A pioneering quartet will bringing folk music to Maldon like you have never heard it before.

The Urban Folk Quartet (UFQ) are doing a national tour next month to promote their new album, The Escape, and they will be gigging at Maldon Town Hall on May 16 at 7.30pm.

The Birmingham-based band play fiddle-led music drawing heavily from Celtic dance forms and traditional song, but from there on in it is unlike many other folk groups.

Just as English country dance unassumingly met with big band jazz musicianship in the mid 20th century, The UFQ’s approach to the folk ethos is to embrace any and every influence from funk grooves to middle-eastern melodies, afrobeat to north Indian rhythms.