Formed in 2004 by the duo Spiers & Boden to headline the first Oxford Folk Festival, eleven piece folk-big-band Bellowhead have played some of the top festivals in the UK and Europe including Cambridge Folk Festival, The Big Chill, Summer Sundae and Roskilde Festival. In 2005, they received the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Live Act.

A self-released demo, E.P.onymous was put out in October 2004 just to sell at gigs - with interest from the distribution companies it made the folk charts. The first full studio album by Bellowhead, Burlesque, was released in October 2006 and was followed in September 2008 by Matachin.

They released a live DVD in 2009 and their third full album, the John Leckie-produced Hedonism, was released in October 2010, followed by Broadside in 2012 and Revival in 2014.

The band called it a day following a tour in 2015, which was released as a live album.

The band reconnected during the 2020 lockdown and performed an online concert in December that year, a recording of which was released in 2021. They followed this with a live tour in November 2022, sadly without Paul Sartin who had died in September that year.