james hollingsworth

"one of the best song writers in the country." - Bristol Rocks. Read more Quotes

England-based singer/songwriter/guitarist James Hollingsworth has a unique, complex guitar style, reminiscent of Andalusian guitar as well as modern rock.

"What a Singer!" - John Burns, Producer Genesis, Burning Spear, JEBO & others.

As well as being known as an inspired solo singer/songwriter/guitarist, James is also lead singer and frontman with the rock band JEBO.

To navigate this site click an album icon above, or use the menu bar (top). Your location is always indicated by black text in the menu bar so you should know where you are.

Collaborations and Compilations:

JEBO | Sean McBride | Sandro Granda | Xavier Panades | OpenMikeCafe
Art for Lands Sake | Wayfaring Strangers | Earthstars | Figure of Speech

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Click to hear James' music

10 May 2008 - Final confirmation of Wayfaring Strangers - Tim Buckley Sessions, a double bill with The Mandrake Project at Bath Fringe Festival's wonderful Spiegel Tent have been announced, the date being Tuesday 27 May. James will be playing a set of songs by the late, great Tim Buckley with Sandro Granda (percussion), Zac Gregory (double bass) and Danny Shayler (Chris Jagger's lead guitarist). Also confirmed for the acoustic band (without Danny but with Sean McBride on flute/sax) are Friday 4 July @ Two Rivers Festival in Chepstow and Sunday 13 July @ Priddy Folk Festival. See the gigs page for details.

James' album Coming Home to Stay is now available for high quality download (320 kbps) at Tune Tribe.

19 March 2008 - James has a new interview posted on the TSM Radio website - it's here. Also! There are new videos on the images page AND JEBO have signed a deal with Öettemusic in Germany, who do everything a record company do except force musicians to sell their grandmothers' furniture in order to pay for 'costs'. JEBO will give finished albums to Öettemusic, who will take a reasonable cut of the proceeds from their marketing and sales efforts. We can confirm that Champagne was involved in closing the deal.

James' acoustic band is shaping up with the addition of Zac Gregory on Double Bass - the set at Priddy Folk Festival will include this new line-up. Meanwhile work proceeds on James' new album, which will include many new tracks as well as live favourites There's more to Life, Wondering where you're going and Time Rolls On.

31 January 2008 - James' song Way Down South, from the album Coming Home to Stay has reached number 3 in the Soundclick Acoustic Rock Chart. Click here to listen to this song!

28 January 2008 - Steve Parkhouse has kindly asked James to be his guest live on air and sing a few tunes tomorrow (Tuesday 29 January) at about 1 pm (UK Time) on BCFM (Bristol Community Radio FM). If you are in the Bristol area you can tune in on 93.2 FM and the rest of the World can listen online here. The show will be repeated the following morning at 1:00 UK time (8:00 pm US Eastern Time). Click here for Time Zones.

31 December 2007 - James' interview with Xavier Panades is now up on the Bristol Rocks Website!

New Year message from James: "Thank you all for your support in 2007! It's been a great year for me. I released 2 solo cd's (and produced Xavier's), relaunched this website and played many gigs including top venues such as Loreley with JEBO and a solo support for Hazel O'Connor at the Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury. Plus my online Plays with Soundclick increased from 4,644 in the year 2006 to 21,891 in 2007... with the new JEBO album in progress and several solo festival dates already confirmed, 2008 looks set to be interesting! Happy New Year to you all! Peace, Peace, Peace!"

21 November 2007 - James' song Way Down South, from the album Coming Home to Stay has been made mp3 of the week on Lemonrock live music website, AND has reached number 4 in the Soundclick Acoustic Rock Chart. Click here to listen to this song!

16 November 2007 - Current holder of the office of Bard of Bath, Ash Mandrake, asked James to be one of the 3 or 4 judges of the competition to elect the 12th Bard of Bath on Saturday 8 December at Invention Arts Centre, Bath. Each Bard holds the position for 12 months. Of course, James is delighted to be asked, and pleased to accept the honour of being on the panel. ps the new Bard of Bath is Thommie Gillow

8 November 2007 - The support for Hazel O'Connor (Breaking Glass) on Sunday 4 November at Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury was a great success, there was a long queue of good people waiting to buy James' CD's, sign up to the email list, and offer congratulations. The promoter at the Theatre invited James to return and also, in his capacity as a tour-manager, to support a well-known artist on their forthcoming UK tour (subject to this artist's approval). Hazel and her band were most welcoming as were the crew.

