In Bristol, pub singers are keeping an age-old tradition alive

“Drunkenness is a strange thing,” says Brad Foskett, preparing to entertain a gaggle of regulars at The Black Cat in Bedminster, south Bristol. “It can be happy, or it can be violent.” With a relentless schedule of pub singing that saw him have just a single weekend free from performance last year, the assumption is that Foskett has seen plenty of both.

As he sings, the glumness of a late February afternoon begins to lift with every passing song. A barrage of classics roll from Foskett’s soulful voice, loosening locals to dance. One woman is gently spun by her partner to The Temptations’ ‘My Girl’, while another throws her arms above her head and beams. Men skank 2-tone style across the pub floor as The Specials’ ‘Enjoy Yourself’ ignites a mass singalong. Cider taps stream as if they are running a bath. Today, happiness is the winner. Usually, in fact, it is. “There’s only one or two pubs I where would never sing in again,” says Brad.

Oft-overlooked for their value as prolific grassroots performers, Britain’s backing track pub singers have earned their keep at the foot of the live music ladder for almost a century. The tradition in its current form – which, according to Foskett, lends itself to being “annoyingly mistaken for karaoke” – is a performer, a microphone and a backing track played from a laptop. In the days before music was available digitally, hours of sprawling instrumentals were often recorded onto cassettes, and later CDs, by the singers themselves, but are now usually purchased for use. Some singers play along with an instrument, but the tradition’s crux is the ability to hold both a tune and, with ranging amounts of difficulty, the attention of a pub.

Unable to dodge the impacts of rapid pub closures mixed with the interactive advances of karaoke, Spotify playlists and the jukebox, time has seen work for the UK’s traditional backing track singers dry up, but scenes live strong in certain pockets. In Bristol, thanks to the committed programming of old-city spots such as The Black Cat, the circuit – to the relief of its professionals – stays intact.

“I just get satisfaction out of it,” explains Foskett, a jovial scene veteran who has over 30 years of experience. “Even if it’s someone singing along, tapping their toes, tapping their fingers on the table, I feel satisfied. You don’t always get a cheer at the end of every song, it doesn’t happen like that, but I just enjoy doing what I do.”

Locally raised and performing in the same pubs that he has frequented for decades, it is a quiet need for showmanship that has entrenched his place on the circuit. “Right from when I was a kid, I’d always wanted to perform – to be in front of people. I’m not a brash person, I actually get very nervous before I start, but as soon as I switch the first track on that all goes away. Not every pub is busy, not every pub appreciates what you do, but that’s not the whole point. I still love it.”

After investing in some mobile karaoke equipment, with the intention of hosting events at the height of the craze, Foskett inadvertently discovered he had a voice of his own, joining the solo singer scene thereafter. Incredibly, his deep, Cash-toned vocals have since survived a throat tumour and six operations. “I didn’t have the confidence to sing for a while,” he reflects. At The Black Cat, with help from his “ritual” swigs of medicinal brandy, Foskett’s set reaches a test cricket-like length of three hours. A feat that at one stage, due to the scarring on his vocal chords, looked impossible.

This resilience – a drive to perform that propels pub singers past the obstacles they encounter – is a necessary asset to become a regular on Bristol’s circuit. “You have to be tough,” says Lucy Winter, preparing to entertain The George; a mid 19th century pub with dated grandeur based nearby in Knowle. “If you want to be an established, reliable act, you just have to be. You can’t walk into a pub and feel uncomfortable, especially as a woman. You have to be able to bat it off.”

She expands: “People think it’s glamorous, that you’re just singing for a few hours a night and don’t have to work the rest of the time. They forget what goes into it. First of all, I have to know songs from the ’60s right up to the charts of today, and people underestimate what a massive cross section of music that is in a two, three hour show. And then there’s the crap that comes with dealing with drunk people.”

