Hey! Manchester promotes gigs by folk, Americana and experimental bands from around the world in Manchester, England. Read more here, see below for our latest shows, check out our previous shows, contact us, or join our mailing list, above.

Upcoming shows: Chris Brain... Mr Ben & the Bens... Daudi Matsiko... Jolie Holland... Christof van der Ven + Niamh Regan... Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom... Giant Sand... Melanie Baker... Sophie Hutchings... Jerron Paxton... Ghostly Kisses... Sounds From The Other City 2024... Francis of Delirium... The Buffalo Skinners... The Handsome Family... Memorial... His Lordship... Florry... Bad Bad Hats... Dana Gavanski... Caoilfhionn Rose... The Lovely Eggs... Rain Parade... Charlie Parr...

When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 20 March 2024
Where: The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham Street, Manchester M4 1LE

We’re delighted to welcome Chris Brain to The Castle Hotel!

Chris Brain emerged out of Leeds’ vibrant folk scene in 2022 with his debut, critically acclaimed and widely distributed album, Bound to Rise, reaching #22 in the UK Folk Charts.

His much-anticipated second album (out now), Steady Away, moves inward and takes on a more self-reflective quality, whilst retaining glimmers of soaring figures and pastoral imagery.

Brain’s distinctive warm vocal and finger-picked guitar style are sustained alongside expansive strings and delicate piano arrangements, taking shape through evolving and introspective impressions on tenderness, loss, pain and awe in nature.

Steady Away further embeds Chris Brain within the contemporary folk scene, whilst gesturing towards the folk tradition. His commitment to folk is only deepened by the two folk clubs and folk festival in Leeds that Chris founded and runs, attracting a wide range of audiences and musicians alike.

‘There are shades of the master Ralph McTell here and I can think of no greater compliment than that… Love it!’ – Mark Radcliffe, BBC Radio 2 Folk Show

’New sounds from Chris Brain, I’m certainly enjoying it’ – Cerys Matthews, BBC 6 Music

Local support comes from Séamus Óg. Based in Manchester, Séamus Óg is an Irish singer songwriter hailing from Carrickfergus. His quartet, formed from port towns in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, each draw from their own celtic origins and stories. Together creating a beautiful blend of instruments intertwined in rich harmonies, and stories full of heart, that will have you swept into a dream state and lingering on adventures taken, and mapping those to come.

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7.30pm on Thursday 21 March 2024
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be welcoming Mr Ben & the Bens back to Gullivers!

Cult DIY outfit and BBC 6 Music favourites Mr Ben & the Bens return in 2024 with a brand new 10-track LP Small Wide World via Bingo Records.

After years of steadily touring the back and even-further-back of beyond in the UK, as well as some of the island’s most beloved venues, Ben found himself taking a well-earned hiatus during 2023. Hibernating in his Sheffield studio in an old pewter factory, and in between working as a full-time potter come illustrator, he penned a set of contemplative songs which would later become the new album.

From the Village Green-era Kinks-style Poor, Poor Me to the motoric Listening Party, Small Wide World combines tried-and-tested methods with sonic departures for the band. Recorded in Tesla Studios and produced by David Glover, the new album inhabits a world of vintage drums machines, shimmering acoustics and wiry synthesisers.

Lyrically, kitchen sink realism winds its way around a set of songs jam packed with melancholic melody. So long Sympathy speaks of fragile ego and our means of combatting this, and Penny Drop of the loudest voice in the room disarmed by a junior colleague. Ben aims to disarm hostility in both society and the self with sensitive, personal sentiment.

With a limited edition vinyl and UK tour in the works for late March this year, Mr Ben & the Bens looks set to take on their Small Wide World once again.

Main support comes from Adam Hopper. Adam Hopper is a singer-songwriter based in Manchester. Concentrating on poignant, wry lyricism and catchy melodies, he creates his own unique brand of wide-eyed, mellow alternative pop music. Adam’s sound is informed by the brighter moments of 1970s New York’s art rock and pop movements and the carefree, DIY attitude of 1990s Lo-Fi and anti-folk scenes. Adam spent the first half of 2023 gigging solo across the country, honing his material, and emerged later in the year, fully fleshed out with his band The Wimps.

Opening the show are The Punchies. The Punchies are a garage-country trio fronted by a former Fruit Tone, bring raucous melancholy and witty libretto to their ramshackle punky tonk live set.

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 27 March 2024
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with Daudi Matsiko for the first time!

Nottingham based, British-Ugandan singer-songwriter Daudi Matsiko carefully crafts modern albeit reverent folk. Deft, melancholic picking reminiscent of Nick Drake is tempered by contemporary percussion and instrumentation.

Matsiko’s vocals derive their strength from their seeming fragility. With every song, his confessional lyrics cut to the marrow. After releasing two independent EPs, A Brief Introduction to Failure and The Lingering Effects of Disconnection, he has toured with GoGo Penguin, Keaton Henson and Portico Quartet whilst also being a participant of the Red Bull Music Academy in Montreal 2016.

2023 has seen the release of new singles oMo, Fool Me As Many Times As You Like, Hymn, and I Am Grateful For My Friends, which have received support from Gilles Peterson on Worldwide FM and BBC 6 Music as well as Lauren Laverne, and have been featured in several Spotify editorial playlists including The Most Beautiful Songs in the World, The Other list, The Listening Post and Fresh Finds. In November 2023, Matsiko also featured and performed on episode 215 of The Adam Buxton Podcast.

After receiving a standing ovation at this years The Great Escape Festival in Brighton, Matsiko’s much anticipated debut album is expected in early 2024.

Special guest is Marco Woolf. Marco Woolf is a Manchester-based singer-songwriter and storyteller. Influenced by the likes of Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell and John Martyn, the music that Marco Woolf makes can prove similarly complex to categorise, his lyrics introspective and insightful – earning him a reputation as a self-evidently skilled storyteller – though thoughtful instrumentation too is just as crucial to his compositions, clearly considered to ensure it possesses comparable weight to his wording.

His latest release, Francine, I – a narrative-led EP issued via Phlexx Records in July 2021 – follows an African woman as she migrates West for the sake of her children and perfectly typifies the trademark one-two punch of tenderness that makes Marco’s music so transcendent. A limited 12” run sold out within 24 hours and the release received positive reviews from several publications, including PAM (Pan African Music, a website dedicated to promoting music from the African continent and diaspora).

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7.30pm on Friday 5 April 2024
Where: Hallé at St Michael’s, 36-38 George Leigh Street, Ancoats, Manchester M4 5DG

We’re delighted to welcome Jolie Holland back to Manchester!

Jolie Holland is an American singer and performer who combines elements of folk, traditional country, jazz, and blues.

Over the span of her career, Jolie Holland has knotted together a century of American song – jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll – into some stew that is impossible to categorise with any conventional critical terminology. This is her burden and her gift, to know all of these American songs of the last ten decades in her head and her heart, and to have to wrestle with their legacy. She dives straight to the pathos of a song the way the very greatest singers, singers like Mavis Staples, or Al Green, or Skip James, or Tom Waits do. Upon first encounter her songs seem challenging, perhaps unsettling at times, but as so many poets and rockers have shown us (from Dante Alighieri to William Blake to Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith to Nick Cave to Mark E. Smith) that’s where the beauty lies. As evident on her first recordings, Holland apparently has no fear of the truth, and there is no emotional core that she cannot reach in song. In fact she thrives on the red hot centre of a musical composition, in all its strange and brutal detail.

