Friday night Badly Drawn Boy headline on the Main Stage

Has it really been a decade since the release of Damon Gough’s Mercury-winning, debut ‘The Hour of the Bewilderbeast’? With a vast back catalogue to choose from, his set on Friday night will surely be a memorable start to the festival.

It’s been a curious, wonderful, inimitable, unpredictable decade of major prizes and minor incidents, all possibilities and pissing in the wind, at the end of which we find Gough starting the new decade as he did the last…at a creative peak, and back on his own label.

Saturday Moseley Folk Festival welcome Tinariwen as their Saturday night headliners.

A group of  former Touareg warriors from the southern Sahara, they fought  in the early 1990s to win greater freedom for the their people. Their fight gave birth to a whole new style of desert music – their roots rock rebellion of the soul is one of the most entrancing sounds to emerge from Africa in years.

More recently, Tinariwen have returned to the very essence of their art for their latest, predominately acoustic, album which will be released on the 29th August 2011.

Billy Bragg will bring the festival to a lively close on Sunday night. Over the past 30 years, he has recorded hit singles, composed Top Ten albums and written political anthems whilst blending elements of folk & punk rock and singing honest songs from the heart.

He has collaborated with many other musicians, including Johnny Marr of The Smiths, protest folk singer Leon Rosselson, R.E.M., Less Than Jake, Kirsty MacColl, Kate Nash and Milburn. He obtained a top-twenty hit with the song ‘We Laughed’ in a band called The Rosetta Life band (with  Helena, Robbie McIntosh, Ady Milward and Chris Lonergan). He, along with Paul Weller and others, was a leading member of UK left-wing musicians pressure group Red Wedge in the Thatcher-dominated 80s.

In recent years he has broadened his audience thanks to his involvement with Wilco on the album Mermaid Avenue and its follow-up Mermaid Avenue Vol II.

Sourced from Moseley Folk Festival