Originally from England, Martin got his first guitar at the age of 8. Soon afterwards he heard a new form of pop music called “skiffle” and took to it immediately – not realising that it was basically up-tempo folk music from the USA.?? He played in small rock, jazz and folk groups while still at school, and after leaving and taking up climbing and walking, he found his interest in folk music was shared by most of his companions. From the day of his first visit to a North London Folk Club he was hooked.

Martin emigrated to Australia in 1969, and almost immediately began performing. Within a year he was running his own folk club and festival in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.

His passion for mountains brought him over to New Zealand with his family in 1975, and in 1976 he ran the first Cardrona Folk Festival, which proved so successful that the event is still on the calendar every October, having become one of the highlights of the New Zealand folk music year. Soon after this he began songwriting, composing several ballads about the historic goldmining area in which he lived. One of these songs, Gin & Raspberry – named after a famous claim across the road from his house - soon became a folk club standard. About this time he also purchased his first mandolin and mandola, and formed a Central Otago based ceilidh band called “Snowgrass”.???

Martin occasionally tours as a duo with New Zealand guitar virtuoso Graham Wardrop, and their two-man show has received acclaim wherever they have performed.

Martin took his songs overseas with a tour of Australia in 1986, followed by an exploratory tour of the U.K. in 1987 and then a bigger tour of Britain in 1991. Since then he has returned regularly to the UK every second year, and in 2005 completed his ninth and busiest tour yet. As well as the usual folk clubs, festivals and concerts, recent tours have included performances in Austria and Norway and to the schools around the Orkney and Shetland Islands, a unique and rewarding experience that compliments his schools programme in New Zealand.

He has performed his songs and humorous bush poems in a wide variety of venues; from isolated islands in the Orkneys to busy cities like London, Bristol and Glasgow; and from tiny pubs in Wales and the Isle of Mull, to St David’s Hall in Cardiff, the national concert hall of Wales. On route he has given concerts in Perth, Darwin, Melbourne, Hong Kong and even Nepal. He has featured on BBC radio in Glasgow, Cardiff, Swansea, Shetland, and on Radio TV Hong Kong.

After being commissioned by the Otago Primary Principals Association in 1998 to write the linking song for the schools 150th anniversary production at the Dunedin Town Hall (“Otago My Home”), Martin took the plunge and sold his mail contracting business in order to concentrate much more on his music. He put together a special heritage programme for schools called "Let's Sing a Kiwi Song", which involves the children in songs about their own country. This has taken him as far north as Northland and as far south as Bluff, and also included the release of an album and songbook of the same name. In 2005 Martin returned to the magnificent Dunedin Town Hall to perform “Otago My Home” with the Dunedin Symphonia, a 56-piece orchestra, as part of their annual Last Night of the Proms. He describes this as one of the hardest but most satisfying performances he has ever had to do, with the orchestral arrangement of his own song making it almost unrecognisable to him.

In 2002, Martin released an album of new material called "Beyond a Climber's Moon".

In December 2003, Martin finally released his first video/DVD "Otago my Home", a project that Martin had been working on for some years with a professional cameraman in Wanaka. This is a video of some of his Central Otago material, and is set and filmed in the very surroundings that inspired the songs. A new video production is now underway incorporating many of Martin’s conservation and wildlife songs.

Martin Curtis will be supported by Dave Hart.