Tim and Julie Cole have been playing music together for many years, having met first at Julie’s school folk club.  Julie had been waiting to hear herself sing in a competition she had entered on Radio Sheffield, and was kept waiting for several weeks whilst Tim showed off his versatility on various instruments from guitar and cello to the more obscure Chinese two stringed violin on the same radio programme.  One of the tunes he played on guitar was Michael Chapman’s ‘Naked Ladies and Electric Ragtime’ – a memorable title. 
A band called ‘Hobb‘ had been booked to play at the sixth form folk club, and when one of their members stepped forward to play a solo instrumental – ‘Naked Ladies and Electric Ragtime’ – Julie realised that she had met her match in more ways than one! She asked for guitar lessons, but somehow never got around to learning until 2 years ago.

Since then they have played mainly traditional songs, but always felt as though they were being a bit too experimental in some ways for the general folk scene at the time. They used cello and voice quite regularly before many others thought of this as a ‘folk’ instrument, and had a succession of third instrumentalists – from Peter Sells (electric bass) and banned from one folk club who didn’t allow electric instruments no matter how subtle, Paul Guppy (celtic harp), vegetarian, but gallantly ate a steak pie cooked by Julie to Neils Grundtvig Nielson (recorders) who decided to go back to Denmark and finally made us make an effort to put out a cassette of arrangements with him, so that we didn’t lose track of any more of Tim’s musical arrangements.  We didn’t have a lot of money at the time, so it was a basic recording of our live sound. Of course, many folk musicians use these instruments now, and it would be nice to think that hearing us play somewhere might have influenced some of them. 

In 2007 Tim and Julie decided that it was time that we put out a better recording of our arrangements of folk songs but other things overtook us again. Julie had just been asked to record ‘Let no man steal away your thyme’, spelt ‘time’ in this instance, for a track on an improvised jazz CD by Martin Archer – ‘Heritage and Ringtones’, and this seemed to be a successful idea, so Martin suggested a whole CD of more folk based songs with his improvised arrangements. However, this time the songs would be original, with words by poet Keith Jafrate and music by Tim Cole. Army of Briars was born and we were again challenging our listeners with new sounds. Martin is a talented composer and full of imaginative ideas. Follow links on the site to Discus music…..

In 2010, we finally got our act together and made ‘Sea-Longing’ that is a retrospective of some favourite songs we have played over the years. Helen and  Julian Cole also appear on the recording playing flute and violin respectively.  We have mainly been based in the South Yorkshire area, but have played as far afield as the Channel Islands and the Scottish Highlands.
Look out for our latest venues in the diary.