Artist of the Month: Frances Bolley

Our Artist of the Month is Frances Bolley! A Multi-Instrumental Musician and Performer, Frances has an incredible range of work from her solo practice, to playing bass for Adjua and lead guitar for Fenix, to composition based work, music production, community focussed arts, and even more. Frances also recently released 'i siarad', a Welsh-language song commissioned by Tŷ Cerdd. Read on to learn about Frances's amazing work!

Could you tell us a bit about the different strands of your work as a Multi-Instrumental Musician and Performer?

I have a few different strands to my work; I work as a performer, as a bass player for Adjua which won a Welsh Music Award in 2024 and done a string of great festivals this summer and released tracks, probably linked to Clarity There. I play lead guitar for the hard rock band Fenix. I also do session work as a musician.

I do more composition based work too for theatre stuff and musically produce myself and other artists. I’ve worked on Foreigner In My Body, an R&D audio-described circus theatre piece about trans joy. I also do more community focussed arts stuff, heading up creative directing the arts programme for aubergine which is an entirely autistic and otherwise neurodivergent owned and run community interest company.

I also am an artist in my own right, and have a solo performance practice as an improvisatory loop-pedal-based performance artist using spoken and sung voice and music as a vehicle for storytelling.

Congratulations on the release of 'i siarad'! How did this song develop?

Thank you! This was great fun. It was a commission from Tŷ Cerdd as part of their AffriCerdd programme which aims to support artists of colour to produce music in Welsh. I worked with established Welsh artist Edie, as my Welsh-language support and we spent a couple of session in the studio where I brought my creative ideas musically and the ideas for what I wanted from the piece, and found words. We ended up hitting across two poems; one in Welsh from Ann Griffiths and a David Wight poem ‘Ground’ which both conveyed both the strangeness of life as someone with a complex experience of marginalisations but also the grounding homeliness of place and how welcoming Wales has been and felt for me. We spent some time doing those and then Edie helped me write words.

It was really important to me that it wasn’t just something that was beautiful in English but translated into Welsh, but also had a poetry to it in Welsh. We spent quite a lot of time honing the language and the translation so that it did this.

It was fun and difficult and I felt cautious because I was aware I was working in a language that I’m just the most beginner of learners in, and that a language contains a cultural heritage that I was not part of. I wanted to do a good job, and I felt that keenly! But I also felt it helped me to take my first steps into learning Welsh which is something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I moved here. I’ve also really found a wealth of kindness in people's support. So after the initial writing stage with Edie, then Ethan at Ty Cerdd helped me with my pronunciation and then I had a couple of great studio session with James who produced the track. Shout out to Chilee for recording such a great video for me on Splott Beach! Stream 'i siarad' here: https://orcd.co/isiarad

How did you get started with music and performing?

I was always one of those children that made lots of noises and copied sounds and was very sonically engaged, so I got piano lessons pretty young but hated it! Then I started the saxophone at around age 9 and that’s when I fell in love with playing music, but I stopped that when I moved to secondary school. I picked up the guitar at age 15 and have never looked back. I started a band pretty instantly! We performed Daniel Beddingfield’s ‘Got To Get Through This’ after only 3 months at our secondary school prom!

After that I knew that I wanted to play guitar and going out into the job market at 16 I realised pretty quickly that I had a choice of doing any of the jobs that were available to me or treating my music like a job, and I chose music! I would not be trapped in an office for the rest of my life! I committed pretty hard to playing. The rest is history really - I did go to university and got a formal education, but I really found my passion for it outside of that and the formal education came after. I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider, even within formal settings.

What are the key influences on your work?

As a guitarist, Carl Sentenna, and other guitarists of that era like Paul Gilbert, Red Hot Chili Peppers and other pop music of the times, Rage Against The Machine. As a composer, I like minimalism and repetition and slow development, cyclical music and I’m massively influenced by video game music, especially Nintendo music which is my favourite genre! I think the art of being able to make a piece of music that is endlessly repeated but doesn’t get boring, annoying or feel repetitive is phenomenal and I think Koji Kondo of Nintendo has mastered that.

As a songwriter, all the artists that are saying something both meaningful to themselves and meaningful for the world, particular mentions like Julien Baker, Bret Denan. I’m also endlessly inspired by my friends. I find their music and passion and voices more significant to me than most commercially available music. Shout out to Rubie and Mayshe-Mayshe.

What can we look out for that's coming up?

Look out for Aubergine Arts stuff in the autumn! And Fenix will be headlining Pride in the Port in September! I’m also a finalist for the Spoken Word competition at an upcoming Transgender Theology Conference in October. I have a couple of really exciting things in the planning stages that are too embryonic to talk about but if you keep an eye on my Instagram and Facebook you’ll hear about them!

Has being disabled shaped or affected your career in music?

I didn’t get any diagnoses until i was halfway through my masters degree so i’d had to work out a lot of coping strategies all through University and my whole life before. In hindsight playing guitar and music generally had been a stim activity for me and the way my brain works, i’m very hypersensitive with sound which means that working in sound makes a lot of sense; i hear a lot of detail others don’t and i make a lot of connections which means that i’m very creative, but not so great at linear thoughts. This meant that being self-employed was the only choice for me.

I also think the reason im’ good at this stuff is because of the way that my brain works and the things people cherish and value as gifts I have are because of the way that I am. As much as i do need support for the ways in which i’m disabled, it’s important to recognise both sides of it.