Young Folk Award winners Moore Moss Rutter play Shoreham

Moore Moss Rutter head to Shoreham's Ropetackle on Thursday, November 8 at 8pm as they tour on the back of their third album, released in May.
Playing ShorehamPlaying Shoreham
Playing Shoreham

It is the latest step for Tom Moore, Archie Churchill-Moss and Jack Rutter who launched themselves in the grand style when they won the 2011 BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award while still at school.

Now seven years on, having toured with some of the biggest and best acts in contemporary folk music, they are celebrating their third CD.

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“We are very pleased with it,” says Archie. “From listening to the first and the second and now the third, you can hear the difference in our playing. We have been playing together for more than a decade, and you can hear the tightness in our playing. The first album was in 2011, the second in 2015 and the third is 2018, and it is always interesting to hear your own development.

“We grew up playing together from the age of 12 or 13. Me and Tom met at the Cambridge Folk Festival when we were both 11-year-olds. We both won a competition to take part in a series of workshops, and we met there and formed a little duo. We have got a little video of us as 11-year-olds! It is really nice to have, and it will be good to look back on it as we get older. Our voices were incredibly high!”

They later met Jack at another festival. Archie and Tom were 14, Jack was 15; when Archie and Tom were 17 and Jack 18 they won the BBC award.

“It was amazing. Until then music had just been something that we learnt privately, that our parents had taken us to. It was more social. But then we realised that we could make something out of it. It was our first step into realising that some people have this as their job, and we got some really cool gigs coming from that. With the success, I think you have just got to think about the reason why you are doing it.

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“We did the first two albums and they were a lot of traditional tunes, but we have always been interested in writing our own stuff. We write on traditional instruments but we write from influences form all sorts of music.

“We grew up listening to metal and rock, and we tend to incorporate that into it. Our mission is to write music that we really enjoy. It was never like ‘Oh we have won the award!’ It was nice to have that accolade, and it opened doors and helped people recognise us and take us a bit more seriously, but we were still in full-time education at the time. We were gigging at weekends and doing festivals during the summer for the first few years and then we went to uni. It is only the last couple of years that we have been out of education and that we have now made the third album.

“The third album is almost entirely written by us. 90 per cent of it is material by either me or Tom or Jack. We have found it really interesting to create a new body of traditional music.

“There are millions and millions of reinterpretations, but we want to create something that was really new. When the album came out, it was 45 minutes of unheard music.”

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