Andy Skellam is a Bristol based musician who creates an idiosyncratic blend of surreal folk & dissonant blues using acoustic/electric guitar, banjo and his baritone singing voice. His music reflects darkly humorous & deeply affecting absurdities.
Andy’s second full length album, Green Moat, was recorded in various locations near Bristol, UK using mostly analogue equipment & techniques. It was produced by Jesse D Vernon (This Is The Kit, The Moonflowers, The Fantasy Orchestra).
Green Moat plays like a surreal dreamscape, perhaps because it is a product of late nights spent hunched over a guitar beside the glowing embers of a fire whilst everyone sleeps. It has spawned from the dusty corners & dank barns of his feral childhood on a disused farm.
Although the songs were created in a rather solitary way, the album is a collaborative affair featuring Beth Porter (cello), Jamie Whitby Coles (drums) and Jesse MorningStar (bass, violin, keys) & vocals by regular collaborator George Morgan.
‘The soundtrack to resting on a broken tree in mulchy woods… [it] has provoked comparisons to Syd Barrett and Nick Drake – artists who similarly managed to butterfly-pin the strangeness of English life in music’ Dan Weltman, Hollowbody, Snails.
‘Andy is up there in my top three favourite guitarists of the new British ragtime guitar revolution’ Kate Stables, This Is The Kit.
He’s tall and thin, got cobwebs in his beard, falls asleep between sentences and hails from Herefordshire via Portsmouth. Andy’s voice is as mellow as a spadeful of Herefordshire soil in Autumn. His guitar playing is as steady as a grandfather clock showered by pine needles.
Andy has opened for artists such as Alastair Roberts, This is the Kit, Gravenhurst, Diane Cluck & Spiro, and has collaborated with Bristol contemporaries Rachael Dadd, Wig Smith & Hollowbody. He has toured Europe, South America and the UK.