ALL FEMALE folk supergroup - Applewood Road - will play live at Stroud’s St Laurence Church on November 20.

The trio - AKA Emily Barker, Amber Rubarth and Amy Speace - garnered much attention for their cover of REM’s Losing My Religion last year, releasing their debut album to widespread acclaim in 2016.

Next month, Applewood Road return to the UK to round off a triumphant year which has included performances at Glastonbury and Cambridge Folk Festival, an appearance on the Andrew Marr Show, and a UK tour with Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Emily, Amber and Amy first met two years ago, during the 2014 Americana Music Festival, at a café in East Nashville.

It was a serendipitous first meeting. Emily Barker was in Nashville for AmericanaFest and had been introduced to Amy Speace by a mutual friend.

The pair arranged to meet over coffee, and Amy invited her friend Amber Rubarth to join them.

By the following afternoon the three had written a song, ‘Applewood Road’, and the following week they recorded it live to tape at Welcome To 1979 studios around one microphone, accompanied only by Telisha Williams on double bass.

The three women, each with successful solo careers of their own, assumed that would be the end of the story.

But the tape made its way back to the UK and into the hands of Gearbox Records, who signed the three basic strangers to a record deal on the strength of that one song.

A few months later a window appeared in their very busy schedules and Barker, Rubarth and Speace reconvened in Nash- ville for one week to write, arrange, rehearse and record a full album.

The songs were again performed live around a single microphone at Welcome to 1979 and recorded to two-track tape.

Applewood Road was released in February 2016 to across-the-board critical ac- claim. 4 and 5 star reviews came in from The Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror, R2, Q Magazine and others.

They appeared on BBC2’s Dermot O’Leary show, singing their arrangement of REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’, which was subsequently included on Dermot’s latest Saturday Sessions CD (Sony).

In the summer, an appearance on the Andrew Marr Show was followed by a session on Sky Arts at Cambridge Folk Festival.

Applewood Road live: Sun 20 Nov St Laurence Church, Stroud.