Bella Hardy profile at SpiralEarth.co.uk (original) (raw)

Bella is from Edale in Derbyshire's Dark Peak and as a child was always singing. Edale was the ideal place to nurture this natural ability, with an abundance of communal song. Having played the fiddle a small amount at school, Bella attended a Folkworks Youth Summer School in Durham age 13 and concentrated on the fiddle.

It was here that she met a set of friends that went on to form the 12 piece band The Pack, their initial motivation was to blag free tickets to festivals yet their exuberance won them critcal success and slots at many of the major festivals across the UK.

At 18 Bella spent 3 years singing with trio Ola and in 2004 she entered the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Awards as a solo artist. She got through the semis as an unaccompanied singer and went into the finals as a fiddle singer. After a Masters in Music from Newcastle University, Bella decided the time had come to make singing her main priority.

Her debut solo album Night Visiting in 2007 was a breah of fresh air on the folk scene, receiving the 4 Star rating of 'Brilliant' from MOJO music magazine in its February 2008 issue and was listed as one of the Top Ten Folk Albums of 2007.

Bella was nominated in two categories for the 2008 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards; The Horizon Award (for best newcomer) and Best Original Song for Three Black Feathers.

She also featured at the 2008 Proms Folk Day at the Royal Albert Hall, performing unaccompanied songs in the afternoon and with Chris Sherburn and Corrina Hewat in the evening.

In 2009 Bella released her second album In the Shadow of Mountains, self financed and self produced with a select group of musicians, it is an astoundingly mature album for someone so early in their career. Officially launched at the 2009 Cambridge Folk Festival, a festival which Bella has a special affinity for as she has run The Hub area within it for many years and of course performed there many times.

Pictures from Cambridge Folk Festival 2009. Click to launch galleries...

In the Shadow of Mountains 2009
Bella Hardy's second album, In The Shadow Of Mountains is a masterclass in melancholic sensuality, it reveals Bella as a gifted songwriter as well as confirming her as one of the best vocalists on the British folk circuit.
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