Fisherman's Friends band: shanty singers from Port Isaac

Who are the Fisherman's Friends band?

The Fisherman's Friends band is a group of male singers from Port Isaac, a fishing village on the north coast of Cornwall. They sing sea shanties and traditional songs of the sea, mostly unaccompanied or with a light backing, in big harmonies built for open air. The group came together in the 1990s as a handful of friends who had grown up in the village and liked to sing together. Three of the founders were fishermen, and the others had spent their working lives close to the water as coastguards or lifeboatmen. That connection to the sea gave the group its name.

For years they were a purely local affair: a summer fixture for holidaymakers and a few self-produced CDs sold in the village. Then, within a couple of years, they had a major-label album in the top ten, a slot at Glastonbury and a following far from Cornwall. Their story has since been told twice on the cinema screen and once on stage, and the group still sings in the place where it started.

Singing on the Platt in Port Isaac

The Platt is the flat open ground at the head of Port Isaac's harbour, at the back of the beach, where fishing boats are hauled up and lobster pots are stacked. In summer the group would gather there and sing for whoever turned up, collecting money for charity. There was no stage and no ticket: just a line of men in striped shirts, the harbour behind them and a crowd of visitors and locals standing round the boats.

The material was the common stock of the shanty tradition. Work songs once used for hauling ropes and turning the capstan sat beside forebitters, the leisure songs sailors sang off watch, and newer songs about Cornish fishing life. Anyone who has heard a crowd join the chorus of "Drunken Sailor" knows the appeal: the songs were made to be sung by a group, with a leader calling the verse and everyone coming in on the refrain. Our guide to sea shanties explains how that call-and-response worked aboard ship.

From the harbour to Island Records

The break came through radio. In 2009 the BBC presenter Johnnie Walker picked up two of the group's homemade CDs while on holiday in Cornwall. His manager, Ian Brown, travelled to Port Isaac, and in March 2010 the group signed a recording contract with Universal Music worth a reported £1 million. For a semi-professional group that still toured only in short bursts around their day jobs, it was an extraordinary sum.

The album that followed, Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends, came out on Island Records on 26 April 2010. It reached number 9 in the UK albums chart and was certified gold. That summer the group played the Cornbury festival and went on to appear at Glastonbury, eventually including a set on the Pyramid Stage. In 2011 they received the Good Tradition Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Their second Island album reached number 29 in 2013.

Later records came out on smaller labels: Proper Job in 2015, released in association with the St Austell Brewery, Sole Mates in 2018 and All Aboard in 2024. The line-up has changed over the years as founders retired or died. Peter Rowe, the oldest of the founding members, died in January 2021 at the age of 88. Jon Cleave, one of the longest-serving singers, has written the Gully series of children's books and a novel, Nasty Pasty.

The Guildford accident, February 2013

On 9 February 2013 the group was due to perform at G Live, a concert venue in Guildford, Surrey. While the venue was being prepared for the show, a heavy steel door at the loading entrance fell. The tour manager, Paul McMullen, aged 44, was killed at the scene. Trevor Grills, one of the singers, aged 54, was struck and suffered serious head injuries; he died in hospital two days later.

The case came to trial at Guildford Crown Court in 2016. The company that had supplied the door was found guilty of a health and safety offence and fined. Its director, who had been charged with manslaughter by gross negligence, was found not guilty. The remaining members carried on as a group, and the second Island album, One and All, came out later that year.

The 2019 film, the sequel and the stage musical

The band's rise became the basis of a British feature film, Fisherman's Friends, released in UK cinemas on 15 March 2019. It was directed by Chris Foggin from a script by Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard and Piers Ashworth, and starred Daniel Mays, James Purefoy and Tuppence Middleton, with David Hayman, Dave Johns and Maggie Steed in the supporting cast. Much of it was shot on location in Port Isaac. The plot is a largely fictional version of events: Mays plays Danny, a London music executive in Cornwall for a stag weekend, whose boss dares him to sign the village singers. The real band members make brief cameo appearances.

A sequel, Fisherman's Friends: One and All, opened in August 2022. Directed by Nick Moorcroft and Meg Leonard, it brings back James Purefoy and much of the original cast and follows the group as they struggle with a second album, ending with a performance on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

In between, the story reached the theatre. Fisherman's Friends: The Musical, with a book by Amanda Whittington and direction by James Grieve, had its world premiere in October 2021 at Hall for Cornwall in Truro, the first show in the reopened theatre after its redevelopment. A UK and Ireland tour followed from 2022. The format suits the material: a cast of actor-musicians singing the same shanties the group sang on the harbour front.

Where the band sits in the shanty tradition

The success of the Fisherman's Friends helped put shanty singing back on the radio and into concert halls well before the online craze that later carried "Wellerman" around the world. They belong to a long line of British groups who took songs from working ships and gave them to a modern audience, from the folk-club singers of the 1950s and 1960s onwards. Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd recorded sea songs for small folk labels; the Port Isaac men took the same kind of material into the album charts. Our profile of Ewan MacColl covers that earlier revival.

For a wider view of where those songs came from, start with our page on sea shanties, or go back to the home page for the Navy side of the story and the singer this site is about.