Paul Sartin
Musician and ‘folk geek’ who played in hit band Bellowhead
PAUL SARTIN, who has died aged 51, was classically trained as an oboe player, violinist and singer, but found his niche as a self-styled “folk geek”, making his mark as a composer, arranger, tutor, choirmaster and performer in a dazzling array of musical outlets.
These included the comedic duo Belshazzar’s Feast, the trio Faustus and, most famously, the 11-piece big band Bellowhead, whose third album, Hedonism (2010), holds the all-time record for an independently released folk album, selling 80,000 copies.
Naturally unassuming, Sartin was amazed to find himself headlining festivals with Bellowhead. “If you play in front of an audience of thousands of people, which I’d never done before and may never do again, you do get an enormous thrill,” he said.
He was, however, unmoved by the idea of celebrity. Cherished by his contemporaries for his consummate musicianship, he was passionately committed to promoting music at the grassroots, and to traditional song. As he put it, “You are just a vessel for a song that predates you and is going to outlive you.”
Born in London on February 20 1971, he was brought up by a single mother, Angela, who played the fiddle. He won scholarships to Highgate School and the Purcell School for Young Musicians, going on to perform in a musical theatre troupe, English National Opera’s Baylis youth project and various orchestras.
It was playing Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody No 2 which piqued his interest in the English folk tradition. Aged 16, he would cycle each week from his home in Willesden to Sharps Folk Club in Camden, then “wobble back, because they used to serve me underage”.
It was there he sang his first folk song in public, a Herefordshire carol collected by Vaughan Williams called This Is the Truth. One regular, a drunken Glaswegian, “lurched off his stool and stumbled up to me, and with his face right up in mine he said, “Never sing again! You are a child of the devil!’”
He then won a choral scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Music and sang as a lay clerk at Christ Church Cathedral for five years. He also discovered that Victorian collectors had unearthed a rich mine of folk songs from his female ancestors, the sisters Edith and Marina Sartin, who became the subject of his 2005 masters degree at the University of Newcastle. (He was tickled to find Marina Sartin described by one song collector as “severely diminished in her faculties and teeth”.)
In 1995 he formed the duo Belshazzar’s Feast with accordion player Paul Hutchinson. They released nine albums, initially concentrating on historical dance music and the 18th-century composer Nathaniel Kynaston, but gradually moving into new territory, playing everything from The Archers theme to cheesy pop, Sartin dabbling with the kazoo and Swanee whistle.
He was also in the trio Faustus, with Saul Rose and Benji Kirkpatrick, releasing the albums Faustus (2008), Broken Down Gentlemen (2013) and Death & Other Animals (2016).
In 2004 he received a call from the duo Jon Biden and John Spiers who, stuck in a traffic jam on the M25, had conceived the idea of a folk big band – and would he like to be involved? Making their official debut at Oxford Folk Festival, Bellowhead went on to become the most successful British folk band of modern times, winning eight BBC Folk Awards and breaking into the charts with their albums Broadside (2012) and Revival (2016). They split in 2016 but reunited this year to record a new album, with a tour planned for November.
Sartin was in the early stages of embarking on a solo career when he arrived to play a gig in Oxford with Saul Rose, and suddenly collapsed and died.
His marriage to Jennie Bailey was dissolved and he is survived by their three sons, also musicians.
Paul Sartin, born February 20 1971, died September 14 2022