Using a recent gig as an example of what a tough evening's work can look like, Winter describes facing eerie “standoffishness” from the moment she entered with her equipment, ”territorial” groups unhappy with her presence. “They didn’t like the fact that I was a woman about to sing in their pub,” she concludes. “Sometimes there’s no other reason.” Afterwards, Winter would change into her gig outfit in a small, urine soaked cubicle before navigating the aggressive advances of locals who were annoyed she wasn’t taking requests. ”I’m not a jukebox,” she informed them with a smile.

In over 20 years of experience, which has taken her from the depths of Bristol to British bars in Tenerife and Cyprus, Winter – a sturdy personality with a stratospheric voice – has been through the mill of these experiences. “You see everything,” she explains. “You’ve sung most of these songs a million times, so often you’re in your own world, just watching or even hearing what’s going on. You see all sorts – couples arguing, police coming in whilst I’m on stage – but you just soldier on. I’ll walk into any pub and it won’t phase me – you’ve got to have thick skin.”

Despite the difficulties, accentuated by the female experience of being in majority male pubs, pub singing remains the circuit where Winter finds her freedom. “I could never go back to sitting in an office, earning someone else’s living. When you strip it back; this is my company, it’s what I’ve worked on my whole life. I’m 40 years old with two kids, but I know on a gig night that I can put my make-up on, put on something nice, and go have some fun. And when stuff is going wrong, I know it's not me, my voice doesn’t suddenly go bad, it’s the people that change.”

As her set at The George begins, her performance follows a familiar pattern. Winter’s mighty vocals fill the room immediately, but they contrast with the long empty space in front of her. The George is a large pub shaped like a horseshoe, and the majority of its clientele spend the first quarter of her set buzzing in the opposite branch. Singers, Winter says, expect this, ordinarily using the first chunk of their set to trial lesser known songs or play tracks that challenge them. Eventually, pubs tend to drop their guard. That’s when the classics come out. True to the process, by the end of her gig, the crowd is at Winter’s command; the patterned carpet in front of her host to a full mixture of movement which ranges from abstract takes on breaking to gracefully drunken ballroom dance. A success.

Bristol bred, Winter believes that the city’s pub singer circuit is “huge”, but deems it a separate eco-system from what she terms the “Gloucester Road scene”, which is the area, scene and circuit of Bristol that is more often presented in media and cultural summaries. “It’s the local pub on a Saturday night, working men’s clubs, Sunday afternoons,” she says. “They’re the bread and butter of the circuit. Without wanting to generalise, the people I perform to probably aren’t the sort to go into central Bristol on a weekend.”

Back at The Black Cat, Foskett – born in the outer-suburb of Hartcliffe and fiercely connected to Bristol’s south – expands on this sentiment. “If I get an opportunity for a gig in the middle of town, I wouldn’t take it,” he says. “I’d rather be in pubs that are in the outer-skirts.” It is here, Brad believes, where cultural examples of a Bristol behind the curtain of an aggrandised popular image can be found.

“I find it bizarre that if there was, say, a TV news report on the hospitality industry, they would go to a pub on Gloucester Road, or the east side of town where there is a different type of culture, a heavy student presence – you never see a proper grassroots boozer, an estate pub. Bristol always seems to be portrayed as a different type of city to what it still, deep down, is. It’s always the upper-cut areas that you see in the media, which get spoken about”.

Foskett’s comments echo those of a long held tension in the city. In recent years, several well-known publications have included Bristol in a ‘best cities of the world’ type listicles, with one recent story championing a “famously bohemian” cultural centre with “a lively mix of protests and street art on every corner”. For many, the conversations that follow these inclusions have become almost as clichéd as the portrayals themselves. It is a debate that can be traced back to when an infamous slogan – ‘Make Bristol Shit Again’ – began appearing on stickers and walls across the city around the mid 2010s. 

