Brighton date on first-ever UK tour for Melbourne singer-songwriter Ernest Aines

But it won’t just be about the tour. Ernest’s first-ever steps on UK soil will also be about finding out more about his family.

“My dad's side of the family is a mystery but part of my family lives there. And it will be really exciting to meet them for the first time. They are in the Bath area. It is a little bit daunting but it would be great to find out more about my father's side of the family. My dad was adopted and it's going to be a really intriguing journey to find out more. I really know nothing in terms of my uncles and aunties that are living but fortunately from what I have heard they are lovely and I would like to think that I might find out more about what happened with my granddad. He was a musician as well, I believe. I think he played the drums and I just want to know more about that lineage.”

The tour has come about through Ernest’s manager: “She is the one that has put me onto this tour, and maybe January is a good time when you're a less well-known artist to get a good run at it but I'm very very keen to do this even though it is the winter over there! Folk is definitely so entrenched in English history. It feels like the purest form of folk exists in England. There are so many storytellers and I think the English people are natural storytellers, the Irish as well. There is always a yarn or a fairy story or olden-times tale that has permeated the culture and that's definitely part of the reason I want to go there.

“Folk music is definitely storytelling but it's also all-encompassing and it's just branched out and grown into so many different genres. It has branched off as many times as human kind has evolved and so to see it purely in terms of storytelling is probably shortening its width especially when you think of all the wonderful instrumental music but certainly storytelling is a big part of it.

"My debut album came out in September and it was really, really well received by the reviewers. It's difficult to know exactly because you just find out numbers these days, how many people are listening and where they're listening and sometimes it feels like you just want a little bit more feedback but definitely the feedback that I have had has been really really good.

“Nine out of ten songs are original on the album and my writing does certainly tend to lean into the folk-tale type of writing. One is a mediaeval love tale about a girl that I met in real life.

“She was a third-grade teacher when I was teaching in school. I met this girl and we ended up falling in love and then there was a break-up and so I wrote this mediaeval love song just as part of my self-soothing to put a real-life situation into a fantastical situation…”