This autumn, Jolie Holland will unveil her latest album, Haunted Mountain; intricately connected with friend and collaborator Buck Meek’s record of the same name, Haunted Mountain features five songs co-written by the pair, including the mesmerising title track. Holland explains: ‘I wrote the song a couple years ago, and it existed as two verses for many months. Buck added a third verse, and then we both began performing it with our bands. When he told me he was including our song on his next record, I was extremely pleased at the weirdness – I was going to release a version as well. Then he told me he wanted to name his record Haunted Mountain, “…only if you’re not already naming your record Haunted Mountain”. Well, that had been the name of my next record for quite a while. We thought about it for a minute and decided it was bizarre and wonderful. Buck’s Haunted Mountain is out in late August. My Haunted Mountain comes out in the autumn. I love how the image of a haunted mountain is so open ended. I love how fun it is to say. I am enormously pleased that Buck chose it as his album name too.’

The nine-track stunner delves into a treasure trove of themes, from anti-colonial thought to homelessness, all while exploring the profound significance of being in reciprocity with nature. ‘When the world is sacred, we are moved to protect it,’ Holland explains. ‘Elves stop highways in Iceland. Faeries save forests in Ireland. Even though the numinous is beyond reason, it’s a motivating, communicative idea. You can tell it to a kid, and when the kid grows up they might understand it ecologically, or they might understand it aesthetically. The numinous is a huge idea,’  she continues. ‘An old friend of mine saw the Jordan River at a place in Palestine where it was just a little creek. His description opened up this realisation to me: every river is sacred to someone. Every inch of Earth is someone’s storied, sung homelands. No one needs to understand this more than settler Americans.’

Working closely with her talented collaborators, Adam Brisbin and Justin Veloso, Jolie recorded the core of the album as a trio before adding layers of intriguing overdubs. Ever the innovator, she employed some unconventional recording techniques, like capturing the sound of knuckles rapping on the piano and incorporating the sounds of cicadas in album closer What It’s Worth. The intriguing atmosphere of Feet On The Ground was created by running a drum machine through an amp into a vast barn, every sonic experiment a testament to her willingness to push the boundaries of her art.

Haunted Mountain is a triumph of boundless creativity, profound lyricism, and thought-provoking artistry. With poetic storytelling awash in a dream-like sonic palette, Holland invites audiences on an alluring journey that transcends genres and leaves an indelible mark on the heart and mind.

‘Noir, lived in, caustic, not entirely of this time’ – Aquarium Drunkard

Tour support comes from Mark McKowski. Mark McCausland is an Irish songwriter/producer/musician, best known for his work as one half of The Lost Brothers. He also collaborates with a variety of artists and produces his own records under the name McKowski. He currently works from his home studio in Omagh, the town that he’s been trying to escape since birth.

This will be one of the first public concerts in St Michael’s since its recent re-opening, having been closed since 2004. The Roman Catholic church was founded in 1859 and became the heart of the Little Italy Community in Ancoats.

Age restriction: 14+. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Buy tickets now

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7.30pm on Tuesday 9 April 2024
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with co-headliner Christof van der Ven and Niamh Regan for the first time!

This April, two superbly talented songwriters – Niamh Regan from Ireland and Christof van der Ven from The Netherlands – team up to perform double headline shows across the UK.

London-based Christof van der Ven has built a truly impressive CV over the past few years, supporting the likes of Bon Iver, Lisa Hannigan and Nick Mulvey. In that time, he has released two LPs – Empty Handed (2018) and You Were The Place (2019) – alongside multiple EPs, the latest of which is Haul (2023).

2024 promises more new music from Christof, as he prepares to release his next record. Recently, Christof headlined a tour in various venues across Europe and the UK, and was an Artist in Residence as part of Sounds From A Safe Harbour – where he collaborated with Niamh Regan, amongst others.

Niamh Regan’s 2020 debut album Hemet introduced her as an artist with a gift for crafting folk-tinged songs with a quiet, reflective intensity. The release started to make waves and achieved over one million streams on Spotify and led to nominations for both the RTE Folk Awards and the Choice Music Prize ‘Album of the Year’.