In fact, Hazel playfully taunted James that his dressing room was haunted with the ghost of comic genius Eric Morecombe who had his third and final heart-attack there 1984. Thankfully ill-circumstances did not repeat themselves and, perhaps rather disappointingly, no comic poltergeist activity was in evidence.

16 October 2007 - The site was updated to include the first compilation album from Open Mike Cafe, which includes James' song Cast Down from the Skies (from the 2007 album Coming Home to Stay)

15 October 2007 - The site was updated to include the compilation album Art for Lands Sake, which includes James' song Still Lights up the Rain (from the 2007 album Coming Home to Stay) and a track by the legendary Rory McLeod. The CD is a fund-raising venture for the buying of land to be nurtured using the methods of Permaculture.

18 September 2007 - the Promo and Gigs pages have been updated with loads of ideas on how you can help promote James' music and gigs. There's info on posting album reviews, printing posters, and html code for posting banners if you have a MySpace profile (or similar).

27 August 2007 - message from James - "apologies to anyone out there in the world who's never even heard of me for receiving spam from the jameshollingsworth.com domain recently. I know that this has nothing to do with my email list by the way, I do not share that information with anybody! It's not a virus either. I only know it's been going on because I've received more than a 1500 returned emails from System Administrators in two enormous batches. This gives an idea of how many emails went out originally, but no idea about who's using my web-identity as a return-path. Hopefully, the new contact page will protect me from such things in future."

11 August 2007 - the support slot has now been confirmed for Hazel O'Connor (Breaking Glass) on Sunday 4 November at Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury. James will play a 30 minute set to open the show. See the Gigs page for details.

28 July 2007 - James has recently returned from a tour in Germany with JEBO which included a show at Loreley, supporting ASIA, Jethro Tull and Fish. The trip was very successful, firmly establishing JEBO with their target audience. There's a tour blog kindly hosted by Bristol Rocks. Check out this video of the band's performance on YouTube!

7 July 2007 - James' new album, Seventh String was released

22 June 2007 - this Website was relaunched.

The new site features a redesigned song-page with lyrics, and clips (full-length versions of are available for high-quality download at a small charge on many sites around the world including i-Tunes, Woven Wheat Whispers and Soundclick), song and lyric pages, artwork, photo's and much more added content. The concept of including track dates on all of James' album releases as part of the biographical record of his catalogue been included on the new website.

“This has always been a plan,” James says, “songs often shed light on the meaning of other songs written at that time. As the website grows, it will relate and link the song pages together, not just showing songs listed in order of the album they were released with, but also showing them in chronological order of their initial inspiration. This is one of the advantages of the web – it's a dynamic medium and I plan to use it to present my body of work not just an advertising space for buying music, but as an integrated kind of 'gallery space', almost as a piece of art in its own right."

On Friday 1 June at 18.20 GMT James had another BBC interview, this time on BBC Radio Somerset's Drive programme with Jess Rudkin, who probed James regarding his art-driven approach to songwriting.

James has written a review of a recent benefit gig for the Stop the War Coalition - it's here.

James' song, Sooner or Later, reached number 4 (out of 10,450+) in the Soundclick Acoustic Folk chart. Click here to hear the track - join for free and vote!

Listen online to James' second BBC interview which took place live on air on Saturday 28 October 2006 with the lovely Faye Hatcher on BBC Radio Gloucestershire. James reports he enjoyed the interview which included him landing a job as a Traffic Bulletin announcer. Listen to the whole interview here! Alternatively, you can listen to just James' performance of his song, One Saturday, here.

JEBO's appearance at The Royal Albert Hall in April 2005, supporting The Musical Box firmly established the band as one to watch. JEBO were asked to support The Musical Box again at the end of February 2006 at Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall, which was also a great experience.