M G Boulter is a songwriter and musician living on the Thames coast in Essex, UK. Serving his apprenticeship in numerous bands in the hotbed of the Southed-on-Sea pub rock scene (the precursors of which were household names such as Procol Harem, Dr Feelgood and Eddie and the Hotrods), M G came to lead, as singer and guitarist, the popular country rock band The Lucky Strikes, who Q Magazine once likened to “The Waterboys on trucker pills”.
During the Lucky Strikes’s tenure (which produced 5 studio albums) M G met New York native and songwriter Simone Felice (The Felice Brothers) and formed a close collaborative working relationship with him from 2012 to 2015. M G featured on the lap steel and mandolin for the majority of Felice’s UK and US tours and became a fixture in the touring incarnation of Felice’s band project The Duke and the King. In 2013 M G released his debut album The Water or the Wave, which saw him fulfil a personal ambition to record with the legendary drummer, Pick Withers (Dire Straits, Bob Dylan & Bert Jansch).
2014-2017 saw a busy collaborative period for M G – he worked on long term projects with Scottish artists Blue Rose Code and Samantha Whates, as well as BBC Folk Award winner Emily Portman (as part of the Coracle Band). In 2015 he formed part of a new ‘supergroup’ featuring fellow songwriters Lucy Farrell (the Furrow Collective) and Neil McSweeney, contributing the song ‘Lulu the Bear’ to the subsequent EP Lulu the Bear and Other Songs. He also found time to contribute to projects by Rosalie Deighton, Vera Van Heeringen and wyrd folk luminaries, The Owl Service. In 2016 he was one of eight artists picked to join the Estuary Songwriting Project which sought to create a show’s worth of material inspired by the Thames Estuary.
Often touted as an ‘artist’s artist’ M G set about releasing his second solo album, With Wolves the Lamb will Lie, in 2016. Produced by Andy Bell the album drew upon the pastoral Sheffield setting where it was recorded to create a sublime mixture of classic singer songwriter material with a rich chamber folk backdrop. The album was picked as one of the top folk albums of the year in it’s end of year round up by The Daily Telegraph and R2 magazine referring to M G as “a weapon’s grade songwriter”.
The success of With Wolves led to M G signing with folk and roots label Hudson Records, which led to the collaborative EP Blood Moon, recorded with Birmingham string quartet, The Froe. The EP was recorded in a Methodist fishermen’s chapel in the old seaside town of Leigh-on-Sea, Essex over just four days. The EP was hailed as a chamber folk masterpiece.
M G’s songwriting creates vignettes of ordinary life and seaside communities. This writing is no better shown than in his 2021 album Clifftown, a themed album based on his personal experiences and the wider hidden histories of his hometown, Southend-on-Sea . Working again with producer Andy Bell and a host of friends from bands as diverse as Bellowhead and Spritiualised, M G created a personal history of growing up in seaside suburbia which is both affecting and observant. The release was accompanied by a podcast series called ‘The Clifftown Podcast’ and the 2022 EP A shadow Falls over New Brighton. The psycho-geographical elements of the Clifftown project led to appearances at Melbourne’s Emerging Writers Festival (2021) and Focal Point Gallery’s ‘Sounds’ Project, an audio online only exhibition delivered from 2022.
2021 saw M G join The Remnant Kings, Jon Boden’s solo touring band as a regular member, as well as collaborating with Shetland artist Jenny Sturgeon which resulted in the 2022 single ‘Flint Knapped’ (Hudson Records). 2024 will see the release of M G’s fourth album, which he has been busy working on throughout 2023.
