Events

“One of Scotland’s very best singer-songwriters.” — The Herald on Sunday

You probably haven’t heard of Simon Kempston. At least not yet. In Scotland they’ve been writing about him for years.

He’s an Edinburgh songwriter, born in Dundee, and a fingerstyle guitarist The Scotsman calls “a master” of the form — classical discipline underneath, Celtic phrasing over the top, blues in the way he bends a line just past where you expect it to stop. Maverick heard “super cool blues in a John Martyn meets Chris Rea vein.” fROOTS went with “intelligent, passionate and highly original.” Iain Anderson has played him on BBC Radio Scotland; Tom Robinson has played him on BBC Radio 6.

What the quotes don’t quite get at is the writing. Kempston builds songs out of architecture, history, politics and the places thirty-eight countries have put him — rarely out of romance — and delivers them in a clear tenor that never oversells a word. He’s played Celtic Connections, Ronnie Scott’s and the Edinburgh Fringe, and regularly puts away more than a hundred concerts in a single year.

He arrives with a new album, A Poet Or A Painter (Listen), released this June and the most ambitious record he’s made — his guitar and voice joined by some of Scotland’s finest folk and jazz players.

One guitar, one voice, and a room where every string carries. If you take a chance on one unfamiliar name this autumn, make it this one.