Steve Andrews

Steve Andrews, aka Bard of Ely, is an author, freelance writer, singer-songwriter and poet from Cardiff in Wales, who lived in Tenerife from 2004 until 2014 when he relocated to Portugal.

He is the author of  Herbs of the Northern Shaman , first published by Loompanics and then again by O-Books. Also Hummadruz and a Life of High Strangeness (an autobiographical account of paranormal and spiritual experiences) and The Bard Word (anthology of poems and lyrics) are available on Amazon Kindle.

He has written for  Kindred Spirit  magazine and has been a columnist for the  Tenerife Weekly  and Tenerife Sun  newspapers, as well as a contributor to  Tenerife News . He is currently writing for Mediterranean Gardening and Outdoor Living magazine, as well as the Optimanova advertising agency. He recently contributed an article on “Coastal Foraging” to Welsh Coastal Life magazine too.

Andrews has also written a series on foraging for  Permaculture Magazine , a series of gardening articles for  Living Tenerife , and in 1997 he had a column in  Big Issue Cymru . It was this last publication that dubbed him the Bard of Ely.

He was an MC for the Avalon Stage at the Glastonbury Festival in 2002 and 2003 and also performed at the festival many times, as well as at the Green Man Festival. He dyed his beard green for the latter event and kept it and is now also known as "Green Beard".

His most successful songs have been “You're a Liar, Nicky Wire”, which was rave reviewed in the NME and released on the  Taffia EP  on Crai Records, along with “Harvest Home”, “Sound of One”, which was played in parties in C5's  Family Affairs , and “Rubber Ducky”, which was used on S4C's  Y Ty  drama.

Andrews was the co-presenter of two series of  In Full View  on BBC Choice and has taken part in many other TV programmes, including, as an actor in  Red Dragon, sci-fi short on HTV Wales'  Shotgun Slideshow , regressed hypnotically in  Weird Wales  (also on HTV Wales), as a guest speaker in BBC2's  Roll Over Beethoven , and as a musician in The Slate  BBC1.

He is written about in detail in  The Last of the Hippies , Fierce Dancing  (Faber) and Housing Benefit Hill  (AK) by CJ Stone, in  The Trials of Arthur  (Element) by Christopher James Stone and Arthur Pendragon, in Peter Finch's  Real Cardiff  (Seren), in  The World's Most Mysterious People  (Hounslow) by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, and in Leonard Cohen - A Remarkable Life  (Omnibus) by Anthony Reynolds.

Andrews is in the cast of the film Savages in Foreign Lands , directed by Raphael Biss, and awaiting a release date.

Read more of his articles on various subjects here – http://bardofely.hubpages.com/ and, on nature and the environment, here http://greenbard.hubpages.com/