A BAND who recently scooped one of the top awards at the BBC Radio 2, 2019 Folk Awards, are playing back on home soil in Wrexham next week with a special gig at Ty Pawb.

The Trials of Cato are in town next Wednesday, December 4, and there are a few tickets still available.

The band recently won the Radio 2 Folk Album of the Year award for Hide and Hair - at a ceremony presented by Mark Radcliffe at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester.

With one member from Rossett and another from Rhos the band are very familiar to local audiences having held the launch show for the album at The Storyhouse in Chester last November.

The remarkable rise of The Trials of Cato on the UK folk-scene has been the subject of massive critical attention in the past three years.

Tickets for the Wrexham show are available at www.thetrialsofcato.com

The trio formed as the members worked as English teachers in Beirut, Lebanon, just a few years ago. They have since torn a shape very much their own into the canvas of the UK folk scene.

Originally from North Wales and Yorkshire, while living in Beirut, they spent a year boiling down the roots of their sound into a hybrid of traditional influences that intrigued Lebanese audiences in the country’s biggest venues.

They moved back to the UK and spent a tireless year performing up and down the country, leading to BBC Radio 2’s Mark Radcliffe hailing them as “one of the real discoveries on the folk circuit in recent times.”

The trio have been playing at major UK festivals this summer and returned from an American tour in time for the BBC awards evening in Manchester. The band are suitably delighted with scooping one of the major folk awards of the year and thanked their many fans for voting for them from an initial shortlist of four that had been decided by judges.

It was mixed by Donald Richard in Toronto and mastered by John Davis (who re-mastered Led Zeppelin) of Metropolis Studios in London.

The Trials Of Cato are:

Robin Jones – Mandolin, tenor banjo, vocals

William Addison – Irish bouzouki, vocals

Tomos Williams – Guitar, vocals