Fay Brotherhood

Fay Brotherhood is an unsigned folk singer-songwriter and artist from Coalville in Leicestershire, with Welwyn Garden City also listed as part of her origin. Born in 1984, she is known for songs with personal and often nature-based themes, alongside a distinctive, powerful vocal style. Her work is associated with folk, acoustic, and new age music, and it often draws on the landscape, folklore, and pagan ideas that shape her writing.

Background and early influences

Brotherhood grows up in a musical family. Her father plays blues rock bass and her mother is a blues singer, and both parents perform together during her childhood. She is exposed to a wide range of music from an early age and also develops an interest in visual art. At primary school she sings in school shows, the choir, and assembly hymns, while also preferring drawing to maths. Early vocal influences include Annie Lennox, Pat Benatar, and her mother’s voice, while the Beatles influence her sense of composition and harmony.

By her teenage years she is listening to artists and bands including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Yes, Blur, Super Furry Animals, and The Seahorses. At King Edward VII Community College, where she studies GCSE music, she begins accompanying herself on a battered classical guitar. She starts writing songs in late 1998, first about social exclusion and later about the natural world and Paganism. A pen friend describes her as having a “pagan soul”, a label she feels fits ideas she already holds.

Songwriting and recordings

Her first album, Whispers in the Boughs, appears in 2003 and reflects these early interests. Around this period she is influenced by Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and especially Jethro Tull. She also cites Sandy Denny, Maddy Prior, Robert Plant, Grace Slick, Ian Anderson, Melanie Safka, and Tori Amos among the voices that shape her approach, particularly for their melodic, expressive, and dynamic singing. She says her parents reinforce the importance of feeling and emotion in performance.

A growing interest in folk is encouraged during sixth form by her music teacher David Fisher, who steers her towards folk clubs and the Cecil Sharp collections. She also gains performance experience through musical theatre productions while studying Performing Arts. Her second album, Follow the Falcon, appears in 2004 and draws on a long bicycle journey from Coalville to Minehead, including time spent in Avebury around Lammas, as well as the difficulties of her first relationship.

After a period of reduced musical activity, she continues writing while focusing on work and personal life. In 2005 she studies Countryside Management at Sparsholt College in Hampshire. The material for Clear Fell, recorded in 2006 and released in 2011, reflects changes in her life after a breakup and uses natural imagery and folklore. Her fourth album, Hare in the Heath, is released in 2012 and focuses on Charnwood Forest, the coalfield, local myths and legends, and the places and people that have influenced her.

Live work and recognition

In 2009 she begins studying BSc Hons Wildlife Conservation at Nottingham Trent University. During her second year she starts performing live again after a chance friendship with folk musicians prompts her to rebuild confidence and learn songs to performance standard, including traditional material and her own songs. She begins booking gigs herself and plays around 50 shows by September 2011, building a reputation in the Leicester and Nottingham music scenes.

Brotherhood wins the open mic competition at the 2011 Southwell Folk Festival and is billed to appear at the following year’s festival. Her support slots include performances with the Billy Mitchell Band, Rory MacLeod, Katriona Gilmore & Jamie Roberts, Kristina Olsen, and The Strawbs. She is compared to artists including Kate Bush, Sandy Denny, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Loreena McKennitt, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.