When: 7pm on Friday 23 July 2021
Where: Gorilla, 54-56 Whitworth Street West, Manchester M1 5WW

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been moved to July 2021. All other details are the same, and original tickets remain valid. It’s still sold out – but if any tickets are returned, we’ll post updates on social media. Here’s a message from the band:

2020: The Year of the Moron.
There is so much uncertainty about the months ahead that we’ve decided to push our “I am Moron” February tour dates onto Summer 2021. We really want a party with our Eggheads and feel that in current circumstances the summer will give us the best chance of doing that.

As well as a load of dates in July, we’ve also announced a batch of brand new UK dates in May and June. Whatever happens we won’t let our Eggheads down. We all need live music in our lives. And this can’t last forever. We won’t give up! See you next year cockers! Love Holly and David XX

We’re delighted to be welcoming The Lovely Eggs back to Gorilla!

The Lovely Eggs are back on the road in 2021 as they announce a string of tour dates around the UK!

With observational and often surreal lyrics about life The Lovely Eggs have a powerful raw sound that creates the sonic illusion of a band twice their size. The result is a mix of heavy psych, pop and strangeness and they have become known for their ferocious yet joyous live performances.

Their new single This Decision is out on 10 January, followed by their new album I am Moron – produced by Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, MGMT, Tame Impala, Mogwai) – in the Spring.

With much support from BBC 6 Music and Radio 1, the band continues to sell out gigs across the UK without the help of management, booking agent or record label support. They are selling out bigger and bigger venues and more eggheads are joining them in their crusade against bullsh*t.

Catch them live in February 2021 for the “I am Moron” UK album tour.

Main support comes Thick Richard. Thick Richard has been pedalling his potty-mouthed poems at festivals and clubs up and down the land since 1999. His cynical, lyrical, jet-black humour, intelligent wordplay, well-crafted verse, and occasionally acerbic, well-targeted comic attacks have earned him much respect from artists and audiences from Edinburgh to Glastonbury. He has supported acts including; Kate Tempest, The Fall, The Courteeners, Jerry Sadowitz, John Hegley, Arthur Smith and Frank Sidebottom. Thick Richard has been heard a number of times on BBC radio, including presenting and writing BBC 6 Music’s Beat of the Day and performed live on the channel for National Poetry Day. He is a regular headliner of Hammer and Tongue nationwide poetry tours and is usually to be found performing a wide variety of live music and cabaret venues. He has also had a sell-out tour of his solo show Swear School.

Opening the show is Dog Daisies. Dog Daisies is a widescreen lo-fi indie-pop project based around the home-studio adventures of Lancastrian songwriter Stephen Hudson. Inspired by motorways, midnight walks, 1980s films and the Lancashire coast, Dog Daisies released the debut LP Eagletism at the end of 2019 to glowing press reviews and repeated airplay on BBC 6 Music. Described as ‘Stand by Me put to music and set on a motorway’, it is a record brimming with imagination and melody; it touches on themes of time-travel and the great outdoors whilst inviting comparisons to bands like Grandaddy, Guided by Voices and Mercury Rev.

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

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been moved to July 2021. All other details are the same, and original tickets remain valid. It’s still sold out – but if any tickets are returned, we’ll post updates on social media.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7pm on Saturday 24 July 2021
Where: The Deaf Institute, 135 Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HE

PLEASE NOTE: This show now takes place on Saturday 24 July, with all tickets remaining valid.

We’re delighted to be helping Francis Lung launch his new album!

Francis Lung is a singer/songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist from Manchester. He began writing and stockpiling music after the demise of his former band WU LYF in 2012. The unique brand of power pop featured on his recorded output spans genres as diverse as disco, soft rock and alt-country whilst gliding seamlessly between them.

New album Miracle is due to be released on 18 June 2021 on Memphis Industries. Despite its serious subject matter, Miracle is far from austere in sound, marrying the cinematic, dreamlike quality of Francis’ earlier music with the pared-back charm of great singer-songwriters like Judee Sill, Jeff Tweedy and Elliott Smith.

