YOU will know Jon Boden best as the multi-instrumental musician and English folk singer who fronts folk big band Bellowhead.

He also tours with Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings and the duo Spiers & Boden, but look at the credits for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s York-bound production of The Winter’s Tale and there is his name: Jon Boden, composer.

The Folk Singer of the Year in the 2010 BBC Radio Folk Awards acknowledges the greater public awareness of his folk rather than theatre deeds. “Yes, it’s becoming so, though I actually started off being a theatre composer and that’s what I always wanted to do, though I fell into folk music when I met John Spiers while composing for a play in Oxford, The White Devil, which was being performed at a series of college chapels 12 years ago,” Jon recalls.

“It was a night off from rehearsals and I’d heard that there was a good folk session in the Elm Tree, up the Cowley Road, which is now a Thai restaurant by the way!. That’s where I first saw John play.”

Their paths would be inextricably linked ever since, although Jon still has found time to compose music for productions ranging from Macbeth for Cambridge Arts in 2002 to the St George And The Dragon for Warwick Arts Centre in 2006 and Merchant Of Venice for the RSC in 2008.

Born in Chicago but brought up in Winchester, Jon attained a degree in Medieval studies from Durham University before studying composition for theatre at the London College of Music.

“There were only four of us on that degree course in the year I started, when the course was only into its second or third year,” says Jon. “At the time, it was the only course specifically for composing for theatre, when there were an awful lot of composing for film courses, which many more people want to do because it’s more profitable.”

Jon admits his work for theatre “can be a frustrating form of composition”. “Often it’s in 20-second sequences between scenes – and sometimes the music is cut back,” he says. “But it’s all about being part of the creative team, and the nicest thing is that you can cross over into each other’s territory, where people can make suggestions to each other, so you’re free to make a contribution.”

His invitation from the RSC to compose the score for The Winter’s Tale came “out of the blue”. “But I had done the score for Merchant Of Venice for Tim Carroll at the RSC five years ago, so I was on the RSC’s books already,” says Jon.

“Lucy [director Lucy Bailey] has an interest in folk music and was aware of my music, and her husband, the RSC designer Bill Dudley, is a very good concertina player – in fact I played with him when we were rehearsing on the Broadside tour with Bellowhead.”

 • Did you know?

Folk singer-songwriter Laura Marling is writing the score for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s April 12 to September 28 production of As You Like It at Stratford.