Frank Hennessy

On the air

Celtic Heartbeat

Frank hosts Celtic Heartbeat on BBC Radio Wales — the best in folk, roots and acoustic music from the Celtic nations, broadcast every Sunday evening from seven o’clock until nine on AM, FM, digital, Freesat and online.

• Celtic Heartbeat Folk, roots and acoustic music from the Celtic nations, hosted by Frank Hennessy. Sunday 7–9 PM
• AM & FM Tune in on the analogue bands across the BBC Radio Wales network. Analogue
• Digital & Freesat Catch the same Sunday evening broadcast on digital radio and Freesat. Digital
• Online Listen again through the Celtic Heartbeat programme page on the BBC. Online

More about the radio show

Frank Hennessy is a Cardiff-born singer-songwriter and broadcaster whose work sits at the meeting point of folk, roots and acoustic music. Raised in Wales and steeped in the traditions of the Celtic nations, he has spent his career performing, writing and presenting music that carries a strong sense of place. His songs draw on the landscape, memory and everyday life of his native city, and he performs them with the plainspoken directness that roots music demands. Alongside writing and performing, he is known as an after-dinner speaker, bringing warmth, humour and storytelling to events across the country.

Celtic Heartbeat is the long-running radio show Frank hosts on BBC Radio Wales, and it has become a fixture in the weekly schedule of listeners who care about acoustic and traditional music. Every Sunday evening the programme opens its doors to a mix of established names and emerging talent, weaving together performances, interviews and conversation. The show is broadcast on AM, FM, digital radio, Freesat and online, so it can be followed wherever the listener happens to be. Two hours of carefully chosen music, presented with an obvious enthusiasm for the material.

The phrase "Celtic Heartbeat" itself speaks to what the show is about: a pulse, a rhythm, something that keeps time like a heart. Frank frames the programme around the idea of music as a living, breathing thing, rooted in the communities that produce it. Over the years the show has built a loyal audience, many of whom discovered the artists they now follow through a Sunday evening broadcast. It is a programme that treats folk and roots music with respect and curiosity, never as background noise but as something worth sitting down and listening to properly.

Beyond the microphone, Frank has spent much of his life onstage. His live work moves between sets of his own songs, covers drawn from the folk and roots repertoire, and stories from a career spent travelling around Wales and further afield in search of material. He performs with an acoustic guitar and a straightforward, unembellished delivery, allowing the words and the melody to carry the weight. Audiences often describe the experience as intimate rather than theatrical: a singer who has something to say, saying it directly, without elaborate production or unnecessary spectacle between the songs.

Writing is central to everything Frank does. His songs are observational and place-based, and they reflect a Cardiff that many listeners will recognise: the river, the parks, the streets, the memory of a city changing around him while its traditions stay constant. There is a recurring thread of longing and attachment running through the work, an awareness that places and people move on even as the songs remain. The material rewards close listening, with verses that reward attention and choruses built to be remembered and sung back. It is music that belongs to a landscape as much as to a stage.

Frank's work as an after-dinner speaker draws on the same qualities that shape his songs: an ear for story, a feel for rhythm, and a comfort with an audience. He speaks about music, about creative life, and about the Welsh and Celtic traditions that have sustained his own career, mixing personal anecdote with observations that land without being over-polished. The talk is intended to entertain as much as to inform, and it is delivered with the same plainspoken warmth that listeners recognise from the radio. It is a natural extension of a working life spent talking about music in public.

Those who know Frank's work often describe it in terms of continuity — of things rooted, of traditions handed down, of songs that travel further than the people who first sang them. The website itself is being built to reflect that spirit, with a design drawn from the same earthy, rugged world: warm off-white backgrounds, deep brown and near-black tones, high-contrast black-and-white photography, and bold uppercase type set with a tight, confident track. Nothing about the visual language is decorative for its own sake; it is designed to echo the honesty of the music it accompanies.

Welsh language features naturally in Frank's world, and the show and the songs sit comfortably within a bilingual culture. The welcome is genuine and twofold — croeso, and the Cymraeg that goes with it — and the sense of hospitality runs through everything from the radio presentation to the live performances. It is a reminder that folk and roots music in Wales carries its language, its landscape and its humour all at once, and that the traditions of the Celtic nations share far more with one another than their borders might suggest. The music is a common ground, and the audience is met halfway with open arms.

For listeners who want more than a single Sunday evening, there is plenty to explore: the back catalogue of songs, archived episodes of Celtic Heartbeat, and the possibility of hearing live performance in a room where the audience is close enough to notice the difference. Frank's career has moved comfortably between studio and stage, between broadcast and conversation, and the through-line has always been the same — a belief in songs as something to be shared rather than consumed. Everything on this site is being assembled around that idea, and the site itself is still under development, with more to come.