Welcome to my website.
Music
I first got really interested in traditional folk music as a teenager. It set me on a path or should I say paths? that I am still exploring several decades later. It has taken me all over Europe, North America and once, even to China. I have been privileged to meet and hear many great musicians and I have made many friends along the way. It also led to me living in Iceland, where I am one half of the duo Funi, along with my wife Bára Grímsdóttir. We are involved in all sorts of musical activities here in Iceland, and we also travel abroad to perform and lead workshops.
You can visit our website here:
We are always interested to hear from people with ideas for projects and performances.
Contact details are over on the
contacts and links page.
It is always hard to write about oneself,
so I will let a couple of other people say a bit...
“Chris Foster merits legend status, one of the very best in the second wave of the Brit folk revival, as important as Martin Carthy, Dick Gaughan and Nic Jones in the way he has modernised and invested traditional songs with inventive guitar arrangements and potent vocal delivery.”
Colin Irwin – fROOTS
‘The warm tone of Chris’ voice and his captivating guitar playing draws you into the ancient world of storytelling which links generation to generation, culture to culture and humanity back to its humanity.’
Susan Grace - Burton Mail
OK, so where do we go from here?
Over the past few years, I have been thinking about what a sustainable, future live music scene could be like, both here in Iceland and also in general, further afield. Many old models no longer work as they did and seem unsustainable.
For my part, I want to go forward to new and better ways of doing things, that do not cost us the earth and wreck the planet in the process.
We cannot carry on jetting around the place in the 'old normal' way. Living here in Iceland, thousands of kilometers from anywhere, with a population the size of a small European city, that presents a special set of challenges, so we have to find ways to create solutions.
For me that could mean smaller intimate scale local events, both indoors (house concerts anybody?), feasts, good old fashioned folk club scale events, and out doors garden concerts, camp fires, tailor made performances in special locations in the countryside, and all with a hefty dose of participation.
Community building is key.
I have always really valued the sense of community and sharing that the best of the folk scene has offered. I firmly believe that our music works best at the scale and in the kinds of settings that it grew out of, so let's see what we can do.
Vökufélagið
In January 2024, I got together with a small group of folk arts activists here in Iceland, to form a new association called Vökufélagið (The Vaka Society). The name comes from the Vaka Folk Arts Festival, which I have been helping to organise since it started in 2015.
The declared aim of Vökufélagið is 'to promote dialogue and cooperation between individuals, associations and institutions, in order to create opportunities to sing, play, dance and listen to Icelandic traditional music, and folk music from further afield, alongside collaborations with other folk arts activities such as handcrafts, poetry, storytelling, drama, etc., all with the aim of building a vibrant, inclusive folk arts community in Iceland.
Folk arts traditions are constantly evolving, and by keeping the inheritance of previous generations alive, they simultaneously celebrate both past and present.
Far from being reenactment or mimicry, they enable people's creativity to manifest itself in the contemporary work itself. In this way, traditions are constantly evolving. Because folk traditions are varied and in constant flux, no single individual or group can claim to own or have created them. They belong to the collective experience of the communities in which they take place. Our ambition is to build traditions for tomorrow.
2024 saw Vökufélagið organising two main events. On June 2nd, as part of the biennial Reykjavík Arts Festival, we organised a 12 hour day of activities in Reykjavík's oldest performance space, Iðnó. The day attracted a steady stream of people of all ages and the place was really buzzing.
Then, from the 13th to 15th September, we held the 7th Vaka Þjóðlistahátíð (Vaka Folk Arts Festival with a full programme of concerts, workshops, sessions, a seminar about the Icelandic rímur (very long narrative singing) tradition, and the centre piece event, a feast with pop-up entertainments, singing and dancing.
As we head into our second year, armed with more bright ideas than we can possibly ever deliver, I'm excited to see what we'll come up with.
More information about Vökufélagið can be found at:
Other stuff that I'm doing...
Gabe Dunsmith, of the Vökufélagið crew organises the fortnightly Reykjavík Trad Sessions at the Ægir bar in downtown Reykjavík. Check out dates etc. on the Trad Sessions Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/RVKsession). I try to get along as often as possible. It's a friendly group of people and with a steady stream of people from other countries passing through, there's plenty of variety in the music.
At the same bar, another Vökufélagið friend, Atli Freyr Hjaltason, of the Reykjavík Folk Dance Association, organises Sagnavaka a monthly ballad dance night, where we sing and dance the old ballads, which used to be widespread across northern Europe, including the UK. Nowadays the Faroe Islands are the remaining stronghold of the tradition.
