JON Boden, former leader of progressive folk big band Bellowhead, sets out on his Afterglow album launch tour on Monday, playing at Pocklington Arts Centre that night to mark the release of his third solo record.

Boden will be showcasing his first new material since Bellowhead blew their last in May 2016, beginning his travels with eight stripped-down, high-octane, close-up, intimate gigs on fiddle, concertina and his trademark stomp box before being joined by The Remnant Kings for ten more shows.

"It's a very different dynamic with the audience, playing solo or with a band," he says. "That's the most noticeable difference, as you'd expect, going from 11 in Bellowhead to being alone on stage," says Boden. "It feels more direct, more interactive with the audience, though there are difficulties involved, nowhere to hide, no-one to cover for you, but it's nice to have that freedom to chop and change in terms of what I play, and musically too you have more freedom.

"I have a lot of material; 15 years' worth now, so it's fun to drop in a different song that I wouldn't have done otherwise, because it's such a lot of work to get a song ready for a band show."

New album Afterglow will "probably be less prominent" in the solo shows than the band gigs, "but I'd expect to do four or five, just because they are songs that I can do solo though they were designed for a band", says Boden.

Afterglow has "quite a positive slant to it", Boden suggests. "The main image is the afterglow of the sun and I've applied that in different ways. It applies to the album being about a post-apocalyptic society, but it's also a one-night love story that ends after that night, so it's the afterglow of an intense relationship that does colour their life."

The album's setting is a love affair at a street carnival with its plethora of artificial lights. "The last reference to 'Afterglow' is that there are a lot of fireworks and embers dying in that particular song," says Boden. "The idea behind the imagery of the street carnival is that in a future society there may be less artificial light whereas we're constantly surrounded by it now, whether its street lamps or lights on a mobile phone.

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"Where light is used artistically, it's one of the most beautiful experiences you can have," says Jon Boden

"It's quite a profound part of the human psyche, the way we are drawn to light, with light festivals at this time of year, and I like to think that in a regressed future customs from different cultures might evolve and blend, so it could be a mixture of Diwali and Bonfire Night.

"Light can be used in an aggressive way with lots of security lights on houses, but where light is used artistically, it's one of the most beautiful experiences you can have."

Boden, now 40, had begun his post-apocalyptic trilogy of albums in a place of darkness and negativity on Songs From The Floodplain in 2010. "I was despairing of the state of world politics and I'd just become a father, so I was obsessing about the state of the world, but then I thought about how we might entertain each other in this post-apocalyptic world; we might have a revival of folk musicians gathering together."

Move forward to 2017, where Boden has built Afterglow around a love story. "Though it ends with them parting, it's not the end of hope," he says. "I'm not looking at these two albums as being cautionary; if we can engage imaginatively with what we like, it will make our transition into the future easier because we're not stepping into the unknown.

"But our addiction to comfort and consumerism is not a healthy thing: when there's a power cut, do you notice how we gather in one house to play cards or whatever, but then we just go back to our own houses and forget about it?"

A year and a half since Bellowhead's farewell shows, no-one who witnessed those exhilarating nights has forgotten them. "I'm tremendously proud of the band. My decision to leave was in no way negative; we'd achieved so much and I couldn't, from my own point of view, see it going any further in the direction of travel I was interested in," says Boden.

"And because everyone else then decided to stop at the same time too, the last tour became a celebration of the great experience we'd all had, though it's difficult to say how much impact we had on the folk scene at large, but we hope to bring the big fan base into enjoying folk music in general."

Jon Boden, Pocklington Arts Centre, Monday, November 6, 8pm; doors, 7.30pm Tickets: £21.50 on 01759 301547 or at pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk. Afterglow is out now on Hudson Records.