Fisherman's Friends

Fisherman's Friends play the Brighton Dome on Sunday 19 September, starting at 19:00. They're a nine-man shanty folk group drawing on 200 years of traditional vocal repertoire, and for this show they'll be joined by musicians Marcus Bonfanti and Simon Johnson on bass, banjo, mandolin, resonator guitar and harmonica.

If you've never come across them, the name is pretty literal: they're a group of Cornish fishermen and friends who started singing sea shanties in a living room in Port Isaac back in 1990. For more than 25 years they've met on the Platt, the village harbour, to raise money for charity, singing the traditional songs of the sea handed down by their forefathers. It's that same repertoire they've built their whole thing around.

They've been around a lot longer than the recent shanty revival suggests. In 2010 they signed a major record deal and their album Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends went gold, making them the first traditional folk act to land a UK top-ten album. Since then they've released One and All and Proper Job, and they've been the subject of an ITV documentary. They've played Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage, the Hyde Park Proms, The Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and to 80,000 rugby fans at Twickenham. They've put out ten albums in total and picked up a BBC Folk Award along the way.

They recently celebrated 30 years of friendship and music, and the line-up has changed slightly: tenor Simon Biddick has joined after long-standing member Billy Hawkins stepped back. Standard tickets are £35.25, and the show kicks off at 19:00 at the Brighton Dome on Church Street.