Dan Plews

Dan Plews was born in Northampton, and moved to Vienna in 2021. When playing solo, he tailors the material to suit the client - audiences in the case of concerts, promoters and venues and private individuals in the case of functions - with a repertoire of about 150 covers and original and traditional songs. He sometimes uses a loop sampler and harmony pedal together through the latest in sound reinforcement technology - an XR18 digital mixer giving him most of the control normally afforded to modern recording studios, and a HK Lucas PA system. He learned some guitar from his dad, a respected performer of British-Isles traditional music, and has played or taught music for his living for most of the last thirty years, touring Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the U.K., the U.S., and Canada, playing solo, or recording and touring together with luminaries of the UK folk scene including Mercury-nominees/Folk award-winners Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden. As well as teaching on Northampton’s Pop Music Course, since 2010 he has run or taught at 40 songwriting workshops in ten countries across Europe with his company AORTAS. The songwriting his solo performances feature is rooted in the emotional and physical geography of his life: father, son, partner, teacher, traveller, musician, and Englishman abroad; and influenced by the people he meets and the music he loves – from the songwriters of his father’s generation, (e.g. John Lennon, Richard Thompson, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell) – to the writing of Elbow’s Guy Garvey, and the people across all Europe with whom he’s written, laughed and shared hangovers. Above all, he strives to communicate, to move and to entertain – what use is the finest voice if you’ve nothing good (or funny) to say, and what’s the point in being a guitar god if someone leaves the gig without singing something (however quietly), or exchanging smiles with a stranger, or feeling closer to those they love, to life, to the truth? Well, there's dancing, of course. That does sometimes happen.