Tim Wilkinson

My songs are English pastoral - of a modern English melancholy. I'm from the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. I lived in California for 12 years, but back in England now, to stay; here, with my wife and children, are where my bones belong.

I live near the great old City of Lincoln, but one day I might return to live again in my beloved Cotswolds...

Mine is a deep love affair with our soft and savage, fragile and friable rural England; each coppice and spinney, stonewall and stile, washing line and wickergate, beermug and barstool, has a story to tell, which I try to put in my songs, songs with a foot in the past and an eye to the future.

What I'm after is the fitting together of words, melody and accompaniment in songs that speak some way or another - be it profound or flippant - of the half-glimpsed other England; the England for which there is no known cure; myth-blurred; where the ordinary and level headed is overlaid and faceted with fantasy; where commonsense meets sixth sense.

Can't bear to be a daub, in the awful portrait of the anxious lives newsreaders, nowadays, seem devoted to painting us into. Rather then, to sing songs with that peculiarly English mix of optimistic melancholy, willing my mind's eye to float me above some green patch of hillside and woodland, where magic might still be discovered, nestling beneath our everyday, if only we look hard enough.

In that place, my ancestors look up from their wheelwrighting and their walking to market; they smile to me in quiet encouragement, while the Cotswolds arch away and away... and there's my Grandfather, straight-backed, forever a Royal Gloucestershire Hussar, telling me, in his understated way, "That's a nice song our Tim".

My influences:
The English countryside, my Grandfather, Nick Drake, David Francey, my old mate and ace guitarist Jim Griffiths, Wilfred Owen, Andy Partridge, Stanley Spencer, James Taylor, Edward Thomas, Richard Thompson, Chris Wood & Hugh Lupton, and so many, many others...