Indie-folk duo take Flyte on Cambridge Folk Festival’s opening day
Named after Sebastian Flyte – surely one of literature’s greatest characters – indie-folk band Flyte are due to perform at this year’s Cambridge Folk Festival on its opening day (Thursday, July 27).
The London-based band, which consists of Will Taylor (vocals, guitar) and Nick Hill (bass, vocals), released their debut album, The Loved Ones, in the autumn of 2017.
The record received widespread acclaim, with The Sunday Times naming it the Best British Debut of the Year. A number of headline tours around the UK and Europe followed – as did second album, This Is Really Going to Hurt, in 2021 – and when Will spoke to the Cambridge Independent outside at a building resembling a “chic 90s café” in London, he revealed that the band had recently returned from a two-month tour of the United States.
“We have good audiences there and we hadn’t been out there since pre-pandemic, so we finally made it out,” explains Will, whose partner Billie Martin performed at last year’s Cambridge Folk Festival.
“We did a pretty comprehensive run of things there, and we’ve got a new record starting to come out – I think the first single [Defender] came out two weeks ago now. Plenty on. There’s more but those are the headlines.”
As well as releasing new music and doing gigs, Flyte also occupy their time in another way.
“We write for other people as well as the Flyte stuff,” notes Will, “so we’ve got quite a busy summer doing that – writing people’s records and things. Then lots and lots of touring at the end of the year. Feeling busy is good.”
Will, who is very much looking forward to seeing Rufus Wainwright and The Proclaimers (“I grew up listening to that Sunshine on Leith record religiously over and over again”) at this year’s event, has never played the Cambridge Folk Festival before but says he’s always wanted to do it and notes that Billie “absolutely loved it”.
Will was also unable to attend last year to watch his other half perform.
“Sadly, I was in the States when she was doing that,” he says, “it’s a shame because that summer I was actually playing guitar for her so I would have been there...
“I missed out, but she said the sound was really good – that was the main takeaway. It was a lovely audience for her and then the sound was really, really nice, which gave her a cosy feeling on stage somehow – which is rare with summer festivals.”
On how the upcoming new album differs from their sophomore effort, Will says: “I think it’s a sort of focusing in of some of the elements that we personally really enjoyed on This Is Really Going to Hurt. I think we took those aspects and ran with it even further.
“For instance, the producer Andrew Sarlo, who is a brilliant alternative folk producer who makes Big Thief’s records and Hovvdy’s records – any artists that are really holding the candle for the modern rendering of the genre currently – he only had a couple of cuts on This Is Really Going to Hurt.
“But on this one, he and the engineer Dom Monks teamed up and we just did it all in one fell swoop with them.
“So on a sonic level, on a creative level – on pretty much all levels – it was very clear and concise, and I’d say confident in its own simplicity.
“Then we had lots of extra artists join us, which we didn’t have on This Is Really Going to Hurt. We had Billie on one of the songs, we had The Staves on another song, we had Laura Marling on another song, a brilliant South African artist called M Field was on another... So more collaborative, more live, more simple, more pared back.”
Will’s parents were both English teachers and inevitably various literary influences trickled into the band’s music.
They even took their name, of course, from Sebastian Flyte, a character from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
“I’m not sure we overthought it at the time, but it was – and probably still is – my favourite novel because of something that we had growing up where we were pretty lower middle class, but then we grew up in Winchester where we were surrounded by some very privileged people and there was a bit of a class divide.
“And I think that fascination with class divide, and this sort of crumbly old English fascination with Catholicism and religion and class, and that sort of thwarted old guard, just seemed like something that spoke to us for some reason.”
Flyte will be performing at the Cambridge Folk Festival on Thursday, July 27. For more information on the festival, visit cambridgelive.org.uk/folk-festival. For more on Flyte, go to facebook.com/flyteband/.