Best-known as founder and frontmen of folk big band Bellowhead – which regularly packs out major venues across the UK including sold out shows at The Royal Albert Hall in London – Spiers & Boden remain at heart the original duo of Jon Boden and John ‘Squeezy’ Spiers who met at an Oxford session in the late ‘90s.
After a seven-year hiatus, while they concentrated on the meteoric rise of Bellowhead and their signing to Universal Records, Spiers & Boden returned to the stage as a duo in 2021, with the brand new album, Fallow Ground (Hudson Records), which went on to reach number three in the Official Folk Albums Chart and was a Mojo top 10 folk album of the year.
Jon Boden’s familiar voice is heard across TV and radio regularly, backed by either John Spiers or John and the whole Bellowhead line up.
They provide the theme tune of the iconic BBC radio soap The Archers, as well as the BBC Radio 2 Folk Show.
More recently Boden’s voice and Spiers’s melodeon can be spotted on the new Bellowhead theme tune and incidental music for 2023 spin-off show Beyond Paradise, which has recently been commissioned for a second series.
For Jon Boden other work continues writing music for theatre and playing in his own line ups Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings and Jon Boden & The Remnant Strings, while John Spiers plays in The Gigspanner Big Band and in a duo with Gigspanner frontman Peter Knight.
However it as Spiers & Boden that they have a very special place in the hearts of folk music audiences across the UK and beyond.
They return this spring for a tour of 18 dates taking in key theatres and concert halls including one date in Ceredigion.
See Spiers & Boden at Cardigan’s Mwldan on Thursday, 14 March at 7.30pm.
Their only other Welsh tour date so far is on Friday, 15 March at Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea.