Escape-ism
Nape Neck
Wharf Chambers, Leeds
Thursday 23rd April, 7.30pm
Escape-ism is the solo moniker of D.C. man-about-town Ian Svenonius of groups The Make-Up, Chain & the Gang, The Nation of Ulysses, XYZ, Weird War, etc. and author of underground bestsellers such as The Psychic Soviet, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ’n’ Roll Group, and Censorship Now!!—and as such, it’s profound, prophetic, perverse, and poetic… It’s introverted glitter, violence against the state, obsessive desire; it stomps on convention, shreds constitutions, clobbers pre-conceived notions of what a record can be.
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Wharf Chambers is a members' club and you need to be a member, or guest of a member, in order to attend. To join, please visit here. Membership costs £1 and requires a minimum of 48 hours to take effect.
Tickets for this show are £10 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue, Jumbo and Crash Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Ren Harvieu
The Crescent, York
Wednesday 6th May, 7.30pm
Ren Harvieu is back with new album Revel In The Drama, due 3rd April via Bella Union and will appear at The Crescent in May.
The album is a brilliant and bolder take on her timeless pop classicism, a compelling diary of a struggle with self-belief and a celebration of liberation and survival, seven years after her Top 5 debut album and having overcome a life-threatening injury. Think of Revel In The Drama as Harvieu’s second debut album; a new beginning.
The album was co-produced by Romeo Stoddart (Magic Numbers) and he'll joined on stage by band mate and sister, Michele Stoddart, as part of Ren's 5-piece band.
Watch the new video here!
Press:
'Harvieu is the kind of Salford lass you can imagine a young Morrissey raving about… a fully formed star.'
The Guardian
'Accessibly sumptuous…between easy-listening seductress and torch-song belter, her voice is soulful and dreamy with just a tang of something muskier in its sweetness.'
The Daily Telegraph
'Hers is an arresting voice, soft and sweet, but dark in hue and sharp with melancholy, like a vinegar smoothie.'
NME
Tickets for this show are £10 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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Boy Azooga
The Lounge Society + The Howl & The Hum DJs
The Crescent, York
Sunday 10th May, 7.30pm
Boy Azooga’s debut album, 1, 2 Kung Fu, is piloted by Davey Newington, a young man with much musical heritage. One of his granddads was a jazzer who played drums for the Royal Marines. Davey’s dad (violin) and his mum (clarinet) both played, and met, in the BBC National Orchestra Of Wales. Davey himself also enjoyed orchestral engagement, playing in various Welsh Orchestra’s and Jazz bands as a teenager.
Davey took up the drums at the age of six. More recently, and operating as one Bongo Fury, he became the rhythmic pulse for Charlotte Church’s Late Night Pop Dungeon, sat behind the kit as Charlotte plied joyous pop hedonism to Glastonbury and beyond. This would have been enough for some, but now Davey returns as Boy Azooga. The oldest song on the debut album is Hangover Square, titled after Patrick Hamilton’s celebrated and blackly compelling 1941 novel of the same name. The book was given to Davey by his dad as Davey left home at the age of 18. He was so taken with the novel that he almost immediately turned the book’s narrative into a song. Now, completing a circle, Newington senior plays strings on the Boy Azooga album. Davey plays everything else.
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Davey’s vocals and arrangements carry the tunefulness of The Super Furry Animals. But the palette extends far beyond singer-songwriterly poignancy. Davey recruited friends Daf Davies, Dylan Morgan and Sam Barnes to form the Boy Azooga live quartet, an ensemble that swings smoothly from filmic instrumentals to a churning, rave-tinged rock that hints at both Can and their progeny in Happy Mondays.
“The album is not all one thing for sure,” says Davey. “The whole point of Boy Azooga is to be a celebration of loads of different types of music. I wanted the album to be more like a mixtape or something. We wanted to include loads of contrasting styles.”
By way of illustration of Davey’s multifarious musical mission, the track Face Behind Her Cigarette both hints at Hot Butter’s 1972 synth-pop smash Popcorn and draws inspiration from the late Nigerian funk overlord William Onyeabor. The filmic instrumental Breakfast Epiphany II is a response to The Beach Boys’ Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), as featured in an LSD-fuelled scene in the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy. Boy Azooga close 1, 2 Kung Fu with Sitting On The First Rock From The Sun, a piece of poised 1960s-flavoured classicism that expands into a Black Sabbath-esque whig out
Other influences on the album include Sly & The Family Stone, Caribou, Black Sabbath, Outkast, Van McCoy, Ty Segall and The Beastie Boys. It’s a range of listening that reflects how Davey moved on from a school-days love of Nirvana and Run-DMC – which was partly down to an inspirational art teacher.
