Kris Drever

Cherished and admired in equal measure by listeners and fellow musicians, award-winning guitarist, singer, songwriter and prolific collaborator Kris Drever has been a leading light on the UK roots scene for well over a decade. A highly skilled guitarist who adroitly blends traditional folk and flat picking with more contemporary influences – allied to a distinctively relaxed and poised vocal burr – Drever is an astonishingly fine interpreter of others’ songs, with a frequent knack for concocting seriously smart lyrical observations and earworm melodies. The Orkney-raised, Glasgow-based 41 year old has played and recorded with an extensive range of artists including Mark Knopfler, Jack Bruce, Danny Thompson, Eddi Reader, Bela Fleck, Tim O’Brien, Jerry Douglas, Sarah Jarosz, Joan As Police Woman, Tinariwen, Karine Polwart and Julie Fowlis. In October 2020 he releases his fourth solo record, Where the World is Thin. It is the follow-up to 2016’s If Wishes Were Horses, which garnered a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award, and features the singles Scapa Flow 1919 (commissioned by the BBC for the First World War centenary commemmorations), Where the World is Thin and More Than You Know. Drever established himself as a solo artist with his own takes on traditional and contemporary songs by others on 2006 debut Black Water and 2010's Mark the Hard Earth, while his most recent two LPs see him mining an increasingly rich seam of songwriting that’s very much his own.