Chris & Ian at the Zeza Festival, Laziska Gorne, Poland

It’s almost twenty years since we first met at Maghull Folk Club. Ian asked Chris to get up at the folk club with him and put a harmony on the chorus to Rita MacNeil’s song,”Working Man”.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Our choice of songs, our style of singing and our voices have changed over those years but the one thing that hasn’t changed is our love of singing those songs and the enjoyment of singing them together.   So, where have those twenty years taken us?  Well to be honest, they have taken us on one long “folk music adventure”.  We have sung in Poland and Norway and several places in between.  We have sung to audiences ranging in numbers from 20 to 2,000.  We have sung in magnificent buildings ranging from St Georges Hall in Liverpool, to the beautifully restored church in Appingedam in Northern Netherlands, and we have met some wonderful people along the way.   And what of our music?  Well, we specialise in close-harmony arrangements and although we both play guitar (Ian mostly plays guitar!!), in recent years we have leaned more towards  unaccompanied arrangements in order to emphasise our harmony style.   We try to select a wide range of songs from traditional and contemporary sources and Ian has written quite a few, but a good song is a good song, regardless of the era or discipline in which it was created.  Our main objective is to find songs that have a good, interesting content that will hopefully carry an audience along with us.  We just want everyone to have a good sing! One of our main interests is in maritime songs.  Living near to Liverpool it’s difficult to ignore the history of slaves, transports and emigrants and we started to pick up on some of the wonderful martitime songs that are out there.  It was this interest that led us to one of the most challenging and one of the most rewarding  periods of our musical journey.  In 2002 we teamed up with another male/female duo, whom we had known for many years.  Steve Dawes and Helen Pitt live in Stockton-on-Tees and we would bump into them regularly at various festivals thoughout the UK.   With both duos having a real love of maritime songs the inevitable happened and Four ‘n’ Aft was born!