Often compared with Neil Young, Steve Andrews The Bard of Ely, comes from Cardiff and lived in the Ely estate for many years. Big Issue Cymru gave him the title when he was a columnist for the magazine. Besides being a bard, he is also famous for having a green beard, and is known as Green Beard or Green Bard too!
Andrews is an ecoacoustic and eclectic singer and songwriter who has played at Glastonbury Festival on several occasions and was there as an MC for the Avalon stage in 2002 and 2003. He also appeared twice at the Green Man Festival and has two tracks on the CD album on Double Snazzy. In 2017, he was featured on the televised Britain's Got Talent show, though he failed to impress Simon Cowell when lots of women from the audience joined Andrews on stage for his cover of Stand by Me.
His song You're a Liar, Nicky Wire was rave reviewed in the NME and fronted the Taffia EP on Crai Records in 2002, and the song Harvest Home was also intitially released on this CD.
Andrews now lives in Portugal but often travels back to Wales where he recorded an album with Jayce Lewis as his producer at Northstone Studios in Bridgend. The album Songs of the Now and Then, produced by Lewis, is available from bandcamp: https://bardofely.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-the-now-and-then It contains the song Where Does All The Plastic Go?, which has made the front page of The Portugal News, and has a chapter devoted to it in SPAM: Stop Plastica A Mare, a book by Italian radio host Filippo Solibello. New songs, also recorded at Northstone Studios, are in the pipeline.