But the feeling of widening divisions – of an existing population increasingly squeezed by gentrification and rising rents, internal migration and a relentlessly expanding student presence – has only grown since then. While Bristol’s ‘bohemian’ history of protest and creativity extends far beyond its centre, the frustration that Brad refers to, that a selection of a few, small central spots such as Stokes Croft continue to override the city’s image and realities, is prominent.

Parts of the city’s south, which is separated from the rest of Bristol by the River Avon, have also begun to feel the changing tides in recent years. In Bedminster, regeneration has made traditional elements of the district – such as the pubs that platform the entertainment circuit – start to feel like a version of the city that is slowly being lost. It is also these pubs, says Foskett, that suffer from rising costs the most, in turn affecting their ability to program singers.

“I’ve noticed quite a few pubs aren’t as busy as they used to be, or have dropped their entertainment to once a week. That becomes a vicious circle,” he explains. “I’m getting the same money in Bristol as an entertainer that I was getting 20, 25 years ago – if pubs can’t get the punters in because prices are too high, they can’t spend the money on the entertainment, and then people aren’t going to the pubs because there’s no entertainment on. If it carries on going the way it’s going, they’re just going to get quieter.”

In spite of concerns, for now Bristol’s solo singer circuit remains a strong, surviving arm of the tradition. As February draws out, The George sees three more acts pass through its doors (including Paul Foster, a chaotic, ska-heavy set that is one of the most popular in the South West), while in Bedminster, the hotbed of the scene, the majority of its surviving traditional pubs advertise shows. At The Black Cat, which still schedules up to four nights of entertainment a week, highlights include Pete Holden, a bowler-hatted, suited singer who includes bursts of instrumentation, Lee Ross, who spends his set floating up and down the pub with jocular crowd work, and perhaps most strikingly, Katie Mills.

A confident and elegant performer, her power and soul set – often performed in shimmering sequin dresses and gleaming gowns – has seen Mills booked well into 2026, something of a rarity in the current climate. The antidote to the circuit’s economic challenges, she believes, is creativity within sets mixed with a methodical professionalism. “I think you need to offer something a little bit different. Something of a little bit better quality than what’s around you. Even if it’s not your music, it needs to be your stage presence. Just something that differentiates you from all the other acts out there. I know it’s harder, places have gone and it is difficult, but I’m actually busier than I’ve ever been. I try to keep a business mind about the music, I view this on the whole as a business. I don’t like feeling like I’m on the back foot.”

Somewhat of a scene newcomer, 42-year-old Mills saw an unlikely arrival on the circuit four years ago after craving a change in direction. “I’d never sung in front of anyone, and growing up I’d never even really been to pubs and clubs. It was something of a midlife crisis, really, wanting to do something out of my comfort zone. There were learning curves, to be able to have that confidence of entering these domains – predominantly men’s domains – with a glamorous persona and just brush it off. But actually, 99% of what I’ve done has been really lovely”.

As her career heats up, Mills believes in the continued place of the tradition that has become her life, putting faith in its preservation. “It’s familiar,” Katie says. “Familiarity appeals. Sometimes when you’ve been out all day, working hard, you don’t necessarily want to trudge into the centre, watch something off-the-wall creative and brand new. There’s plenty of that in Bristol. Sometimes you want to just sit, relax and have a drink. It’s ease, it’s nostalgia – people know exactly what they’re getting with a backing track singer.”

Perhaps it is a respect for this familiarity, particularly through budgetary means, that will be vital to its future. The dispelling of notions that in a city such as Bristol, the creative pinnacles that enhance its reputation are the only strands of culture worth heavy investment. While pubs and social clubs in many of Bristol’s residential districts continued to close, a five year refurbishment of central venue Bristol Beacon took £132 million from taxpayers' pockets.

Bristol’s pub singer circuit carries the same bruises as the elements of the city it represents. Both squeezed by gentrification, both fighting through change and economic strain, but still proudly ever-present. “I think it will continue,” says Foskett, “that there’ll be enough work for everybody. I hope it does, you know, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves at the weekend otherwise.” 

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