Chris Smyth

Chris Smyth is a musician and songwriter from Bedford, UK. Chris began on the Nottingham music scene in 2001 and spent a couple of years playing, unpaid, as acoustic background music in wine bars, competing with fruit machines in pubs and doing sets at exploitative industry conventions. Despite some good support gigs, Chris decided the music business was not for him.

Chris retreated to his parent’s house, where he lived, with his wife, in his childhood bedroom. He spent two years recording This Is Our Factory (2004), using all the money from a minimum wage temp job to press a CD.

Around this time Chris was offered a support gig at Hitchin Folk Club. Despite not playing folk music, Chris found an appreciative audience who came to listen to the music. It was a revelation. The next couple of years were spent playing at folk and acoustic clubs and a summer of folk festivals throughout the UK, meeting and playing with great musicians and forming new friendships.

Despite increasing success, Chris never felt he fitted in on the UK folk scene. Years of living without an income, reliant on family for a bed, being unable to repair the car or afford petrol, took their toll. Chris gave up music and began a successful career as a designer.

Over the past decade Chris has continued to write. He has released an album (Numbers & Titles, 2010) and an EP (Narrow Lines, 2016) but, like many musicians who never quite made it, Chris continues to have a complicated relationship with music.