STORYTELLING has led two members of one family down very different paths.

Both father and son tell tales of gamblers and thieves, saints and sinners, fools and queens; but one is a painter and the other leads a folk rock band with a national following.

Now the two are coming together to create a weekend of music and visual art at Helmsley Arts Centre.

Stephen G Bird is a narrative painter and head of art and art history at Ampleforth College. His multi-layered paintings move imaginatively between worlds. Conrad Bird leads Holy Moly and the Crackers, an outlandish, gypsy punk band with a lively, moonshine mix of Romani, Americana and contemporary British folk-rock.

Their gritty songs are foot stomping whirligigs about sorcery and treachery, highs and lows, delivered through “a punky, fiddle flying, Cajun dancing, raucous hoe down with a huge burst of energy”

Conrad grew up with Stephen’s pictures, inhabiting the labyrinths of their shifting kaleidoscopic narratives and they have certainly had an impact on his own creative pathway. His songs to some extent reflect the world of the paintings.

“What really holds our songs together is the emphasis on lyrical narrative”, said Conrad. “As a band we bring together a lot of influences and styles - Blues, Gospel, Irish, Balkan, Rock and Roll, Ska, Reggae.

“ We like to play songs with grit and groove and bounce. We like to make people dance, drink and have a party. But we like to tell a story. If we were to call ourselves a ‘folk band’ it is because we are tellers of tales.”

Stephen said: “We all make sense of the world through stories and the way I recount stories is through drawing, working in cycles of imagery often related to literary and mythological themes. For me drawing is the architecture of the imagination; it’s about reconfiguring the stories known to us all simply through putting marks down on paper, board or canvas.”

Now the two collaborate. Stephen designs the band’s CD covers and some of Holy Moly’s backdrops and a book is in the pipeline.

This will be a collection of Stephen’s pictures and Conrad’s lyrics and will accompany Holy Moly’s musical show, If the River Was Whiskey, the narration written by Conrad’s brother, Henry, who is a guest musician with the band.

Holy Moly are being sponsored to tour “If the River Was Whiskey” widely next year.

Holy Moly will be playing at Helmsley Art Centre on Saturday. Stephen’s exhibition will run until December 22 and will include a selection of paintings from a cycle of works based on Genesis, commissioned by the Farmington Institute, University of Oxford.