Greg McDonald

Greg McDonald is a London songwriter Rolling Stone calls "a poetic genius".

McDonald's hard-hitting songs of freedom and redemption, rooted in the streets and bars of South London, have won fans from Radio 2 to 6music to Q to MTV - think Leonard Cohen meets Joe Strummer.

New album Tomorrow England features folk legend Phil Beer of Show of Hands, & fuses gypsy accordions with indie guitars to create what R*E*P*E*A*T* Records founder Richard Rose calls McDonald's "revolutionary street-folk" sound.

Tomorrow England is McDonald's first full studio album, and follows Stranger at the Door, the cult debut recorded in a Camberwell bedsit for £45 only to become Q's highest rated independent release of the decade.

BBC 6music's Tom Robinson recently opened his show with the first single from the new album, Reclaim the Night, while current single Liberty Waltz, McDonald's paen to international resistance movements, recently prompted a feature in the Foreign Affairs pages of The Times.

Initially championed by John Peel as the front man of The Dawn Parade, the indie band he formed at school, McDonald's songs have gone on to strike a chord everywhere from Radio 1 and Radio 2 to XFM, 6music and MTV, while old-fashioned hard-gigging has taken him from South London boozers to UK festival main stages and shows with Seth Lakeman and Kings of Leon. Even Morrissey has been spotted at gigs.

Greg hosts his own regular night, Heathen Thursdays, a weekly night of live acoustic, roots and folk music which happens every Thursday at The Crown, Blackheath, South London.

As Tom Robinson puts it, "Greg McDonald reminds you why you got into music in the first place".

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