LEADING Irish traditional band Dervish are celebrating their 21st birthday this year with an anniversary tour which brings them to Nettlebed Folk Club on Monday, February 8.

It will be one of the biggest acts ever to have been staged at the club.

During their career Dervish have taken their music world-wide — as well as venues throughout Europe and the US they have played as far afield as Japan, the Great Wall of China and Israel and represented traditional music at Brazil’s Rock in Rio festival before an audience of 250,000.

Dervish formed in 1989 as an all instrumental line-up and recorded the album The Boys of Sligo. Two year later singer Cathy Jordan, still a teenager at the time, joined and the embryonic Dervish sound began to develop.

Through years of playing together, the band has become deeply at home with each other’s styles, carefully crafting their arrangements to capture the energy but also the subtlety and finesse of the Irish tradition.

This has resulted in a recognisably ‘Dervish’ sound — the result of their own particular exploration of the endless rhythms and complexities that make great Irish music.

The instrumental line-up of bouzouki, fiddle, mandola, flute, accordion and bodhran blend satisfyingly together to produce one of the most distinctive, yet expertly balanced sounds anywhere in the folk scene.

This combines with the uniquely mesmerising vocals of Cathy Jordan — regarded by many as the most captivating voice in Irish music of the last two decades.

Dervish promise a fresh set of highlights and forgotten gems throughout the tour, selected from their seven albums. By the standards of many bands, that’s a fairly low productivity rate in 21 years, but Cathy explains: “We’ve never wanted to produce an album for the sake of it. Sometimes you come across a great traditional song you haven’t heard before, or ideas come for new songs, but you can’t rush that process. When the right material has come together, we record, but only then.”

A generation of Irish music fans would say that the policy has paid off — few bands can look back on 21 years without at least one album in the back-catalogue that is regarded as an aberration that would have been best left unreleased. As Cathy says: “We feel we’ve had the right material for seven good albums so far, so that’s the number we’ve recorded — why issue more?”

After the UK tour, the anniversary year will see tours to America and Europe, but Dervish return to Britain in the summer for a number of festival appearances, including the Avalon Folk & Roots stage at Glastonbury.

The gig at Nettlebed Village Club, High Street, Nettlebed, starts at 8pm. For more info go to www.nettlebedfolkclub.co.uk

l The extra special gig the club was running with American singer-songwriter Tom Paxton on Saturday, February 6, has been cancelled along with the whole of his UK tour because of his wife’s illness. Ticket holders should call 01628 636620 between 6.30pm and 9.30pm weekedays or weekend daytime for info about a new date or refunds.