Blue Lantern Sessions: Dan Whitehouse and Polly Paulusma

Expect a Jools Holland-style setting, with the best sell-out names from the acoustic scene.

Experience the Blue Lantern Sessions at Storyhouse, an intimate evening of acoustic music featuring top Roots, World, and Acoustic artists.

The evening begins with Igloo Hearts as hosts, followed by an ‘up and coming’ support artist, before the main headline act takes to the stage.

Songs Before Sunrise: Polly Paulusma & Dan Whitehouse  
Expect an intimate, deeply atmospheric evening – songs, stories, spoken word and moments of stillness with two of the UK’s most distinctive and innovative songwriter–performers.

Dan Whitehouse’s work has been described as “Intriguing” and “Gorgeous” **** (The Guardian), and “Unflinching… haunting” (Clash Magazine), marking him out as a songwriter of rare emotional clarity. His most recent material, Only Love, shaped between England and Japan, explores presence, distance and fatherhood with striking honesty and his back catalogue has been celebrated by Folk On Foot and BBC Radio 6 for Dan’s insight into social history and the human condition.  

Since her debut Scissors In My Pocket on One Little Independent Records, Polly Paulusma has built a critically acclaimed body of work spanning songwriting, production and academic research, and has toured internationally including supporting Bob Dylan and Coldplay. Her work has been widely praised, with The Guardian noting “a voice capable of some unexpected twists” and Rolling Stone describing her debut as “an enchanting… intelligent folk pop”. Her recent album Wildfires brings her evolving fusion of spoken word and song to full expression. 

Across the evening, Dan Whitehouse and Polly Paulusma create a shared musical space where song and spoken word blur, and where two distinct voices meet in compelling dialogue. Moving between solo moments and subtle interplay, the set flows from sparse piano and guitar-led songs into more expansive textures, with each artist responding to the other’s work in real time.