Martin Green

Martin is a multi-award winning musician and Ivor Novello winning composer. As a member of Lau he has won four BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards for Best Group an unprecedented four times. In 2015 he was nominated in the Best Musician category. In 2019 he won the Ivor Novello award for his sound walk “Aeons” that was part of The Great Exhibition of the North. His latests album, Split the Air, is a combination of brass and electronics - and forms the score to KELI by National Theatre of Scotland. Born into a family of traditional music and trained by Bert Santilly, one of the contemporary accordion world’s most respected teachers, Martin gained a strong grounding in numerous styles and techniques at an early age, including spending time in Hungary with some of the leading lights in Balkan and Gypsy music. Soon after finishing school he joined Eliza Carthy, princess of English folk music, with whom he worked for several years. Recordings with her include ‘Red Rice’, ‘Anglicana’ (both Mercury Music Prize short-listed) and ‘Angels and Cigarettes’. This fruitful musical relationship blossomed in the form of the critically-acclaimed Carthy-Green duo album ‘Dinner’ featuring JC001 (Nitin Sawhney) and Eddi Reader (Fairground Attraction). After opening for Joan Baez in 1999 as part of Eliza Carthy's band Martin was invited to join the Joan Baez band and between 1999 and 2001 he toured extensively with her in America and across Europe, including a solo feature as part of her show.