Lewis ‘Burner’ Pough – Burners For Bread

( Performed and produced by Lewis Burner, 2024)

Hailing from Leeds, England, Lewis ‘Burner’ Pugh is a Traditional musician influenced by everything from bluegrass and country through to skiffle and punk. Having been raised on bluegrass and folk music, Pugh kicks-up the socially-conscious and worker-led ethos of Dustbowl troubadours like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger on the rollicking new Bullets for Bread, released earlier this year. On this, Pugh’s third solo album, all ten songs on the album are originals, although it’d be easy to mistake this collection of songs as a crate of 45s having just fallen off a rickety horse-drawn wagon on its way to a plough auction. Pugh plays guitar, banjo, and harmonica, calling in bandmate Steven Hicken Jr. (from his THE BURNER BAND project) to play steel pedal guitar and THE OFTEN HERD’s Niles Kreiger to strum the fiddle, conjuring a twangy, sepia-toned tracklist that channels contemporary concerns through the exhilarating, all-but-lost form of Protest Music. Featuring ‘The Ballad of Emily Swann’, a true story of domestic abuse and murder in Yorkshire, and ‘Featherstone Massacre’, which details the story of soldiers opening fire on picketing miners, “Pugh” as folk music reviewer At The Barrier writes, “make his passion a vibrant and uplifting force, with quality of the tunes a distinct added bonus. You might even call him the cowpunk Billy Bragg!”