20260220: Friday 20th February 2026: Emily Maguire
£13.00
Support: Jody Prewett
At the Golden Hind, 355 Milton Road, Cambridge CB4 1SP
8pm (Doors open 7:30pm)
Entry: £14(door), £13(advance), £12(members).
With seven albums and five books to her name, Emily Maguire, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, Buddhist poet and award-winning mental health advocate, is “a talent to be reckoned with”. Featured in interviews and playlists on BBC radio, her story is inspiring.
Emily believes that music is “all about uplifting, comforting and inspiring people.” She has dedicated all her albums to her Buddhist teacher, and has given interviews about her Buddhist faith, her music and her mental health. She has played at a wide variety of venues, from mental health hospitals to arts centres and major festivals, and has written songs about her experiences of mental health, including ‘Falling on my feet’, which she performed to 4,000 people at The Royal Albert Hall in 2006, at the end of her tour with the legendary Don McLean.
She suffers from clinical depression, and experienced it for the first time when she went to college. She then developed fibromyalgia, and, confined to her bedroom, she taught herself guitar and started writing songs. She has since been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
In 2003, she moved to Australia to live on a goat farm with bass player and producer Christian Dunham, whom she later married. Emily released her acoustic folk-pop debut album, “Stranger Place”, in 2004, and her second album “Keep Walking” in 2006. In 2006 the Waterboys’ manager Philip Tennant offered her a 16-date tour of Ireland, and in July 2007, she and Christian played Cambridge Folk Festival.
Emily’s third album “Believer” came out in 2009, and, having suffered another breakdown, she published the book “Start Over Again” (2010) about her experiences of bipolar disorder, saying “I just felt completely liberated. People could understand where these songs were coming from.”
In 2011, after touring with the former lead singer of Dr Hook, she wrote and recorded her fourth studio album “Bird Inside a Cage” (2013), produced by Nigel Butler (Will Young, Robbie Williams, X Factor).
In 2014, following an intensive tour of Germany, Emily developed chronic tendonitis, had to cancel all her gigs and couldn’t play for 18 months. This caused another bout of depression which lasted a year.
Back on her feet again in 2016, Emily published a collection of poetry, prose and song lyrics, “Notes from the North Pole”, and worked on her fifth studio album, “A Bit of Blue”, (2017). Its message is that there is hope and joy in the midst of suffering.
In 2018 she published “Meditation Mind”, a book of Buddhist-inspired poetry. In 2019 she and Christian moved back to their goat farm in Australia and that year, the US-based International Society for Bipolar Disorders presented her with the Mogens Schou Award for Public Service and Advocacy at their annual international conference in Sydney.
In 2021 Emily published a book of her poems, “Words with wings”, which she has also set to music for piano, and her first songbook for guitar. In 2023, she began working on her sixth studio album, “A Light to Follow.”
She separated from Christian in 2023 and returned to the UK. After suffering a long bipolar episode and kidney damage in 2024, she has begun performing again, solo, at smaller venues. And how lucky we are to be able to welcome her to Cambridge Folk Club.
Jody Prewett: 2025 was a busy year as Jody returned to the road with neighbour and friend Emily Maguire, also performing a number of solo headline shows too.
Also in 2025, Jody was busy recording a new album on the edge of the New Forest. The 10-songs are set to be released in 2026, seeing Jody explore a more expansive sound with greater depth of textures, ambience and more detailed instrumentation than previous releases. The album could be described as 'sci-fi folk'; a narrative of unexplained phenomena runs throughout, from crop circles and UFO's to clairvoyants and standing stones. With the album approaching the final stages of completion, more details will follow soon.