Musically Sarah Gillespie’s sound is a melting-pot of urban-folk and middle-eastern blues. Her lyrically driven songs are conveyed with a powerfully sensuous voice and deft finger-picking guitar. With her distinctive delivery, Gillespie is a passionate and formidable storyteller – wrestling with the toils of life, love and yearning in a style that blends everyday banter with raw poetry.  

Bursting with character, her voice is strong and provocative, yet at the same time full of vulnerability - and it is this that makes her such a compelling performer. She creates a mix of emotive ballads, raucous gypsy swing, blues and vaudeville - not to mention some wild Arabic-infused flourishes courtesy of Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon. However, within all of this, the influences of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and the Velvet Underground can clearly be heard. Her dynamic band not only includes the album’s producer Gilad Atzmon on accordion, clarinet and sax, but also features renowned jazz drummer and percussionist Enzo Zirilli, with Ben Bastin on double bass,

Sarah Gillespie predominantly grew up in the UK, although as her mother was from Minneapolis, her childhood was peppered with trips to the States. With an eclectic set of musical influences, she began writing songs on the piano at the age of nine, graduating to guitar at fifteen. Her first gig came about three years later in Madison, Wisconsin. Snow-stranded and happily drunk (thanks to a fake ID that later landed her in jail) after a Bob Dylan gig, she bumped into members of Dylan's support band, Over the Rhine, who invited her to open for them at sold-out shows in Cincinnati. Upon returning home to London, she turned her attention to academia, gaining a first class degree in film and literature and a Masters in politics and philosophy from Goldsmiths.  

"Totally original music… Sarah Gillespie is brilliant, the bee’s knees" - Robert Wyatt 

A beat poet adventurer who strays beyond the bounds of singer-songwriter. Mojo   

Streetwise and romantic, tender and tough. Daily Telegraph   

Gillespie’s second album is so strikingly fine that you wonder how you can have missed her first one… Lovely, poetic. The Mail on Sunday   

She’s an incandescent new presence who matches her imposing delivery with superior lyrics’ The Guardian

Haunting tunes and striking lyrics…yearningly pretty and bitter sweet. The Independent   

She’s a fiercely independent and radical singer and writer, eschewing the clichés of the “chick with a guitar” genre to deliver something far more poetic, political and visceral. Gillespie is a poet. The Jazz Mann