Along with Bára and other friends, I run monthly Söngvaka (song workshop sessions) through the winter months. Bára is chairperson of Kvæðamannafélagið Iðunn, the organisation founded in 1929, and dedicated to preserving Iceland's song and poetry traditions.
All in all, there seems to be a growing amount of folk arts activity with more people getting involved all the time. It feels like things are on the move here and not before time.
Visual Arts &
Community Arts Work
Video of exhibition at the Society of Icelandic Artists gallery Reykjavík 2022
Many years ago, I spent five years studying at Art Schools in England. Then, I set out on my life's journey as a painter and touring musician. In due course, I got deeply involved in the emerging UK Community Arts Movement, working with all sorts of groups of people, developing ideas and techniques for making work together, rather than as a solo artist working in isolation.
As a community arts worker, I worked on a huge variety of both large and small scale projects, with groups of people of all ages and abilities, in both rural and urban settings. Projects included painted and mosaic murals, photography exhibitions, screen printing campaign posters, mixed artform events and celebrations, theatre performances and live and recorded music.
I have been living in Iceland since 2004 and since moving here, alongside touring internationally and recording both solo and as the duo FUNI with Bára Grímsdóttir, I have also resumed making studio based art works.
Summer's gone and winter's here.
2024 has gone by at a dizzying speed. Here in Iceland, mornings are dark, long past breakfast time. Daylight hours are very short, and it is cold outside. This song from my Hadelin album sums it up pretty well.
Recordings
Over the years, I have done a fair bit of recording, including seven solo albums and two duo albums as FUNI with Bára Grímsdóttir, along with session work for other people. My most recent solo album, Hadelin was released in March 2017 and one of the tracks was nominated for the best traditional song award in the 2018 BBC Folk Awards. Scroll down to see some reviews.
CD copies of Hadelin and and my 2008 album Outsiders, along with downloads of earlier albums and individual songs are available from
My solo music and Icelandic albums with FUNI are also on all the usual streaming sites.
My latest album 'Hadelin' got some excellent reviews in the folk and world music press. Here are some extracts.
fROOTS, April 2017
Long-domiciled in Iceland and an infrequent visitor to recording studios, Foster’s new solo release comes as an unexpected pleasure. Actually, it’s not really a ‘solo’ album as he’s accompanied by Jackie Oates (viola), John Kirkpatrick (melodeon), Jim Moray (piano), Trevor Lines (double bass) and Martin Brinsford (tambourine). When they all play ensemble – as on The Faithful Plough and Greensleeves (with Foster on hammered dulcimer) they’re a terrific English country dance band.
Songs, however, are Foster’s stock-in trade, and here he revisits some of the greatest examples of the English canon, starting with the daddy-of-’em-all, The Seeds Of Love. Accompanied by his own guitar and Oates’ viola, it’s an utterly majestic performance. Of the three songs that don’t have Roud numbers, two – Once When I Was Young and Who Reaps The Profit? Who Pays The Price? are by Leon Rosselson. Chris Foster is (with all due deference to Messrs Bailey and Carthy) probably my favourite interpreter of Rosselsongs, and the astute booklet notes that reference both Standing Rock, North Dakota, and Hinkley Point, Somerset, further reveal the singer’s empathy with the great songwriter’s work. The final track – Spring Song, is, astonishingly, Foster’s first original composition, proving once and for all the falsity of that old dog/new trick trope.
Huge credit should go to producer Jim Moray for his role in creating an album that marks not just the welcome return of a folk scene favourite but one of the very finest albums of English song by anybody in recent years.
Steve Hunt
Living Tradition magazine
Chris has emerged from the fastnesses of his Icelandic home with a CD that’s heavily redolent of his Somerset roots... And it really is good; these are real, meaty songs that tell strong stories, and Chris’s distinctive voice and engaging phrasing enhance the quality of his material. It is in the nature of story-songs to be lengthy, and with songs like The Holland Handkerchief and Rosselson’s Who Reaps the Profit? Who Pays the Price? It takes a singer of considerable ability to hold his audience for the length of the song, let alone for the duration of a CD that includes several such songs. This never appears to be a challenge for Chris, whose ability to ‘carry’ a song has only improved over the years.
John Waltham
Chris Foster’s status as one of British folk music’s major players is secure. His two records for Topic in the late 1970s (Layers and All Things In Common) ensured him a place alongside the likes of Martin Simpson, June Tabor and Nic Jones as one of the leading lights of the acoustic boom of that period. Although music took a back seat in the 1980s as he followed other artistic projects, he continued to release solo albums, his last being Outsiders (2008). Foster will be 70 next year, and after a shapeshifting career, he could be forgiven for settling down and producing something a little more prosaic. But that is not his style, and Hadelin sees him once again pushing the boundaries of traditional music...