Since its release, Niamh has embarked on headline tours around Ireland, UK, Australia and more – pairing this with many festivals and a variety of support opportunities with artist such as CMAT, Villagers, John Grant, SOAK, Patrick Watson, Sam Amidon, Cormac Begley, Sorcha Richardson, Josh Ritter, and many more, which has led to Niamh’s new-found confidence and joy performing on stage. Niamh will release her second album, Come As You Are, in May 2024 via Faction Records.

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7.30pm on Monday 15 April 2024
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to welcome The Burning Hell’s Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom back to Manchester – to present Never Work!

Working hard or hardly working? The last few years have been a bit of both. In the spring of 2020 Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom released an album of contemporary labour songs and were just getting ready to head out on the road with it when… well, you probably remember what happened next. By the time touring had started up again, their attention was geared toward the 2022 album Garbage Island with their band The Burning Hell.

Finally, this April, Ariel and Mathias will be bringing Never Work to life, collaborating with visual artist and indie rock legend Shotgun Jimmie in a multidisciplinary show. This tour will be accompanied by a re-pressing of the long sold out Never Work, and the release of a collaborative EP with Shotgun Jimmie, Hardly Working.

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 24 April 2024
Where: YES Pink Room, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

We’re excited to welcome Giant Sand to Manchester – their first visit in 19 years!

Giant Sand celebrate 25 years since the release of the legendary Chore Of Enchantment, the panoramic masterpiece that was the turning point for the classic line-up featuring seasoned songwriter Howe Gelb and latter-day Calexico members Joey Burns and John Convertino from 1999.

Filled with mind-bending one-liners, customary offbeat instrumentation, echo fields and hazy horizons, Chore Of Enchantment is a songbook of Howe Gelb’s greatest songs. The high level production by the legendary Jim Dickinson, PJ Harvey foil John Parish and acclaimed singer/songwriter/producer Kevin Salem, a tour-de-force of Gelb’s unique oeuvre.

Highlighting their eclectic and esoteric career, this reissue celebrates the band’s magnificent, long and winding career. This deluxe reissue features restored artwork and newly penned liner notes from MOJO’s Dave Henderson.

‘A beautiful, emotionally complex album’ – The Quietus

Giant Sand have been the primary outlet for the stylistic curveballs and sun-damaged songcraft of singer-songwriter Howe Gelb. In four-plus decades he’s managed to reinvent rock, country, blues, punk, garage, lo-fi, jazz, gospel, avant-garde noise and flamenco gypsy music with his impressionistic imagery and expansive observations of the world.

The reissue is released alongside 2010’s Blurry Blue Mountain. A gorgeous and much-celebrated collection of perfectly-crafted, personal songwriting from Howe Gelb. It’s another well-thumbed chapter recounted by one of Americana’s great writers.

‘An album full of heart, soul, and wit… there’s some very real magic to be found in the elegant force of Blurry Blue Mountain’ – AllMusic

Giant Sand will be touring the UK as a band, including Tommy Larkins on drums, this April.

Special guest is Ben Woods from The Golden Dregs. The Golden Dregs are a band based in South East London. Their latest album, On Grace & Dignity, was released in February 2023 on 4AD, followed by an EP of pop covers in November. Originally hailing from Cornwall, the project started life in 2016 as a musical vehicle for producer and songwriter Ben Woods.

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7.30pm on Thursday 25 April 2024
Where: YES Basement, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

We’re delighted to be working with Melanie Baker for the first time!

Melanie Baker is a singer, songwriter and musician hailing from the Lake District and now based in Newcastle-upon-tyne. Her direct and honest lyricism captures themes such as queer identity, self-reflection and the anxieties of modern life.

Her self-released music has so far received radio support from BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 1, BBC Introducing and Radio X, as well as supporting the likes of dodie, Tessa Violet, Maisie Peters, Will Varley, Jen Cloher, Jesca Hoop and runnner.