Davey: “Mr Clark was pretty cool. He knew I played drums, so he told me I should check out Can because they have really interesting rhythms, so I bought Can’s Ege Bamyasi in Spillers Records in Cardiff. When I was in the shop [Television’s] Marquee Moon was playing on the stereo, a record I’d never heard of. I ended up buying that as well. Not a bad day’s work…”
Davey is evangelical about his musical influences. His choice of band name also has links with cultural precedent – this time the 1994 film The Little Rascals, which was, in turn, based on Our Gang, the series of comedy shorts created by Laurel & Hardy producer Hal Roach.
“When we were growing up,” says Davey, “we used the watch the film The Little Rascals at my gran’s house. In that film they chant ‘Azooga-zooga-zooga’ so the name comes from that. My cousin is in a really good Edinburgh-based band called Man Of Moon. When me and him text each other we always sign off with ‘Azooga-zooga.’ I’d wanted to call the band Bo Azooga after Bo Diddley, but my girlfriend told me BO was not something good to have in a name…”
Alongside the triangle, Davey also played timpani, xylophone and sleighbells for various youth orchestras. He was delighted to find that The Stooges also deployed sleighbells, on tracks such as I Wanna Be Your Dog. Now sleighbells feature on the Boy Azooga album. But Davey’s treasure chest of hand-held percussion doesn’t stop there. Maracas are a key feature with Face Behind Her Cigarette, the song with which Boy Azooga often finish their live set, and which turns into a rave/psych monster-mash in the process.
“I started off with two pairs of maracas,” says Davey, “my lucky black maracas from this shop in Cardiff… Then my girlfriend and my best friend knew we had loads of gigs coming up. So they got me all these cheap maracas for my birthday, like 40, and drew different stuff on them – the date of a gig and so on. I think I currently have about 50 pairs. We lose a few at gigs but I’m hoping that’ll change and people will start bringing their own…”
Secure your maracas, grab those sleighbells. The Boy Azooga beat is already among us – and getting louder.
Tickets for this show are £10 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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The Stroppies
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Wednesday 20th May, 7.30pm
**PLEASE NOTE THIS SHOW HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO THE COVID19 OUTBREAK. REFUNDS FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
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Aoife O'Donovan
'Songs & Strings'
Hallé St. Peters, Manchester
Thursday 21st May, 7.30pm
It's a great pleasure to bring wonderful singer-songwriter Aoife O'Donovan to the newly refurbished Hallé St. Peters in Manchester in May.
**Tickets on sale on Friday 20th!**
**PLEASE NOTE THIS WILL BE A SEATED SHOW WITH ALL SEATS UNRESERVED**
Recognized for her ethereal voice and substantive songwriting, Aoife O’Donovan is also known for her collaborations. Called “a vocalist of unerring instinct” by the New York Times, O’Donovan is one of the most sought after vocalists and songwriters of her generation and her career has allowed her to collaborate with some of the most eminent names in music across a wide variety of genres.
The most recent example is I’m With Her, the band comprised of Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and O'Donovan. Their debut album See You Around, released in February 2018, has garnered praise from NPR, who instantly hailed the collection as "willfully open-hearted”, and The Guardian called their sound both "ethereal and purposeful”.
As a solo artist, O’Donovan has released two studio albums. In the Magic Hour (2016), a 10-song album full of the singer’s honeyed vocals mixed with gauzy, frictionless sounds: splashing cymbals, airy harmonies, and the leisurely baritone musings of an electric guitar. Mojo described the record as “exhilarating and exploratory,” while the New York Times named “The King of All Birds” one of the Best Songs of 2016. Aoife toured 2016 in support of the album and ended that year releasing a live album Man In A Neon Coat: Live From Cambridge with her touring band. Her debut solo album, 2013's Fossils, is a moody collection of original songs with a country lilt. The record received critical acclaim and was featured on a number of “Best of 2013” lists including NPR Music, American Songwriter, New York Magazine, and No Depression. In 2018, Aoife contributed an original song titled “Are You There”to the film What They Had, an official selection at both Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals.
Watch / Watch / ListenO'Donovan spent the preceding decade as co-founder and front woman of the string band, Crooked Still. She is the featured vocalist on The Goat Rodeo Sessions, the Grammy-winning album by Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile and its one-third of the female trio Sometimes Why. Throughout her career, she has also collaborated with artists such as Alison Krauss and jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, and is currently a member of the house band on the radio variety show Live From Here.
Hallé St. Peters, Manchester
Thursday 21st May, 7.30pm
It's a great pleasure to bring wonderful singer-songwriter Aoife O'Donovan to the newly refurbished Hallé St. Peters in Manchester in May.
**Tickets on sale on Friday 20th!**
**PLEASE NOTE THIS WILL BE A SEATED SHOW WITH ALL SEATS UNRESERVED**
Recognized for her ethereal voice and substantive songwriting, Aoife O’Donovan is also known for her collaborations. Called “a vocalist of unerring instinct” by the New York Times, O’Donovan is one of the most sought after vocalists and songwriters of her generation and her career has allowed her to collaborate with some of the most eminent names in music across a wide variety of genres.
The most recent example is I’m With Her, the band comprised of Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and O'Donovan. Their debut album See You Around, released in February 2018, has garnered praise from NPR, who instantly hailed the collection as "willfully open-hearted”, and The Guardian called their sound both "ethereal and purposeful”.
As a solo artist, O’Donovan has released two studio albums. In the Magic Hour (2016), a 10-song album full of the singer’s honeyed vocals mixed with gauzy, frictionless sounds: splashing cymbals, airy harmonies, and the leisurely baritone musings of an electric guitar. Mojo described the record as “exhilarating and exploratory,” while the New York Times named “The King of All Birds” one of the Best Songs of 2016. Aoife toured 2016 in support of the album and ended that year releasing a live album Man In A Neon Coat: Live From Cambridge with her touring band. Her debut solo album, 2013's Fossils, is a moody collection of original songs with a country lilt. The record received critical acclaim and was featured on a number of “Best of 2013” lists including NPR Music, American Songwriter, New York Magazine, and No Depression. In 2018, Aoife contributed an original song titled “Are You There”to the film What They Had, an official selection at both Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals.
Watch / Watch / ListenO'Donovan spent the preceding decade as co-founder and front woman of the string band, Crooked Still. She is the featured vocalist on The Goat Rodeo Sessions, the Grammy-winning album by Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile and its one-third of the female trio Sometimes Why. Throughout her career, she has also collaborated with artists such as Alison Krauss and jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, and is currently a member of the house band on the radio variety show Live From Here.
Tickets for this show are £19.50 in advance.
You can get tickets online from here.
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Joan Shelley
James Elkington
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Sunday 24th May, 7.30pm
Yay! Finally we get to see Kentucky native and collaborator with the stars, Joan Shelley back in the UK again for some of her own shows. Cannot wait.
Joan Shelley is a songwriter and singer who lives near Louisville, Kentucky not far from where she grew up. Like the River Loves the Sea is her fifth album. She draws inspiration from traditional and traditionally-minded performers from her native Kentucky, as well as those from Ireland, Scotland, and England, but she’s not a folksinger. Her disposition aligns more closely with that of, say, Roger Miller, Dolly Parton, or her fellow Kentuckian Tom T. Hall, who once explained—simply, succinctly, in a song—“I Witness Life.”
She’s not so much a confessional songwriter, although Like the River… gets closest to such subjectively emotional impressions as perhaps any album to date, and she sings less of her life and more of her place: of landscapes and watercourses; of flora and fauna; of seasons changing and years departing and the ineluctable attempt of humans to make some small sense of all—or, at best, some—of it. Her perspective and performances both have been described, apparently positively, as “pure,” but there’s no trace of the Pollyanna and there’s little of the pastoral, either: her work instead wrestles with the possibility of reconciling, if only for a moment, the perceived “natural” world with its reflection—sometimes, relatively speaking, clear; other times hopelessly distorted—in the human heart, mind, and footprint.
Listen / Watch
Since the 2015 release of her album Over and Even, Shelley has crossed the US and Europe several times as a headlining artist, sharing shows with the likes of Jake Xerxes Fussell, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Doug Paisley, Daniel Martin Moore, the Other Years, and Michael Hurley. She has opened for Wilco, Chris Smither, Andrew Bird, and Richard Thompson. Jeff Tweedy produced her previous record at The Loft in Chicago and her current record Like the River Loves the Sea was recorded at Greenhaus Studios in Iceland.
James Elkington
Chicago songwriter and guitarist James Elkington has collaborated with everyone from Richard Thompson to Jeff Tweedy to Tortoise. His sophomore album at Wilco’s Loft, expanding upon his celebrated 2017 debut Wintres Woma as well as his recent production and arrangement work for the likes of Steve Gunn, Nap Eyes, and Joan Shelley. Casting glances back to British folk traditions as well as toward avant-garde horizons, these brilliant new songs, as accessible as they are arcane, buttress Elkington’s brisk guitar figures and baritone poesy with strings, woodwinds, and backing vocals by Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station.
Tickets for this show are £11 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue, Jumbo and Crash Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Rachael Dadd
The Crescent, York
Thursday 4th June, 7.30pm
More info to follow.
Tickets for this show are £8 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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Native Harrow
The Basement, York
Friday 17th July, 8pm
“This record is about becoming your own advocate. Realizing maybe you are different in several or myriad ways, and that that is okay. And further, it is about me becoming a grown woman.”, Devin Tuel says. The singer-songwriter is at home in Newburgh, NY reflecting on her third album, Happier Now (available April 12 on Different Time Records in North America and August 2 on Loose Music in Europe and the UK), as well as the difficult sojourn the former ballerina and classically trained singer has had to traverse to become the writer and performer she was meant to be. Happier Now, released under her nom de plume, Native Harrow, is a set of nine songs recorded and mixed by Alex Hall (JD McPherson, The Cactus Blossoms, Pokey LaFarge) at Chicago’s Reliable Recorders. The album was co-produced by Hall, Tuel, and her bandmate, multi-instrumentalist Stephen Harms.
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The album was recorded in just three days in March 2018 during what Tuel calls “downtime” in the middle of a grueling 108 date tour. Each morning began with the songwriter presenting her collaborators with the day’s material. The trio rehearsed and documented each song live on the floor, tracking as a band. No click tracks, scratch tracks, or even headphones; just three musicians in a small room, captured with Hall’s collection of vintage mics and some subtle retro production techniques. Overdubs, including vocal harmonies, the rare lead guitar, B3 organ, Rhodes, and a few others, were added to decorate these live performances.
The band cuts out clear and vibrant narratives on fear, love, the open road, ill-fated relationships, and coping with the state of the world.
Happier Now’s nine songs were written during three back-to-back tours across North America supporting the band’s second album, Sorores. Some songs, including “Something You Have” and “How You Do Things” were written just days before recording began. Tuel skipped lunch on the third and final day of recording to pen the road-weary “Hard To Take”. Four days after arriving in Chicago, Native Harrow was back on the road and Happier Now was complete.
“I wanted to share that I made it out of my own thunderstorm. I had experienced the high peaks and very low valleys of my twenties. I saw more of the world on my own, got through challenges, reveled in true moments of triumph… but all the while the world around me was growing louder, wilder, and scarier. Music for me is a place to be soft. This album was my place to feel it all.”
Happier Now oscillates between feeling the sting of uncertainty (“Can’t Go on Like This”), the beauty of California (“Blue Canyon”) and the ache for lavish stability (“Way to Light”). You could say Tuel wears her heart proudly on her sleeve, but that’d be underplaying the exact gravity of her stories. Each starlit image is framed within her warm, enveloping vocals and the careful, profound considerations of Harms’ musicianship. Start to finish, the new record pours forth from her very bones, and you get the overwhelming sense she has never been more daring and honest than right now.
Tickets for this show are £10 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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Willy J Healey
Wunderlust
The Crescent, York
Wednesday 5th August, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
More info to follow.
Watch / Watch / Watch / Watch
Tickets for this show are £10 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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BDRMM
The Fulford Arms, York
Wednesday 2nd September, 7.30pm
Hull/Leeds based five-piece bdrmm release their much anticipated debut 'Bedroom' on July 3, via Sonic Cathedral.
The 10-track album was recorded late last year at The Nave studio in Leeds by Alex Greaves (Working Mens Club, Bo Ningen) and mastered in Brooklyn by Heba Kadry (Slowdive, Beach House).
It’s a hugely accomplished debut and a real step up both sonically and lyrically from their early singles, which were rounded up on last year’s If Not, When? EP. Musically, there are nods to The Cure’s Disintegration, Deerhunter and DIIV, while the band reference RIDE and Radiohead. There are also echoes of krautrock and post-punk, from The Chameleons to Protomartyr, plus the proto-shoegaze of the Pale Saints’ The Comforts Of Madness, not least in the cross-fading of some tracks, meaning the album is an almost seamless listen.
Listen / Watch / Listen
As a result, Bedroom becomes an unexpected and unintentional concept album, running through the different stages of a break-up set against the backdrop of the ups and downs of your early twenties. “The subject matter spans mental health, alcohol abuse, unplanned pregnancy, drugs… basically every cliché topic that you could think of,” reveals frontman Ryan Smith. “But that doesn’t mean they ever stop being relevant. It’s a fucker growing up, but I’m lucky enough to have been able to project my feelings in the form of this band, surrounded by four of the best people I’ve ever met.”
And that band name, in case it needs explaining, is pronounced the same way as the album title. “I never thought I’d get to the stage where I would have to explain it so much,” says Ryan. “We have been pronounced as Boredom, Bdum and my old boss actually thought we were a ska band called Bad Riddim. We’re all sarcastic cunts, so Bedroom spelt correctly seemed like the perfect title.”
He’s right. The perfect title for the perfect debut album.
bdrmm – from bedroom to Bedroom
Inspired to write and record a track in his bedroom after hearing Washed Out’s ‘Feel It All Around’ back in 2016, bdrmm frontman Ryan Smith decided to hastily form a band after the resulting demo got picked up and played by BBC Radio 1. He recruited his younger brother, Jordan, guitarist Joe, synth player Dan and drummer Luke. Like all the best bands, there is something ever so slightly wrong about them, something out of balance – not least because they range in age from teenagers to their mid-30s.
They played incessantly, supporting the likes of Fat White Family, Her’s and Viagra Boys, and began recording at The Nave in Leeds, with producer Alex Greaves. A pair of self-released singles (‘Kare’ and ‘The Way I Want’) were followed by two more for London indie Permanent Creeps (‘C:U’ and ‘Heaven’). Word of mouth grew thanks to coverage from the likes of So Young and The Line Of Best Fit and, when Steve Lamacq played them on his late-night Recommends show, Sonic Cathedral were listening.
The label reissued ‘C:U’ with new song ‘Question Mark’, followed by ‘Shame’ and then all the singles compiled on an EP titled If Not, When? The band won over legions of new fans – not least Lauren Laverne, Huw Stephens and John Kennedy – and set about making their debut album.
“We put a lot of hard work into creating Bedroom,” says Ryan. “It’s been really difficult, too, we all have personal things going on. Everybody needs an escape from the bleak reality of modern-day existence and, for us, this band is it – and I really hope we can be somebody else’s, too.”
Tickets for this show are £5 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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Squid
The Crescent, York
Wednesday 9th September, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
**THIS SHOW IS NOW SOLD OUT**
The hotly tipped post-punk, disco-funk phenomenon Squid are back with new single ‘The Cleaner’ and the news of an EP called ‘Town Centre’ which is coming out on 6th September via Dan Carey’s Speedy Wunderground label - the first EP from the legendary producers singles label. Physical release of the EP will be 15th November.
Watch / Watch / Watch
On ‘The Cleaner,’ Squid are at their dynamic best; making good on the angular funk of ‘The Dial’ and the disco-punk of ‘Houseplants’ that has seen them receive love from radio, press and fans everywhere they’ve been. ‘The Cleaner’ is inspired by moving to London, trying to adjust to the pace and lifestyle of the city and all the issues that throws up. As with any Squid track, ‘The Cleaner’ is bursting with ideas and a clear energy and determination within the band to embrace different musical styles.
Dan Carey on Squid and The Cleaner: “I love Squid so much. To record with them is such a joy - the room is a sea of ideas and enthusiasm without any clashes of ego; every suggestion is given full attention. This, combined with their musicianship results in beautifully inventive music, underpinned by a hard steady groove and topped with lyrics that are important and surreal. When I first saw squid I was blown away. In the middle of being blown away, they played The Cleaner. In the middle of The Cleaner I was blown away by the middle bit of The Cleaner. So I was 3 levels down, and I thought ‘Yes...Squid”
Squid have built their name on the back of a run of fine singles and their incendiary live shows - including three packed sets at this year’s Glastonbury Festival - which displays an energy and conviction that is positively transcendent in its chaos and fever.
Formed in Brighton, Squid is the brainchild of Ollie Judge (Drums & Lead Vocals), Louis Borlase (Guitars & Vocals), Arthur Leadbetter (Keyboards, Strings), Laurie Nankivell (Bass & Brass) and Anton Pearson (Guitars & Vocals).
Press:
'A more aggressive spin on the funky post-punk of Television and Talking Heads'
Stereogum
'A rich blend of psychedelia, Europop and punk noise'
The Line of Best Fit
'Intense, weird songs that scan like David Byrne conducting LCD Soundsystem'
Drowned In Sound
'Vigorous post-punk that winds itself into tight coils before springing apart'
NME
'A unifying sense of ingenuity and vessel bursting energy'
DIY
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Maz O'Connor
The Basement, York
Wednesday 9th September, 8pm
The Black Horse, Otley
Thursday 10th September, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATES. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
'Maz O'Connor's ace, apart from her remarkable songwriting talent, is her captivating voice’
Q Magazine
'The perfect mix of youthfulness and gravitas’
The Guardian
Maz O’Connor grew up in the wild Lake District of the Romantic Poets, studied literature at Cambridge and is now settled in East London. Her roots are in Ireland, and all of these diverse influences work together to make her songwriting something unique. Her exceptional voice provides the perfect vehicle for her powerful songs.
Watch
Maz spent her teenage years singing in folk clubs, and in 2014 was the recipient of a BBC Performing Arts Fund Fellowship (Adele was a previous recipient) which paired her as an emerging artist in residence with The English Folk Dance and Song Society. During this year she wrote, recorded and released her album ‘This Willowed Light’, which earned her a nomination for the BBC Radio 2 Folk Horizon Award and appearances at high profile festivals such as Cambridge Folk Festival, WOMAD and Glastonbury. The Guardian called it ‘folk album of the year thus far’.
Maz began to explore her own songwriting further, addressing themes of Millennial angst in her second album ‘The Longing Kind’, about which Songlines wrote: 'There is an inquiring intelligence as well as an emotional sensibility at work here…she plays and sings beautifully *****'. She toured the U.K. and Europe, including opening for such artists as David Gray, Thomas Dybdahl and Rosanne Cash.
An EP of cover songs 'The Undercover EP' followed, a collection of some of her favourite songs by other artists, from Bob Dylan to Louis Armstrong, via Greenday. Accompanying shows included appearances at Henley Festival and How the Light Gets In, and a packed London's Kings Place.
Alongside her own performances, Maz is also busy as a songwriter for special projects, commissions and theatre. She has been commissioned to write songs for UK Parliament and The Royal Shakespeare Company, and is now working on her own piece of music theatre.
