CORNWALL-based singer and songwriter Sarah McQuaid  comes to the Ustinov Studio at Bath Theatre Royal on Monday 30th September.

Sarah’s been mentioned in a quiz question on BBC Radio 4’s Counterpoint, featured on the O2 Music Map, supported by the Arts Council, presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her guitar work, and earned critical raves for all seven of her albums and her live performances — but she remains largely unknown to the general public. Her 55-show autumn UK and USA tour brings her total number of gigs this year to 98 — not quite as many as the 118 concerts she played in 2023, her first full year of touring since the pandemic, but still an ambitious undertaking – and she is aiming to build a fanbase one gig at a time.

“It’s why I do a lot of village hall and library concerts” she says “because those shows draw an audience that hasn’t necessarily ever heard of me, but goes along anyway because it’s in their local area and it’s not a big investment for them — the library concerts are almost always free to the public and the village halls tend to be subsidised.”

Born in Spain to a Spanish father and American mother, Sarah grew up in Chicago, touring the US and Canada as a member of The Chicago Children’s Choir. In the mid-1990s she made her way to Ireland, where her authorship of The Irish DADGAD Guitar Book led to invitations to write regular music columns and reviews for Hot Press magazine and Dublin’s Evening Herald.

Moving to Cornwall in 2007 with her Irish husband and their two children, she met Zoe Pollock, writer and performer of 1991 UK Top 5 single Sunshine On A Rainy Day, outside the gates of their children’s school. The pair soon found themselves co-writing songs for an album released in 2008 under the band name Mama, described in MOJO as “Janis Joplin’s freewheeling spirit crossed with Joni Mitchell’s lyrical density.”

“I owe Zoë a massive debt of gratitude for getting me into songwriting in a serious way,” says Sarah. “Prior to that I’d thought of myself basically as a folksinger who happened to write an occasional song, but she gave me the confidence to focus on my own original material.

Through Zoë she also met Martin Stansbury, who produced and engineered the Mama album and then became Sarah’s manager and sound engineer, accompanying her on tours since 2009. Most recently, he produced and engineered Sarah’s sixth solo album, The St Buryan Sessions, recorded live in lockdown in the beautiful medieval church of St Buryan, near her home.

The entire album was filmed as it was being recorded, and videos of all 15 tracks can be viewed on Sarah’s website – https://sarahmcquaid.com – together with details of the forthcoming tour and more information including a 10-minute video intro to Sarah and her music.