Sean Cooney is an award winning songwriter and folk singer.

He is a winner of three BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards with his band The Young’uns (Best Group 2016, 2015 & Best Album 2018) .

He has performed at hundreds of theatres and festivals in the UK, Europe, Australia, USA & Canada since 2007.

His songwriting commissions have included the BBC Radio Ballads (The Ballad of the Great War 2014, 2017) Rising Up! Peterloo 2019 and The Transports (5* The Guardian, 2017)

His songs have been recorded by artists including the Ivor Novello award winning Martin Green and the Mercury nominated The Unthanks.

He is the author of The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff (5*The Stage, directed by Lorne Campbell) “an extraordinary portrait of a working class hero” (5* The Observer).

He has written and presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4.

His TV appearances have included Lockerbie Our Story, Springwatch Unsprung and BBC Inside Out

He has worked extensively in education – writing and sharing songs and stories with children from more than one hundred schools across the UK since 2007.

Peter’s Field is a new work by Sean Cooney (The Young'uns), performed by Sean Cooney, Eliza Carthy, Sam Carter & Jennifer Reid. The piece features 15 songs woven together with Jen's spoken and sung narrative to tell the story and commemorate the Peterloo Massacre.

On 16th August 1819, 60,000 working people came from all over Lancashire to attend a mass meeting in Manchester advocating parliamentary reform and to hear the famous radical speaker Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. The magistrates sent in the yeomanry cavalry and 15th Hussars to disperse the unarmed crowd and aid the arrest of the speakers. At least 18 people were killed and hundreds injured in the scenes that followed. Women were deliberately targeted and many of the victims recognised their assailants.

The songs and narrative draw from the hundreds of eyewitness accounts.

Peter’s Field was premiered at FolkEast Festival in Suffolk on the 205th anniversary of Peterloo, on 16th August 2024.