Meet the band behind Mirvish’s ‘Fisherman’s Friends’ musical

Jeremy Brown and Jason Nicholas are fishermen; Jon Cleave runs a shophouse; John Lethbridge is a mechanical engineer; John McDonnell owns a bread and breakfast; Toby Lobb works in video production.

Together, these six men from a small seaside town in Cornwall, England, also happen to be one of the most popular folk bands in modern British history. Known as Fisherman’s Friends, they’ve performed across Europe, sung at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012 and become the first traditional folk group to produce a U.K. Top 10 album.

Not that you could necessarily tell at first glance. They’re unassuming, down to earth and love to crack the odd nautical joke. (They’re perhaps a few decades too old to be considered a boy band, so they cheekily refer to themselves as a “buoy band.”) And despite all the success, singing remains a side hustle; they even take a hiatus in the summer during peak fishing and tourist season to focus on their day jobs.

But their journey — from jamming in their local pub in the late ’90s to being discovered by a holidaying BBC radio presenter in 2009 and subsequently signing a £1-million ($1.6-million Canadian) record deal the following year — is probably one of the unlikeliest origin stories of any musical group.

They’re reportedly the first British band since the Beatles to inspire two movies, according to local Cornish media. And now their story has been adapted into “Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical,” currently playing at the Royal Alexandra Theatre until Jan. 15.

“It is very strange,” said Brown, describing the group’s path to success. He and his bandmates spoke with the Star on Saturday ahead of the musical’s North American premiere.

“We haven’t really planned anything in our second career. We’ve only sung where people have asked us and we’ve never pushed ourselves,” he said. “We started singing in the pub, literally, and now we’ve ended up with two films, a musical and getting flown across to Canada to see the musical.”

The group, which was at one time composed of 10 members, first performed together in the mid-1990s. They’d jam at the local watering hole in their hometown of Port Isaac or outside by the harbour. A quarter of a century later, they continue to hold unannounced pop-up concerts at the waterfront, as the seagulls squawk above.

“We don’t use any mics or speakers or anything; we just do it completely unplugged,” said Cleave, affectionately known by some as Moustachio MC on account of his luxuriant moustache.

Home is an important part of the group’s identity. Five of their six members are from Cornwall. McDonnell hails from Yorkshire but has called the southwestern English county home for more than four decades. Port Isaac, the group’s home base, is a tiny fishing village of fewer than 800 residents.

Though they’ve signed with international record labels, they still record their albums locally at a church two miles inland. (The harbour’s seagulls add to the nautical ambience during the band’s live concerts but are simply too noisy for the album tracks.)

“We’ve been pretty grounded throughout the whole thing,” said Nicholas. “And I think that’s down to the fact that everybody enjoys their lives away from the group as well. So the singing is a complement on top of what we’ve already got.”

Most of the numbers the group performs fall into the genre of sea shanties, work songs traditionally sung by sailors to pass the time on the water and also keep them rhythmically in unison while pulling the ropes.

“As the years have gone by, they’re not relied on within sailing as much, but they’ve become more communal songs,” explained Lobb. “There are a lot of songs that have a community feel to them because it’s associated with people getting together. It’s pretty bonding and it helps to keep that identity of where you’re from.”

Many of the men of Fisherman’s Friends grew up with these songs. Lobb recalls heading to the pub — “many years before I should have been,” he noted with a chuckle — and sitting at the back while learning all the words to the popular songs as his neighbours went up to perform.

In Port Isaac, pub singing and sea shanties are inextricably linked with the town’s history of gig rowing, a service that ferried harbour pilots to incoming vessels. Because of the rugged Cornish coastline, piloting a ship into port was challenging and required the expertise of a local crew.

In town, there would often be multiple teams all vying for the gig; the practice is also often called gig racing, owing to how the first crew to row their pilot to the incoming ship won the job and earned a hefty commission.

But after a day’s work, the hive of activity would almost always drift from the harbour to the local pub, where songs accompanied the drinks.

Nicholas, who originally hails from the neighbouring town of Padstow and joined the group in 2010, was a gig rower who often came to Port Isaac. An accordion player, he was asked to join the existing group to add some instrumental music to the sound.

“I’ve never escaped since,” he said with a laugh.

Despite the group’s success, they’ve also experienced unfathomable tragedy. Nearly a decade ago, fellow member Trevor Grills and band promoter Paul McMullen were killed after a heavy industrial door crashed on them before a concert in Guildford, England.

The group took a brief hiatus after the freak incident and delayed the release of their second album; they also turned down an offer to tour the United States.

“None of us felt like singing or playing gigs, and we turned down quite a lot,” Nicholas said in 2014. The group only returned to the stage about a year after the incident.

And in early 2021, one of the group’s founding members, Peter Rowe, died at age 88.

Still, the group presses on and hopes to pass on these centuries-old sea shanties to a new generation of artists. It seems to be working. In Port Isaac and other communities across the county, there’s been a resurgence of interest in the traditional art form, said Brown, with young groups, inspired by the success of Fisherman’s Friends, popping up over the past decade.

“It’s lovely to see from our point of view … the next generation keeping the songs going,” said Lobb, “because at the end of the day, that’s all we’ve really done: held onto these songs and waited for the next person so we can pass it on and they can keep going.”

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