Baker’s latest EP Burnout Baby is set to be released in April 2024 on Du Blonde’s indie record label Daemon TV, followed by her second headline UK tour in April with her newly formed band.

She wrote the songs on this EP about the process of struggling with intense burnout: the texts from friends waiting endlessly for a reply, the days lost to endless scrolling, the dying plants that just remind you that you’re not succeeding at taking care of anything. Amid real, raw pathos, there’s also a sense of lightness to Baker’s newly rocky full-band arrangements. These are songs that may never have existed had Baker not found a way to make music that excited her again, and that gives them tangible spark.

Burnout Baby is a kind of rebirth for Baker, a flame re-ignited which for a time had been lost. ‘It’s an evolution of me trying to stop caring what people think of me,’ she says. ‘All of these songs are just reminders to do what I want and be who I wanna be. They’re all almost mantras to me now. When I perform them, it’s like getting to hear the words that I really wanna believe in.’

‘Beautiful sound’ – Jo Whiley, BBC Radio 2

‘Alluring, irreverent scuzzy, grungry grit’ – Atwood Magazine

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7.30pm on Saturday 27 April 2024
Where: Hallé at St Michael’s, 36-38 George Leigh Street, Ancoats, Manchester M4 5DG

We’re delighted to be working with Australian composer and pianist Sophie Hutchings for the first time – plus special guest Simeon Walker!

Close your eyes, and take a trip. Listen and you’ll see it. An ancient place of desert plains, mountain ranges and rocky gorges; of blazing sun, star-cloaked nights and shadows that loom and leave. A timeless terrain where clouds dance in water and red dirt roads stretch beyond the horizon.

This is soundscape as landscape. As a vast interior.

 A World Outside.

The ninth studio album from lauded pianist and composer Sophie Hutchings is a work of spacious, hypnotic beauty, a musical travelogue inspired by a road trip through Australia’s mighty Northern Territory, beginning in tropical Darwin and going deep into the arid Red Heart.

Rich with emotion and feeling, texture and contrast, as propulsive and powerful as it is elegant and intimate, A World Outside is an impressionistic take on a wide brown land. Piano notes flow, pause and surge, variously blending with strings, synths, percussion and field recordings, and features from First Nations artists, revered Yolgnu songman Rrawun Maymuru and rising Larrakia diva, Lena Kellie.

This is music that unveils itself. Like a universe of secrets.

“I’m a person who needs time away in a natural environment in order to make music,” says Hutchings. “The bigger and more challenging the space, the better.”

Like the majority of Australians, Hutchings grew up – and spent holidays – on the coast. Sydney-based, she remains an avid surfer. Travelling is a passion: periods spent in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East have woven golden threads into a sound hailed as ‘calm in a maddening world’ by Clash and ‘stirring, vigorous, grandly melodic’ by MOJO.

Hutchings flexed this shining aesthetic to global acclaim on her 2020 Mercury KX debut Scattered on the Wind, a collection of hitherto unheard pieces – some based around verse by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi – and fresh material created with musicians on strings, woodwind and soprano vocals.

This time around, she began with a blank canvas. With a map and an open mind. Reflection had provided direction: “Over lockdown I realised that I really didn’t know enough about the land on which I was living” she says. “I decided to get lost in its colossal landscape. I wanted to absorb what I was seeing.”

Hutchings committed everything to memory: the constant heat haze. The contours etched by the sunrise. Palm trees jutting from the sides of cliffs, swimming holes strafed with rainbow sparkles, rocks whose patterns told of long-gone seas. The great silence, sometimes eerie, often serene, that crept into her bones.

“There were days when I literally didn’t see any humans. But I saw dingoes. Cliff wallabies. Wild camels and wild horses. I heard echoes, and melodies in the wind. Some mornings I’d do a big hike up a rock face and stand there taking in these endless 360-degree views.”

