Folk Night with Bridget Hayden

Free entry/’pay what you can’ collection for the artists

Join us for the first LORE event of 2026 – a rare trad solo show for Bridget Hayden, one of Northern England’s finest and most fearless interpreters of traditional song, our events also feature floor-spots for local folk singers and musicians (with priority for new contributors); so please join us, and perhaps join in!

Entry to this and most other Puzzle Hall Inn events is free; we also invite voluntary contributions from the audience across the evening to further support the artists that we are hosting.

Widely acclaimed as one of 2025’s finest folk albums, ‘Cold Blows the Rain’ by Todmorden’s own Bridget Hayden & The Apparitions is an enrapturing wintery pilgrimage through traditional standards including ‘Blackwater Side’, ‘Lovely On the Water’ and ‘She Moves Through the Fair’, traced out in spectral banjo, harmonium and fiddle. These most traditional of songs, learned at her mother’s knee and delivered with tender restraint, mark a paradoxically radical departure for Hayden, who has been a key figure of the UK’s ‘Trans-Pennine Underground’ experimental music scene across two decades, including as a member of Vibracathedral Orchestra and the Telescopes, and as a central figure in the Folklore Tapes nexus.

‘Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions start the year with traditional songs as heavy as the sodden moors at midnight. They unfurl at a glacial pace, with analogue synths and delicate banjos buoying up Hayden’s deep, measured voice.’ Folk Album of the Month, The Guardian.

‘Like a skeleton tiptoeing through a field of windblown grass.. quietly heart-rending’ 4.5/5, Uncut Magazine.

‘A mist-soaked album of traditional songs… I found myself quite mesmerised, as the songs weaved their subtle magic’ 4/5, Songlines.