The Food Of Love Project

Introducing The Food of Love Project, a compilation album featuring some of the great names of folk music performing a rich variety of songs either referenced or performed in the plays of William Shakespeare. The album was curated and commissioned by Sebastian Reynolds of PinDrop and Tom McDonnell of TMD Media to mark the Oxford Shakespeare Jubilee 2016, a festival programme of events exploring Shakespeare's incredible legacy. Opening with the orchestral drone folk chorus created by Dead Rat Orchestra with their version of Bonnie Sweet Robin is to the Greenwood Gone, as referenced in Hamlet, the album gets off to suitably grandiose start. Steam-punk inventor/musician Thomas Truax reimagines classic English ballad Greensleeves in a typically cosmic, surrealist light, and Oxfordian band Stornoway rework the old gaelic tune Eibhlin a Riun into a beautiful, sonorous nugget of pop gold. The Children of The Midnight Chimes' drone noise take on Oh Death, Rock Me Asleep is fittingly atmospheric, considering that the poem on which it was based was allegedly written by Anne Boleyn as she awaited her beheading in the Tower of London. Other perfomers include acclaimed Scottish folk troubadour Alasdair Roberts, Kirsty Law, Flights of Helios, Brickwork Lizards and James Bell.