Acoustic magic for the Five Valleys

2:44pm Wednesday 9th July 2008

"I DO a lot of thinking - I am a thinker - and my lyrics are normally what I want to say about something - after a lot of thinking."

Singer songwriter Ceilidh Jo has been impressing Stroud with her thoughtful acoustic magic for the past three years.

She first came to Stroud as a six year old, when her family moved to Painswick. Between then and now she's lived in Yorkshire, Germany and Cornwall, with periods in Stroud in between.

Since summoning up the nerve to get up and sing at an open-mic night three years ago, she has appeared at Glastonbury, headlined the Stroud Fringe Festival and released an EP, Over The Valleys.

"This music that I am doing at the moment started around three years ago. I had returned from travelling and living in Germany with my daughter, and started playing with other musicians in Stroud, and one thing lead to another," she said.

"It was Andy Dunn, from Stroud's Hub/ SVA, who first encouraged me to develop my music and continue to play the songs that I was writing, after I performed at one of the original Hub open-mic nights.

"I'm told that I used to sing myself to sleep as a child, so I guess I have always been singing," she said.

"My family is very musical and my brother is a fantastic guitarist. I copied the basics from him, but I have never had a proper lesson."

Ceilidh Jo will play at the Prince Albert in Rodborough on Saturday, 8.30pm.