Kate St. John

Kate St. John is a composer, arranger, producer and instrumentalist (oboe, cor anglais, accordion, saxophone and piano). She was a member of The Ravishing Beauties, The Dream Academy and Channel Light Vessel and has recorded two solo albums: Indescribable Night and Second Sight. She has played with many singers and bands including Julian Cope, Marianne Faithfull, The Waterboys, Philip Glass, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker, Martha and Rufus Wainwright, the Carthy/Waterson family, the Thompson family and my new family, the MacColl/Seeger clan. In the nineties she toured with Van Morrison and played on 5 albums and was a member of Tom Wait's Magic Bullets Band for his and Robert Wilson's Black Rider shows Since 2005, she has been Musical Director for multi artist shows at The Barbican and The Festival Hall in London and venues around the world. including the Way To Blue tributes to Nick Drake, Hal Wilner's Rogues Gallery and Nino Rota concerts, Daughters Of Albion, Evening Of Political Song at Richard Thompson's Meltdown, Bright Phoebus Revisited, Blood and Roses: Tribute to Ewan MacColl and the Imagining Ireland/Imagining Home concerts for the Centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. She has written string, woodwind and orchestral arrangements for various records and concerts. In January 2017, she arranged 9 songs for Laura Marling and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for the opening night of Celtic Connections in Glasgow. She and her writing partner and husband, Neill MacColl, specialise in on-set music production in films, having worked on Far From The Madding Crowd (2015), My Cousin Rachel (2017), Tulip Fever (2017) and The Little Stranger (2018).