bio

Over the last 25 years, folk musician and songwriter David Nigel Lloyd has performed in the US, Canada, Ireland and England. Both the LA Times and Britain’s Folk Roots called DNL’s music “excellent.” The LA WEEKLY called him “some serious traditional fun.”

He sings of pumpkin kings, fairy queens, East African juju men, divine drunkards, prisoners both great and small and ancient Irish berserkers loosed on dusty California oil towns. In performance, he often introduces these songs with a surreal folk tale, a humorous anecdote or —just for laughs— an outrageous lie. “A strongly individual musical and poetic mind is at work here,” wrote English journalist David Kidman in beGlad.

With his “spirited singing and full-bodied playing,” (Dirty Linen) “Lloyd uses traditional tunes and themes where it suits his purposes.” (Folk Roots) His repertoire also includes several venerable British ballads sung straight or reset, for example, in the Mojave Desert. He will often round out a performance with a brisk hornpipe or an old-timey song or two.

“As much American influenced as British,” (Steve Hochman, the LA Times) DNL accompanies himself on the 8-stringed octar and on steel and gut-strung guitars tuned differently. Good Times, the Santa Cruz weekly entertainment newspaper, called him “one of the finest guitar pickers on the West Coast.”

He was selected this year as an official showcase standby artist for the Folk Alliance International Conference in February. He was also invited to perform at the Winterfolk IX festival in Toronto the same weekend. He has performed at the Yakima Folk Festival, the San Francisco Free Folk Festival, the County Kern Celtic Festival, the Claremont Folk Music Festival and the Lord Buckley Memorial Celebration. Among the many folk venues at which he has performed are McCabe’s in Santa Monica, CA; the Pistol River Concert Association and the East Avenue Tavern, both in Oregon; and the Flying Cloud Folk Club in Toronto.

DNL’s recent CD, Rivers, Kings and Curses, was featured on the ‘Best of 2008’ episode of NPR’s syndicated Celtic Connections show. The album’s guest performers include Celtic music legend and Incredible String Band founder, Robin Williamson; and famed sideman for the likes of Big Mama Thornton and Freddie King, the blues pianist Nat Dove.

DNL’s 1984 singer/songwriter LP, Dark Ages, was reissued in 2008 as a forgotten classic by the US specialty label, Yoga Records. Music from his five critically acclaimed albums has aired on many college and NPR stations and once on Late Night With David Letterman.

Born in the British East Africa of the Mau Mau uprising, David lived in England and Germany before immigrating to America in 1962. His early music career in the LA New Wave and Post Punk scenes, found him in bands with musicians like Jethro Tull’s Glenn Cornick and Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Billy Bass of Parliament Funkadelic.

In the late 1980s, David Nigel Lloyd and His Mojave Desert Ceilidh Band were LA’s only Celtic folk rock band. In 1993, he performed with Buck Henry, Kay Lenz and Billy Hayes in Spike Stewart’s infamously strange Shakespearean adaptation, Shakespeare’s Plan 12 from Outer Space. He also reset the play’s songs to music and performed them in the film.

David Nigel Lloyd also served for many years as a teaching artist and an arts in education advocate in California’s Tulare and Kern counties.


				*DNL's web site:* *bio*



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