Lapsed trumpet player, electric bassist, dobro & lap steel player. Jazz, Country and Pop columnist and reviewer, once operator of Listomania gig listing & reviews website… Jack of all trades…

Since the birth of the label in 1997, FatCat has always had a solid engagement with material sent to us as demos. Where numerous labels will throw demos straight into the trash unopened, at FatCat we've always made an effort to listen and reply to every demo received. Numerous FatCat artists have been picked up having been discovered in this way (including Frightened Rabbit, The Twilight Sad, David Karsten Daniels, Welcome, Odonis Odonis, Get Back Guinozzi!, Silje Nes, Ensemble, Xinlisupreme, Songs Of Green Pheasant, Janek Schaefer - to name just a few), and it has always been really exciting to unexpectedly discover something great in this way. Just as when we started, this philosophy of keeping an ear to the ground and attempting to support good new creativity remains at the core of what we do.

With rapid changes in technology of recent years, the majority of demos are now sent to us electronically, but we are still happy to receive material through the post as CDs (please mark as 'demo submission' and mail FatCat Records, PO Box 3400, Brighton, BN1 4WG). Whilst we are still receiving a high quantity of demos, with our ever-busy release schedule and ongoing commitments to an expanding roster of signed artists, FatCat are now finding fewer opportunities to physically release material from new artists. As an antidote to this, back in 2004, we began using our website to showcase the best of the demos we were receiving. Alongside a DIY microsite built specifically to help people who wanted to release their own music, we hosted the our favourite demos online, with artwork and MP3s available for free download. In 2010 we began to use the more immediate freedom of SoundCloud as a platform - setting up a dropbox for people to submit tracks to and a player on the front of our site to showcase the best demo submissions. 

In February 2012, the new and improved FatCat demo site you are now using was launched, again using SoundCloud as the engine to drive the site. We have kept all of the the original demo artists on the new site - grouping them in collections archived by year. There is a lot of really great material stored away here, so please do spend some time looking around. 

The choices of who we have asked to join this archive are highly selective, and we make no apologies for this. These are tracks we consider to be really good quality material, tracks that we are happy to help promote and to have associated with FatCat. If you like what you hear here, then please do download the tracks and share this music with your friends.

As a multi-instrumentalist, collaborator, composer and songwriter, Beth has a passion for creating, an ear for listening, and a pure, unaffected voice that delivers beautifully original, understated yet powerful songs. Imagine Joanna Newsome goes to Nashville and writes a song with Anne Briggs and David Byrne from Talking Heads. She is a member of The Bookshop Band, Spell Songs (with Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Kris Drever) and Red Carousel string quartet. Beth’s cello can be heard on hundreds of recordings, including the Oscar Nominated, and British Animation Award winning film score Robin Robin (Aardman/Netflix) which she composed with Ben Please.

Picked for her songwriting and cello playing, she is one part of Spell Songs (a project inspired by the book Lost Words by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane) with legends of folk including Karine Polwart, Kris Drever and Julie Fowlis. They had a sold out tour in 2019 and were one of Songlines Magazine’s Best Albums of the Year 2019. It was also part of a BBC Prom at The Royal Albert Hall where Beth sang a solo piece with the Southbank Sinfonia. Beth has also toured and recorded with Eliza Carthy, The Unthanks, The Winter Wonderband and many other folk artists. 
She is also one half of literary duo The Bookshop Band (with her husband Ben Please) who spend much of their time writing songs inspired by books and playing them in bookshops and book festivals across the UK, Europe and the States. They have made fourteen albums and are currently recording a new album with Pete Townshend of The Who. 
Beth and Ben wrote the musical score for the Aardman Animation film Robin Robin which was awarded a British Animation Award for the music and was nominated for an Oscar and an Ivor Novello Award. They also wrote music for the audio book of Jackie Morris’ The Unwinding. Other film credits are Far From The Madding Crowd (2015) and BAFTA winning animation The Eagleman Stag (2010) 
In the pop world she has toured with Newton Faulkner, The Heavy and Peter Gabriel and has worked with hundreds of producers and engineers such as John Parish, Boo Herwerdine, Tchad Blake and Stuart Bruce for recording sessions over the last 20 years. Artists include The Proclaimers and Petula Clark as well as Maximo Park and Enter Shakiri. Studios include Real World, Rockfield, Yellow Arch, Castlesound, Moles and Invada. She also does remote sessions from her home in Scotland. 
She plays with Bath based string quartet Red Carousel, who write their own compositions and have been awarded funding to make their debut album. She has also recently joined the The Galloway Agreement, based in her now home county of Dumfries and Galloway. 
She also writes songs under her own name and has also made an album under the band name Marshes. Beth’s own songs are characteristically quirky, charming and ethereal and carried by Beth’s pure and unaffected voice.She has been likened to Cat Power, The Beatles, REM, This Is The Kit, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Radiohead, The Incredible String Band and The Kinks. With a classical background, a venture into folk music, and a love of simple pop songs, there’s nothing quite like Beth’s songwriting.

London based record label, home to Beach House, Father John Misty, Midlake, John Grant, The Flaming Lips , Susanne Sundfør and many more...

Beth Porter is following