Story

Kev Fox was born in 1982 in Middlesbrough, in the North East of England. There was a keyboard in the house, and after ten reluctant piano lessons he was already rewriting Beethoven into pieces of his own – his teacher thought he wasn’t practising; he was composing.

School bands followed, then music college and Confucius Saints – a five-piece that toured the support circuit, earned an NME write-up (“rock and roll on a knife’s edge”) and a development deal with Virgin. When the town got too small, Kev talked the whole band into moving to Manchester.

In Manchester he worked at Johnny Roadhouse Music, met Ian Brown, Noel Gallagher and Mike Joyce of The Smiths – who told him, in no uncertain terms, to stop working in a music shop and get on with it. Bands came and went. Then a photographer friend bought him an acoustic guitar, and Kev did the one thing he had never done: he went out and played his own songs on the street.

Busking under the arches near St Ann’s Square, selling a home-recorded EP called Help Yourself, he found an audience one passer-by at a time – and a way of playing directly to people that still defines his shows.

A travelling arts festival took him across Europe and, almost by accident, to Poland – his first time on a big stage alone. Tours through Germany, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain followed. He recorded his debut album King For A Day in an 1838 chapel in North Wales, then kept heading east.

In Poland he met producer Andrzej Smolik. Their first song together, L.O.O.T.T., went to number 3 in the Polish charts. The duo Smolik // Kev Fox has since released the albums Smolik / Kev Fox (2015), the EP Queen Of Hearts (2017) and Belly Of The Whale (2023), played orchestral shows across the country and become one of the most loved live acts in Polish music.