Keith James

Keith James, active as a singer, songwriter, poet, author, and producer, has sustained visibility on the U.K. folk circuit since the 1970s while building listeners for both original material and readings of other artists’ work. Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, he spent his childhood in Surrey and Berkshire, launching his performing career there in the late 1970s through steady acoustic appearances on the then-busy wine-bar route. His first release arrived in 1981 as the self-issued four-song vinyl EP The Bar-Room Balladeer; later the same year came the album Songs, and by the close of 1983 three further EPs plus the LP The Swallows had followed. Continued touring enlarged his audience and led to several BBC Radio sessions. After spending time in South America near the end of the 1980s, he returned to Berkshire, turned toward engineering and production, opened his own studio, and collaborated with assorted folk, blues, and jazz musicians. He later resumed live work, issuing additional original albums including Tomorrow Is Longer Than Yesterday in 1993; the 2000s brought heightened output with Outsides (2002), Postcards (2005), and No.1 Paradise Road (2006). In 2001 James assembled a program devoted to songs by one of his preferred writers, Nick Drake, which succeeded on the U.K. folk circuit and was revived regularly over the following fifteen years. Audience requests prompted the 2003 studio album The Songs of Nick Drake; in 2008 a live album with bassist Rick Foot documented one such performance. Separate tours presented musical settings of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems and selections from Leonard Cohen’s catalog, both later issued on compact disc. Time Let Me Play, released in 2014, set Dylan Thomas poetry to music, while Always appeared in 2015 containing new songs refined over ten years to his standards. James has also published poetry and is completing a book on the challenges confronting the creative spirit.