In these times of division and unrest, celebrity culture, and social media obsession, Reg Meuross offers a refreshing perspective. A compassionate and insightful songwriter, Reg’s quiet resistance and storytelling remind us of our shared humanity. Recently named one of FATEA magazine’s 2025 Artists of the Year, Reg is a rare and vital voice.

“I’ve always made up my own itinerary,” he admits, an approach that has served him well across a career spanning five decades and an impressive catalogue of 17 albums. What continues to drive him on is a profound sense of compassion and a compulsion to sing about social injustice, inequality, courage, and heroism – above all, a desire to tell people’s stories.

In the true spirit of a travelling troubadour, Reg Meuross was born on the move, almost on the Flying Scotsman. His mother was travelling to visit his father, then stationed in County Durham with the army, when she went into labour on the train, eventually giving birth to Reg in Stockton-on-Tees. Shortly afterwards the family moved south to Yateley, Hampshire, where he spent his early years.

Music was embedded in family life. Both grandparents were Drury Lane opera singers, and Reg fondly recounts that his grandmother’s screams featured in the Hammer horror films. His father played harmonica and bugle and loved the great crooners – Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin – while his mother adored musical theatre, particularly Oklahoma! and West Side Story. Another formative influence was a family lodger who introduced Reg to Radio Luxembourg, opening the door to American blues alongside the Beatles, the Everly Brothers, the Stones, and the Kinks. “All that two-part harmony stuff – I loved it,” he says. “I feel privileged to have grown up in that time.”

His most transformative influence however was Bob Dylan. “I’m not sure I’d do what I do if it wasn’t for Dylan,” Reg says. “Me and millions of others owe a huge debt to that man for opening our eyes and our hearts.” It was Dylan’s talent to write about subjects others avoided – in songs such as ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and ‘Positively 4th Street’ that really struck a chord with Reg: “he was breaking the mould.” A defining moment came in 1978 when Dylan played at Blackbushe Aerodrome, just miles from Reg’s home. “I remember sitting in my bedroom and hearing Bob Dylan sound-checking.”

Reg learned guitar in his teens and played his first gig at Yateley Folk Club at 16. “I gave the impression I was quite a good guitarist, which I’ve been getting away with ever since!” he laughs, quoting Woody Guthrie’s line that anything beyond three chords is showing off. True to form, Reg downplays his instrumental prowess. “For me, it’s about creating and delivering the song.”

Before music, poetry was his first love. Influenced by Dylan Thomas, WB Yeats, John Betjeman and Robert Frost, he began writing his own poems from the age of four. “I’ve always been interested in phrasing – what words can do, how to make them better.” That sensitivity to language remains central to his songwriting.

Reg’s career kicked off in earnest in the 1980s with bands The Flamingos and later The Panic Brothers. His first major solo release was The Goodbye Hat in 1996, establishing a hallmark style: emotionally resonant songs rooted in empathy and social awareness, following in the lineage of Ewan MacColl and Roy Harper.

His songwriting defies easy categorisation. Subjects range from suffragette Emily Davison to artist William Blake, Chilean singer Victor Jara, and American folk pioneer Woody Guthrie. Themes span love and grief, mental illness and migration, austerity, war and institutional corruption. “If I’ve become skilled at anything,” Reg says, “it’s distilling a story and turning it into a song – something I enjoy enormously.”

Many of his most powerful works appeared on the RAW trilogy (2016-2019). Songs such as ‘For Sophie’ (about Sophie Scholl of the White Rose Nazi resistance group), ‘Angel in a Blue Dress’ (a tribute to NHS nurses), ‘And Jesus Wept’ (about executed WWI soldier Harry Farr), and ‘We Looked Away’ (inspired by a visit to Dachau) often act as moments of awakening for listeners encountering these stories for the first time. Alongside social narratives, he also writes tenderly about love and relationships, including a moving tribute to his father, ‘Good With His Hands’.

Most recently, Reg has focused his time on three ambitious song-cycle albums. 12 Silk Handkerchiefs (2018) explored the 1968 Hull triple trawler disaster, telling the story through the perspective of Lillian Bilocca, aka ‘Big Lil’ and the ‘Headscarf Revolutionaries,’ whose activism transformed maritime safety. “This is still living history,” Reg notes, “it continues to resonate.”

In 2023 came Stolen From God, widely regarded as his masterpiece. Addressing the transatlantic slave trade, the album emerged from Reg’s own recognition of how little he had been taught about Black British history and empire. Following four years of extensive research, the ten songs trace events from the first English slave voyage in 1562 through abolition and the Compensation Acts of the 1830s. “I wanted to tell the untold history,” he says. “The other side of the coin.”

His most recent release, Fire and Dust (2025), focuses on Woody Guthrie and was commissioned and produced by Pete Townshend. While Guthrie shaped Reg’s political awareness, Reg doesn’t consider himself a political animal: “I don’t go to rallies,” he says and while there is often plenty of anger in Reg’s songs, he is never judgemental: “I’m saying: I believe this is wrong, and I want to tell you why.”

It’s this deep social conscience that defines Reg’s work. “You see things you believe are wrong, and writing songs becomes a way of leaving a legacy – something that educates and inspires, through both the music and the stories.”

Anyone who has seen him perform live will attest to that impact. Whether in a pub, folk club, festival, or theatre, the intimacy and honesty remain constant. Armed with his treasured 1944 Martin guitar – and occasionally banjo, dulcimer, tenor guitar, or harmonica – Reg can make audiences laugh and cry within a single song. “People love being taken to that place,” he reflects, “because giving in to the emotion can be healing.”

After years immersed in large-scale projects, he now plans to refocus on a solo album centred on personal experience rather than a unifying theme. In an age of global uncertainty and relentless bad news, it is reassuring to know that Reg Meuross remains committed to shining a light on what connects us. “Whatever you’re singing about,” he says, “there has to be beauty and humanity in it. Music should be beautiful.”