MARK RADCLIFFE is well-known as the presenter of the Radio 2 Folk Show, and also the 6music weekend breakfast show with Stuart Maconie. His interest in folk music also extends to performing, and together with artist and guitar tutor David Boardman he has just released an album of 10 original songs, Hearsay and Heresy.

Their second album together, the pair met at The Rose and Crown in their hometown of Knutsford in Cheshire 10 years ago. “We both found we could blend harmony together as well as guitar playing and sought inspiration from duos like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, The Milk Carton Kids, Simon and Garfunkel and The Everly Brothers.”

The opening song Merchant City, Driving Rain came about while they were at Celtic Connections and was inspired, if that can be the right word, by Glasgow’s weather conditions at the time. Other songs like At the Bar San Calisto refer to favourite watering holes but the album also has tracks rooted in folk music’s traditions of storytelling and social commentary.

Steal the Sea was written about the cotton barons in Manchester and the plans to build the Manchester Ship Canal. “I feel the themes are reminiscent of Ewan MacColl singing about Salford in Dirty Old Town. We were also thinking about the paintings of LS Lowry and the Walter Greenwood novel Love on the Dole when looking at Manchester’s industrial history.”

The album ends with The Not So Grand Hotel the one track that can be described as a protest song about the 2024 riots outside hotels housing asylum-seekers. “We have been performing this a lot and I try to depoliticise it when talking to audiences as I don’t claim to be an expert on the situations that cause people to flee their homeland or what the solutions to those conflicts are. I just want to generate a feeling in the audience that people should be treated with kindness and empathy and generating hatred towards children is a line you don’t cross.”

With friends contributing harmonica, fiddle and piano this is an album worth listening to on every level.

Hearsay and Heresy is released by Talking Elephant Records