Alan Bell - The Definitive Collection

(September 2005) 16 tracks: The Lakeland Fiddler * Windmills * The Minstrel * Alice White * Fair Stood The Wind * The Band in The Park * Song For Mardale * The Ballad of The Working Man * The Dark Island * Letters From Wilfred * The Jacinta * Spring Song * A Sailor’s Sky * Bread and Fishes * In My Homeland * So Here’s To You.

On this album Alan, director of the Fylde Folk Festival, returns to his roots as a singer and, to meet many requests from around the world, Alan and his friends have re-recorded the most popular and requested songs written in his forty-year career as a songwriter.

Alan Bell was born and bred on the Fylde Coast of Lancashire and started singing in a church school at the age of four years – he has been singing ever since! After a period of singing American folk songs, followed by a period with a skiffle band, Alan joined two others to form The Blackpool Taverners in the early 1960s, who also ran the very successful Taverners Folk Club. The group released several LPs, toured clubs, concert halls and festivals, appeared on countless radio and television shows and on a Royal Command Performance.

Alan first started writing songs for The Blackpool Taverners, including Windmills, The Minstrel, Alice White and of course Bread and Fishes, which was later recorded in Japan, amongst other countries. After the demise of The Taverners, Alan formed The Alan Bell Band and continued to write songs, often for other singers and radio and TV programmes.

His suite The Band in The Park won the prestigious Radio Italia prize for broadcasting for BBC Radio Lancashire. In addition his song cycle Wind, Sail, Sea and Sky, written for the local choral society in the old Lancashire fishing port of Fleetwood, where Alan lives, won great praise.

Alan continued to write other suites and eventually he was featured on a BBC2 Television programme titled Alan Bell - The Man and His Music. Alan was also invited to sing Bread and Fishes in an edition of television’s Songs of Praise. In 2000 Alan won an award from The Local Heritage Initiative to write a show - The Century’s People - telling of the life and times of ordinary people living on the Fylde coast between 1900 and 2000.