... Hadelin ends with Spring Song, and it will come as some surprise to the casual listener that this is the first and only song that Foster has ever written, especially given that it sounds so natural, so universal that it could almost be a traditional piece. ‘Hail the hum of hedge and hive, it’s good to be alive,’ he sings with a combination of verbal freedom and authorial control that many seasoned songwriters would envy. Spring Song ends the album just as The Seeds Of Love started it: with birdsong. Time, Foster seems to be saying, is circular rather than linear, and to celebrate its passing in song is the most natural thing in the world. He has the uncanny ability to make everything he does appear easy, assembling or arranging songs like an artisan builds a drystone wall – a piece at a time, and with the gaps and cracks providing as much of the character as the solid, tangible elements. And like drystone walls, these striking songs will become part of their surroundings, and will surely stand the test of time.
Thomas Blake
Reykavík Grapevine
English folk ballads don’t get much attention these days on a musical stage saturated with grunge-hip-techno-disco-pop. But here to give them the attention they deserve is Chris Foster, a Somerset native who has lived in Reykjavík since 2004. Chris’ work preserving and promoting traditional Icelandic music—and reviving old Icelandic instruments such as the langspil and fiðla—is worthy of praise in its own right, but for his album release concert at Mengi, Chris returned to his roots.
Though pop culture’s obsession with all that is glitzy, ostentatious and cacophonous threatens to relegate the ballad as a form to dusty Oxford archives, Chris insists ... that these songs “are not museum pieces.” Instead, “they refer to the natural world, the rhythm of the seasons, birth, life, death, love, betrayal, the ebb and flow of the struggle for justice and human rights.” In digging up old songs and painting them in a new light, Chris effectively reclaims the ballad and insists they are worthy of singing.
... In a world beset by wars and oppression, the ballads open a window into how we might mourn. Take this verse, for example, from The Trees They Grow So High:
She made for him a shroud of the hadelin so fine
and every stitch she put in it,
her tears came trickling down,
crying,
“Once I had a bonny boy,
but now I have got never a one,
so fare you well my bonny boy forever.
The song tells of an arranged marriage between a woman of 21 and a man of 16, whose sudden death leaves his widow stricken. Though the lyrics may appear antiquated at first glance, the song’s power lies in the rawness of its emotions and its capacity to bring grief to the surface of life. Ballads force us to confront our own darkness as well as the darkness of the world, and in that way can function as instruments of healing.
Chris sings with such deftness that you can hear in his voice his sense of home, his drive for justice and his deep love of life. He is an artist in the truest sense: one who is dedicated to his craft, who understands the power of story and song.
Gabe Dunsmith
www.fatea-records.co.uk/magazine/reviews
Hadelin is an extremely well considered selection of songs that (in Chris’ own words) “have all sorts of connections with people and places (he) has known over the years”, while referring to “all things that remain a constant, albeit shifting backdrop to the human condition”. Although this is nominally a solo album, Chris has, entirely appropriately, chosen his backing musicians very carefully, to represent the next generation – to whom he’s passing the torch of tradition, as it were – along with others with whom he’s worked over the years, while also inviting Jim Moray to produce the record.
.... there’s something magical about Chris’ way with a song, what I can only describe as an immediate, “living” breathing interpretation (meticulously considered, yet nowhere artificially pointed) that brings its lyric alive and somehow accentuates its relevance....
Finally, I must mention that the CD has been produced with exemplary clarity by Jim Moray, assisted by Dylan Fowler, and the whole affair is impeccably packaged, the disc being housed in a beautifully designed digipack with full colour booklet.
David Kidman
Stirrings magazine
Chris has lived in Reykjavik for a while now and I was pleased to attend a night a while back on a foggy night at Calver Village Hall when he and Bára Grimsdóttir did a show of largely Icelandic material and at the end he promised more albums of English traditional songs. This is a fine example and it is superb and well worth the wait.
Once When I Was Young is a Leon Rosselson song about dissociation from nature and love in a world of glass, granite and concrete, which shows what we have to fight to retain human values in a world of corporate greed and control. Never more apt than today as the forces of nationalism and fascism are on the rise again.
The Life Of A Man likens our time here to the leaves on a tree and was collected by Chris from Jumbo Brightwell in Leiston. The shift of gear at the end of this version was inspired by New Orleans marching bands at funerals and lifts the solemnity into an apt optimism as they get a move on. The instrumental version of Greensleeves that follows was from a Somerset fiddler in 1907 and continues the notion that death is the beginning of another natural cycle; so why should we grieve?
Mike Wild