Welcome to the fourth year of Twang Factor, where Americana UK sets out to find the best new and emerging americana acts. Got talent? This is the place to show us what you’ve got.
Our fourth contestant is Woody Holmes, who was born on the western rim of the Lake District. Holmes started his working life at 16. As a woodcutter, he spent his late teens and twenties working in the forests of Northern England and South West Scotland. After fourteen years working in the forestry industry, he moved to Edinburgh, where he became a full-time busker, playing a diverse repertoire of songs, from Woody Guthrie to Neil Young to traditional Irish songs (his grandmother is from Bray County, Wicklow) and his own originals.
He then embarked on an odyssey of self-discovery. Hitchhiking around Ireland and mainland Europe. Often to be heard playing afternoon sessions in Mulligan’s bar, Amsterdam or in the tunnels of Berlin, finally arriving in London and living in the notorious Arlington house hostel in Camden Town. He has been playing in the pass-the-basket sessions in such pubs as Molly Maguires and the Dublin Castle while busking around Covent Garden and in the Greenwich tunnel.
Woody Holmes is an undiscovered singer-songwriter with decades of songs, an itinerant past, a love for the art of songcraft and the music of his deceased hero, Townes Van Zandt. He currently lives off the grid in a cabin he built himself close to his beloved Western Lake District.