Her background in folk continues to inform her storytelling and feminist themes are a constant in her work: from the song ‘Derby Day’, which she was commissioned to write about Emily Wilding Davison and the feminist re-telling of the creation myth ‘Mississippi Woman’ (both on her first album ‘This Willowed Light’), to the songs giving voice to women in portraits who have been silenced as muses (on her second album ‘The Longing Kind’).
She considers new album ‘Chosen Daughter’ - a collection of darker, story songs - a bigger, more concentrated feminist statement. The album was inspired by the stories of her female ancestors, grandmother-mother-daughter relationships, and ideas around female inheritance. It is not protest music, but a very personal album which explores, and celebrates, the feminine.
Tickets are £12 in advance and you can get them for York here and for Otley here.
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Jake Xerxes Fussell
The Basement, York
Friday 11th September, 8pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
Durham, North Carolina singer and guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell (yes, that’s his real middle name, after Georgia potter D.X. Gordy) grew up in Columbus, Georgia, son of Fred C. Fussell, a folklorist, curator, and photographer who hails from across the river in Phenix City, Alabama (once known as “The Wickedest City in America” for its rampant vice, corruption, and crime.) Fred’s fieldwork took him, often with young Jake in tow, across the Southeast documenting traditional vernacular culture, which included recording blues and old-time musicians with fellow folklorists and recordists George Mitchell and Art Rosenbaum (which led Jake to music) and collaborating with American Indian artists (which led Jake eventually to his graduate research on Choctaw fiddlers.)
As a teenager Jake began playing and studying with elder musicians in the Chattahoochee Valley, apprenticing with Piedmont blues legend Precious Bryant, with whom he toured and recorded, and riding wild with Alabama bluesman, black rodeo rider, rye whiskey distiller, and master dowser George Daniel. He joined a Phenix City country band who were students of Jimmie Tarlton of Darby and Tarlton; he accompanied Etta Baker in North Carolina; he moved to Berkeley, where he hung with genius documentary filmmaker Les Blank and learned from Haight folkies like Will Scarlett (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, Brownie McGhee) and cult fingerstyle guitarist Steve Mann; he appeared on A Prairie Home Companion. He did a whole lot of listening, gradually honing his prodigious guitar skills, singing, and repertoire. In 2005 he moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he enrolled in the Southern Studies department at Ole Miss, recorded and toured with Rev. John Wilkins, and in 2014, began recording his first solo album.
Jake’s 2015 self-titled debut record, produced by and featuring William Tyler, transmutes ten arcane folk and blues tunes into vibey cosmic laments and crooked riverine rambles. Collaborating with Tyler and engineer Mark Nevers in Nashville was a conscious decision to depart cloistered trad scenes and sonics for broader, more oblique horizons. Tyler, a guitar virtuoso known for his own compositions that untether and reframe traditional six-string forms and techniques, helmed the push boat in inimitable fashion, enlisting crack(ed) Nashville session vets Chris Scruggs (lap steel, bass, mandolin: Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Marty Stuart), Brian Kotzur (drums: Silver Jews), and Hoot Hester (fiddle; Bill Monroe, Ray Charles) to crew.
In 2017 Fussell followed his celebrated self-titled debut with a moving new album of Natural Questions in the form of transmogrified folk/blues koans. This time these radiant ancient tunes tone several shades darker while amplifying their absurdist humor, illuminating our national, and psychic, predicaments. What in the Natural World features art by iconic painter Roger Brown and contributions from three notable Nathans—Nathan Bowles (Steve Gunn), Nathan Salsburg (Alan Lomax Archive), and Nathan Golub (Mountain Goats)—as well as Joan Shelley and Casey Toll (Mt. Moriah).
On Out of Sight, his third and most finely wrought album yet, guitarist, singer, and master interpreter Fussell is joined for the first time by a full band featuring Nathan Bowles (drums), Casey Toll (bass), Nathan Golub (pedal steel), Libby Rodenbough (violin, vocals), and James Anthony Wallace (piano, organ). An utterly transporting selection of traditional narrative folksongs addressing the troubles and delights of love, work, and wine (i.e., the things that matter), collected from a myriad of obscure sources and deftly metamorphosed, Out of Sight contains, among other moving curiosities, a fishmonger’s cry that sounds like an astral lament (“The River St. Johns”); a cotton mill tune that humorously explores the unknown terrain of death and memory (“Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues”); and a fishermen’s shanty/gospel song equally concerned with terrestrial boozing and heavenly transcendence (“Drinking of the Wine”).
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Tickets for this show are £10 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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Nadia Reid
Aoife Nessa Francis
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Monday 14th September, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
We're teamed up with our friends at Hee Haw to help bring Nadia back to Leeds in April!
No one ever got anywhere by standing still. As an artist, you must move to grow. It’s a sentiment Nadia Reid knows well. Leaving her beloved New Zealand for America to record her third album with strangers, what she didn’t expect was a family awaiting her; teaming up with Spacebomb, her evocative travel tales push explorations of love, personal growth and deep reflection beyond boundaries she ever thought possible.