A smile. “That land has a mystical other worldliness like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.”

Back home in Sydney, Hutchings began magicking an album using the loose, natural style she developed as a child. A child who, having struggled to sight-read, would come to channel her distinctive musical gifts using instinct, imagination and a system of written-out chord charts, practicing in private on the family piano while her two older brothers were listening to and/or playing in alt-rock bands. Her jazz-musician father, a multi-instrumentalist, had raised her on a musical diet that generally favoured horn players: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Chet Baker. The young Sophie gravitated to instrumental piano, regardless.

Pieces by the likes of Frédéric Chopin and proto-minimalist Eric Satie are in her muscle memory, nestled alongside such late-teen discoveries as contemporary classical composers Arvo Pärt and Jóhann Jóhannsson American chamber music renegades Rachel’s and iconic Australian improvising trio The Necks. And although Hutchings composed prolifically throughout her mid-to-late twenties she waited until she was 32 before releasing her debut album, 2010’s Becalmed.

“Music wasn’t something I’d ever thought of as a full time career,” says Hutchings, who has toured the globe, composed for film soundtracks and appeared on countless Best Of lists. “I guess music found me.”

Special guest is Simeon Walker. Leeds-based pianist and composer Simeon Walker has quickly emerged as a leading light in the burgeoning Modern Classical scene, following the release of Mono and Winnow, his two albums to date. Simeon regularly performs and tours across the UK and Europe; has supported a variety of artists including S. Carey, LYR, Sebastian Plano, Loscil, Erland Cooper and Taz Modi; and performed notable live sets at Latitude & Timber Festivals. His latest single Reverie features on the first official Piano Day compilation by the LEITER label, alongside Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds and Chilly Gonzales.

His music receives regular broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 shows including Unclassified and Night Tracks, alongside BBC 6Music, KEXP and Soho Radio, with his music receiving listening figures in excess of 25 million streams across platforms. He also founded and continues to curate Brudenell Piano Sessions; an intimate and varied live music series highlighting the diverse music being composed and performed on the piano, hosted at Leeds’ iconic Brudenell Social Club.

This will be one of the first public concerts in St Michael’s since its recent re-opening, having been closed since 2004. The Roman Catholic church was founded in 1859 and became the heart of the Little Italy Community in Ancoats.

Age restriction: 14+. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane

When: 7pm on Saturday 27 April 2025
Where: Low Four Studio, Deansgate Mews, Great Northern, Manchester M3 4EN

We’re excited to be working with Jerron Paxton again – this time, at Low Four!

Smithsonian Folkways is proud to announce that Jerron Paxton has signed with the label for his next, long-awaited full-length release, due out in 2024. Paxton joins Folkways contemporaries such as Dom Flemons, Jake Blount, Our Native Daughters and others exploring the diverse roots of Black folk music in America and highlighting its continued importance and influence.

Paxton is a skilled interpreter of Black traditional music, having spent his life learning the multifaceted musical dialects of blues, old-time, ragtime, and Cajun music and playfully dressing them up in their brightest hues. He is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, banjo, piano, fiddle and other instruments with deep histories and ties to Black American music — each with a master’s touch.

Born in South Central Los Angeles into a family steeped in Southern music and culture, he has been based in New York City for nearly his entire adult life. He has appeared on the covers of The Village Voice and Living Blues and has earned praise from numerous other publications. The Bluegrass Situation captures Paxton’s holistic approach to his craft: ‘He is not merely a preservationist mining bygone decades for esoteric material or works that fit a certain aesthetic or brand. He simply takes music that is significant to his identity, his culture, and his experience and showcases it for a broader audience.’

This show takes place at Low Four – a recording studio situated on Deansgate Mews in the Great Northern warehouse. This intimate venue features a Cloudwater bar.

This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Buy tickets now

Attend on: Facebook


All shows are 18+ unless otherwise stated.
Designed by ikram_zidane