Square Roots Productions’ debut spring season at the Green Note in Camden Town ended on a high note with an evening of outstanding music which exemplified the charity’s mission: to showcase both legacy artists while also offering a platform to new talent.

Bonnie Dobson and Harry Phillips were the perfect fit. And as a Canadian singer-songwriter whose recent forebears hailed from Scotland and Ireland and who played the folk clubs of Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago and, of course, New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1960s before settling in London more than 40 years ago, Bonnie is also the most perfect exemplar of SRP’s Bringing It All Back Home project, as this recent interview for the Ham & High shows. The project celebrates the music which left these islands in centuries past and fetched up on the shores of Canada and America, toing and froing across the Atlantic ever since. Our ‘special relationship’ is a musical one.

The concert, on 13 April, was a sell-out – Green Note’s intimacy is great but demand for tickets way exceeded supply – and the atmosphere was electric, attracting fans from as far afield as Belgium.

Singer-songwriter Harry Phillips opened the show, offering a preview of his debut album, English Americana. As on the album, he was backed by Alex Tinlin on keyboards and Simon Treasure on drums and percussion: a talented trio who surely made new fans. Harry’s set included ‘Back Around’, ‘Time Out Don’t Phase Me’, ‘Half Light’ and ‘Coming Home’, a beautiful and touching song written for his mother. Acknowledging the roots of Bringing It All Back Home, he closed his 45-minute set with ‘Trying to Get to Heaven’ by Bob Dylan, a song from his acclaimed 1997 album Time Out of Mind.

The performance (the band was pared down for the occasion) revealed a talented singer and guitarist, Harry swapping between his beloved Martin and Fender and perfectly in sync with his fellow musicians. The three can also be heard on the new Tinlin CD, Strangely Blue.

Catch Harry now and see him on the way up: English Americana is officially launched on 4 June with a concert at Haresfoot Brewery in Berkhamsted.

Bonnie opened her set with a tipping of her metaphorical hat to the sixties solo years, ‘before I acquired my Bens’, a reference to guitarist Ben Phillipson and fiddle player Ben Paley, whose father Tom Paley (folk royalty) was in the audience. She offered three songs: ‘Long River’, a Canadian song; ‘Dear Companion’, from among the songs collected in the Appalachians by Cecil Sharp; and ‘The Klan’, an extraordinarily chilling song from the early 1950s, featured in Sing Out, variously credited to Alan Grey and Alan Arkin. The songs showed off her magnificent voice to perfection and it didn’t take much imagination to be transported back to another time and another place.

Then it was time for her ‘Boys’ to join Bonnie on Green Note’s tiny stage – those two Bens, plus bassist Tali Trow – for a musical journey (replete with anecdotes) that spanned her remarkable career and revealed the breadth of her skills as a songwriter. The set included ‘Peter Amberley’, a traditional song from Canada’s Maritime Provinces which, in the early 1960s, inspired a young Bob Dylan when he came to write the melody for ‘The Ballad of Donald White’, as well ‘V’ Le Bon Vent’, an Acadian song learned when the teenage Bonnie was a camp counsellor working children’s camps in Ontario and Quebec. It was an utterly captivating performance of light and shade, including many of her own songs: the fun and flighty ‘Come on Dancing’, the powerful and poignant ‘Who Are These Men?’, the ‘gently psychotic’ ‘Winter’s Going’, a favourite of Jarvis Cocker; and, of course, ‘Morning Dew’, written back in 1961, her first song, widely covered, and sadly still all too relevant.

It was a mesmerising performance which left the audience calling for more, despite the 11pm curfew. Check out Bonnie Dobson and Her Boys at their 8 May gig at the Apple Tree in Clerkenwell, London and on 10 June at the Kalamazoo Klub at the King’s Head in Crouch End. And don’t forget the new album, Take Me For a Walk in the Morning Dew, now also available as a limited edition LP.