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“Out of My Province is definitely a travelling album; they are road songs,” tells Nadia, of the album, written during a period of intensive touring following the release of her critically acclaimed LP, Preservation. Between European tours, appearing on Later…with Jools Holland and singing with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, Out of My Province is the sound of a young artist growing in profile and dexterity before international audiences and whose world has changed before her eyes.
Very wonderful Irish singer Aoife Nessa Frances is opening this show too which we're excited about. Her album on BaDaBing at the beginning of the year was wicked and you can check it out here.
Tickets for this show are £11 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue, Jumbo and Crash Records in Leeds or online from here.
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BC Camplight
The Welly, Hull
Thursday 24th September, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
BC Camplight celebrate the release of new album 'Shortly After Takeoff' with a short tour in the spring including this show for us at The Welly in Hull.
“This is an examination of madness and loss,” says Brian Christinzio, the inimitable force behind BC Camplight. “I hope it starts a long overdue conversation.”
Fired by his ongoing battle with mental illness, Shortly After Takeoff is the final, and finest, chapter of what Christinzio calls his “Manchester Trilogy”, following 2015’s “How To Die In The North” and 2018’s “Deportation Blues”. All three albums were created after the native Philadelphian had moved to Manchester. Like Deportation Blues, Shortly After Takeoff spans singer-songwriter classicism, gnarly synth-pop and ‘50s rock’n’roll, with Christinzio’s similarly distinctive, flexible vocal carrying a fearless approach to lyrical introspection, but the new album is a major leap forward in songwriting sophistication and lyrical communication.
“It’s important to stress that this isn’t a redemption story,” he says. “I'm a guy who maybe lives a little hard and I’m in the thick of some heavy stuff. But as a result, I think I've made my best record.”
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Tickets for this show are £15 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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Richard Dawson
The Crescent, York
Monday 5th October, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
**THIS SHOW IS NOW SOLD OUT**
We're extremely pleased to be working again with our friends at Let's Go Baboon to bring the mighty Richard Dawson back to York, and this time with his band. Tickets on sale now so do not hang about!
A singular voice, part savant-genius, part court jester, his music echoing with voices past, present and future.
Richard Dawson, the black-humoured bard of Newcastle, returns to release his sixth solo album 2020. Where critically-acclaimed predecessor Peasant (2017) gave a voice to the citizens of the ancient early medieval northern kingdom of Bryneich via a set of narratives as bawdy as Chaucer and as epic and bloody as Beowulf, 2020 is an utterly contemporary state-of-the- nation study, that uncovers an equally tumultuous and even bleaker time. Here is an island country in a state of flux; a society on the edge of mental meltdown. This is England today.
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Nuanced and challenging, the ten songs also conversely feature Dawson’s most melodic moments yet. Many of his musical trademarks – unexpected time signatures, strange flourishes and welcome digressions,sounds simultaneously harsh and honeyed, sensitive and abrasive – are in place, but more than ever such disparate components are corralled to create a highly focused collection that offers a thoroughly dire diagnosis of the UK, yet is shot through with flecks of hope.
Dawson tours these bold, lyrically unflinching songs with three piece band.
'At times deeply, painfully intimate, but also witty, bawdy, surreal, disquieting, nostalgic, brash and fearlessly individual'
The Quietus
'Dawson rewards you generously, with kitchen-sink realism, a psychedelic take on fable, and an almost pugilistic sense of compassion'
The Observer
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British Sea Power
The Crescent, York
Wednesday 28th October, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
**THIS SHOW IS NOW SOLD OUT**
Celebrating their twentieth year in show business, Berkshire six-piece indie-rock band British Sea Power play The Crescent for the first time in May.
Tickets go on sale on Friday 7th February at 9am and you would be wise getting them bought quick!
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Tom Robinson Band
'Never Too Late - 70th Birthday Tour'
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Wednesday 9th December, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
Although many of Tom Robinson's 70s contemporaries such as The Jam, Elvis Costello and Ian Dury have spawned tribute bands, to the best of his knowledge no such act has ever attempted to cover his own back catalogue. Which of those songs, he wondered, would a Tom Robinson tribute band choose to assemble a full-on crowdpleasing set?
There'd have to be the songs co-written with Elton John and Peter Gabriel. Also those unexpected comeback hits of the 1980s such as War Baby and Atmospherics. Not to mention the stone-cold punk-era classics that launched his career: Motorway, Power In The Darkness, Up Against The Wall, Too Good To be True and of course the anthemic Glad To Be Gay.
In 2020 the veteran broadcaster and songwriter will mark 70 years on the planet by embarking on a month-long tour with his incendiary live band playing highlights from his own 45 year career in music. There may not have been a Tom Robinson tribute act until now - but as the chorus of his debut single puts it: "2-4-6-8... ain't never too late".
