Jez Lowe

Recent projects[edit]

In 2006, Lowe contributed to the BBC Radio 2 Radio Ballads documentary series broadcast on Radio 2 as a homage to the original series of the same title, pioneered by Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jez Lowe was commissioned to write 22 new songs for the documentary-folk series, which were not all performed by Lowe but featured guest vocals from the likes of Barry Coope, Bob Fox and many more. The series went on to win two Sony Radio Academy Awards.


In 2008, Lowe was nominated as 'Folksinger of the Year' in the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, but ultimately lost the category to young Scottish singer and instrumentalist Julie Fowlis.


In 2015, Lowe received two nominations for the BBC Folk Awards, as Folksinger of the Year and for Song of the Year ("The Pitmen Poets"), but again failed to win in either category. He was on tour in Canada at the time of the ceremony, with James Keelaghan and Archie Fisher, under the trio-name "Men At Words".


He has an on-going working partnership with guitarist/singer-songwriter Steve Tilston, which sees them do thirty-plus concerts together every year, and which resulted in the album The Janus Game in 2016, consisting entirely of new songs written by Tilston and Lowe in collaboration. Lowe's long-time partnership with Canadian songwriter James Keelaghan also continues, with a joint tour of Canada lined up for 2024. A "live" album by the pair, recorded in Australia in 2002, was released in 2017.


Since 2011, he has been part of a quartet known as The Pitmen Poets, alongside Benny Graham, Billy Mitchell and Bob Fox. They have toured extensively every few years around the UK, and have released three albums of songs about the coal mining communities of North east England.


In January 2018, Lowe published his first novel, The Dillen Doll, through the independent publisher Badapple Books. The story of the novel includes many references to traditional North East of England folk songs, many of which are included on a CD, also called The Dillen Doll, presented as a continuous "suite" of music and songs which culminates in the song "Dol Li A", upon which the story is based. A second novel, The Corly Croons, was published in 2019, and a third, "Piper's Lonnen", in 2022, together with a 5-track CD of songs and pipe-tunes mentioned in the book, featuring long-time collaborator Andy May on Northumbrian Pipes. A fourth novel is due for publication in early 2024.


The final series of the BBC Radio Ballads, The Ballad of The Great War, came to an end in November 2018. This series has featured more than a dozen Jez Lowe songs (bringing it to a total of over fifty of his songs that have been used since the "new" radio Ballads project began in 2006). Lowe also provided the lyrics to John Tams's theme music for this series, entitled "The Cherry-Cheeked Optimists", from episodes two to five. An off-shoot from the Radio Ballads, a project called The Ballads of Child Migration, also features three Jez Lowe songs and was released on CD in 2015. Two further songs were composed by Jez for inclusion in a BBC Radio Two production of Michael Morpurgo's book Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea in 2017, which is linked to the Child Migration project.