 2017, Napier will be playing songs from his 2017 album Glasgow - his second collaboration with Boo Hewerdine.

Glasgow combines freshly-penned originals with classics and rarities from the city’s ballad canon by authors as diverse as Hamish Imlach and The Blue Nile.

Together, they form an extended musical love-letter to Scotland’s metropolis, celebrating 20 years since Napier first arrived as a student, swapping his idyllic Highland childhood home for the 14th floor of the city’s notorious Red Road flats.

In between putting the finishing touches to Glasgow he toured with Shake the Chains and earlier this year, he joined up with BBC2 Folk Award winning artist Megan Henwood for her EP The Story Song Scientist.

Napier’s own songcraft today reflects this increasingly rich stylistic melting-pot – a mix he’s played no small part in creating, especially the cross-fertilisation between Glasgow’s folk and indie communities, as both co-host of a long-running open-mic night and promoter of the decade-old Hazy Recollections concert series

Napier himself remains happy to identify as a folk singer – even if he does enjoy stretching the term’s already elastic parameters. “I don't fit that one-guy-with-a-guitar template,” he says.

“I do love that old-fashioned, all-round idea of an ‘entertainer’ - I think it’s a brilliant thing.”

“But then that’s totally what the best folk singers are; they’ll have you in absolute hysterics, in between punching you in the gut - people like Loudon Wainwright, John Prine, Michael Marra.

“That’s the absolute pinnacle, as far as I’m concerned.”

Findlay plays The Core on November 23 at 8pm. Tickets cost £11.50 before fees.