Bio:
After a stint in the acoustic trio Café Society, culminating in a 1975 album produced by Ray Davies, Tom founded his own group TRB (Tom Robinson Band) with the late Danny Kustow in 1976. The group were early supporters of Rock Against Racism and the following year their debut single 2-4-6-8 Motorway became one of the landmark singles of the UK punk era.
Mild notoriety followed in 1978 when Radio 1 banned Tom's follow-up anthem "Glad To Be Gay" and subsequent hits included Up Against The Wall and TRB's debut album Power In The Darkness which went gold in the UK and Japan.
His third band Sector 27 was produced by Steve Lillywhite and and went on to play Madison Square Garden in 1981, opening for The Police. After the group's management went bankrupt, Tom fled to Hamburg to avoid going the same way, and then became first UK musician ever to tour East Germany, backed by local musicians.
Tom returned to chart success as a solo artist in 1983 with War Baby and Atmospherics: Listen To The Radio; and co-wrote songs with Peter Gabriel, Elton John and Dan Hartman. In the 1990s, following a one-man tour of Ireland, he signed to Cooking Vinyl records and released three critically acclaimed solo albums.
As a broadcaster Tom won his first Sony Radio Award in 1997 for his BBC London documentary "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away". Ever since helping launch BBC Radio 6 Music in 2002 (and helping save it from closure in 2010) he has worked fulltime at the station, where he won a second Sony in 2011 and currently presents three shows a week.
Tickets for this show are £21 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue, Jumbo and Crash Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Eliza Carthy Restitute Live
The Crescent, York
Sunday 24th January, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
**THIS IS A SEATED SHOW**
Eliza Carthy MBE should by now need no introduction. A multi-award winning singer, songwriter and musician from a formidable English music dynasty.
Describing herself simply as a “modern English musician”, Eliza Carthy herself is one of the most recognisable faces of the English folk revival. Her first “solo” album of traditional music in 14 years, Restitute is literally a homely affair, recorded as it was at Eliza’s home in the picturesque Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire.
The band for the Restitute tour comprises Eliza Carthy, Ben Seal, Ben Somers, Willy Molleson and David Delarre – with support slot and special guest appearance from Saul Rose.
In addition to the Restitute material, the band will perform songs from brand new recordings of original songs by Eliza Carthy & Ben Seal – taken from their forthcoming album Northern Glowerhouse presents Through that Sound my Secret was Made Known.
Tickets for this show are £22.50 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and Earworm Records in York or online from here.
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Pictish Trail
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Saturday 3rd April, 2021, 7.30pm
**RESCHEDULED DATE. ALL TICKETS REMAIN VALID ALTHOUGH REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE FROM YOUR POINT OF PURCHASE**
Genius weirdness from the Lost Map head-honcho as a new album has him getting the band back together to celebrate.
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Something of a sonic hermit, Pictish Trail has spent large parts of the past few years tucked away in his caravan on the Hebridean isle of Eigg, feverishly working on the follow up to Secret Soundz Vol. 1 & 2, his critically- acclaimed double album of DIY electronic folk-tinged croft pop, released in 2014. Future Echoes is the mesmerising result. Written in remote seclusion but recorded in the bustling heart of London, it reunites Pictish Trail with Adem Ilhan, who produces the majority of the record. Johnny and Adem previously wrote music together in 2010 under the name Silver Columns, releasing the hugely well received album Yes And Dance via London taste-makers Moshi Moshi. Future Echoes features additional production and mixing from Rob Jones (Cocknbullkid, Sweet Baboo, Slow Club) and drumming from Alex Thomas (Squarepusher, Air) and was mastered by Guy Davie at Electric Mastering.
A very personal musing on mortality, the death of friendships and the finality of things, Future Echoes represents the most confident, cohesive and pop-savvy collection of music Pictish Trail has written to date. The album’s opener and first single ‘Far Gone (Don’t Leave)’ takes its cues both musically and thematically from the Coen brothers’ Fargo, adding a tongue-in- cheek hip-hop beat, raspy Casio keyboard bassline and echo-slathered vocal over the top of an ominously queasy sample. ‘Dead Connection’ is a dizzying and very danceable dispatch of ghostly electro all about attempted discourse with the dead and accepting that what is gone is gone. ‘Half-Life’ slows things down at the album’s half way stage for a by-turns shuddering and twinkling take on decaying and yet somehow still interminable relationships, while closer ‘After-Life’ is a twisted polyrhythmic psychedelic disco opus, with a chorus sung in a Jimmy Somerville-worthy falsetto, reflecting on reincarnation and life lived on repeat. Which is exactly what you’ll be putting Future Echoes on by the time you get that far.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Lynch is also busy running his own musical empire from the remote Hebridean island Eigg (56°54’N, 06°10’W) he calls home. Following ten successful years running Fife’s infamous Fence Records, Lynch moved on to pastures new and founded Scotland’s most exciting new label Lost Map Records in 2013.
Tickets for this show are £14 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue, Jumbo and Crash Records in Leeds or online from here.
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