Braintree, UK · folk · anti-folk

Beans on Toast

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A man, an acoustic guitar, and a running commentary on the state of things, delivered pub-side — a new album every December and a grin through all of it.

Beans on Toast is Jay McAllister, born in Epping in 1980 and raised in Braintree, Essex, the younger of two brothers. At Notley High School he formed a band called Jellicoe, which released one album before splitting up in 2001, after which he moved to north London.

He performs mostly alone with an acoustic guitar, writing talkative, loosely structured songs that mix political commentary, drinking stories and observational humour, delivered in a conversational voice that owes as much to stand-up timing as to folk tradition.

He began performing as Beans on Toast in London in 2005, playing frequently at Nambucca, a pub on Holloway Road where he lived and worked at the time. He has played Glastonbury every year since 2007, and supported Kate Nash at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2008.

His debut, the fifty-track double album Standing on a Chair, appeared in 2009, produced by Ben Lovett of Mumford & Sons with guest vocals from Emmy the Great and Frank Turner among others. Frank Turner later produced his third album, Trying to Tell the Truth, in 2011, and Beans on Toast supported Turner's sold-out Wembley Arena show in 2012.

He has released an album every year on 1 December, his birthday, since his debut, now numbering fifteen records and forming a large, deliberately unpolished catalogue. He came up through the same London circuit as Frank Turner, and built his following through relentless small-venue and campsite playing, including opening Turner's UK stadium tour in 2014 to crowds topping 100,000 in a week.

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folkanti-folk