Special guest is Ben Gregory. Ben Gregory is the lead singer and songwriter of Blaenavon, the acclaimed group. Showcasing new material, this is a rare chance to see him perform a solo show.

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

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Dice.fm, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 1 September 2021
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been postponed until September 2021. Original tickets are valid and all other details remain the same.

We’re delighted to be welcoming Mr Ben & The Bens back to Manchester!

After the celestial adventures of Mr Ben & The Bens’ previous issue, band-leader Ben Hall finds all the magic he needs on earth with his new album. On 2019’s Who Knows Jenny Jones?, Hall plotted the story of a young, shy Pitsmoor woman who returned from an alien encounter newly armed with serious disco-dancing know-how. Released through Bella Union on 10 July 2020, Life Drawing looks closer to home – Sheffield and thereabouts – for 12 brightly plaintive, character-driven vignettes, set to warm, acoustic, indie-folk-pop backdrops after its predecessor’s close encounters of the synth-driven kind.

A ‘cloudy thread of narrative’ is present, Hall explains, but this time it’s left open for listeners to map routes through it. ‘The idea with the title is that the songs are character sketches, and their stories coalesce in a place that has a bit of all the towns in the North of England I’ve lived in. Bits of myself in the stories came out unintentionally, so I’d like it if the listener could find those semi-truths from the songs and place them into their own experiences.’

Vibrant invitation to start exploring arrives with album opener On the Beach, where Hall’s tender vocal and dreamy organ provide simpatico companions to a wistful tale of a visit to a beach charged with memories – one of many evocative locales on the album. How Do You Do? brings to mind Belle and Sebastian at their dreamiest, while seeding enviro-metaphors – suns and moons, storms and tides, rain and snow, Whatever the weather may do – that figure strongly throughout the album’s every-day rhapsodies.

While these motifs provide consistency, a tremendous sense of DIY musical dynamism is at work elsewhere on Life Drawing, colouring in the fringes and shading the edges. ‘I spent a lot longer on this album, in fact the longest I’ve spent on any project in my life,’ he says. ‘Hopefully that gravity comes across! I have the curious ability to make and move on way too quickly when making music and art, so hopefully this record’s got a bit more staying power.’

Plenty of melodic sticking power propels the urgent Danny, where beaches and seas provide backdrops for a character study about someone reaching out for connection. At the opposite extreme, the gorgeous Astral Plane is a sweetly psychedelic lament, images of waves and shores lapping gently against the tale of a ‘barely functioning’ character. Faithful Hound is a country-sad ballad, Minor Keys a retro doo-wop-ish reverie about a character blithely ‘at sea’ and wasting the day away, all set to a waltzing-Wurlitzer melody.

Elsewhere, Metronomy-esque outsider-pop laments (Beast in the House), jaunty pop miniatures (Walking to an Open Sky) and pin-drop-delicate folk-pop lullabies (Irish Rain) emerge with range and empathy, attuned to the earthy hopes, dreams, sorrows and pleasures of their subjects. Closing Time sets a writer’s (‘“In the town, that you write into life on to pages so white’) to a reverberant piano, before Watering Can closes the album on notes of brassy uplift. ‘I go,’ sings Hall, drawing forward momentum from the stories he digs up.

For Hall, Life Drawing is a rich, rewarding step forward in a still-young career.

‘Upbeat, psychedelia-tinged pop’ – Secret Meeting

‘An intoxicating mix of perfectly fitting melodies and vocal strafes’ – Clash Magazine

Main support comes from Manchester’s own Ivan Campo. Ivan Campo’s story began in 2000 when the band met whilst studying Contemporary Music at UCLAN. After graduating, they put together their first EP, Clippings 2, which was self-released in 2004. Since then they have performed at a variety of venues and festivals throughout the UK and have played three tours around Spain. Their collection of laid back songs tell tales; inspired by life, love and literature. Having been on hiatus throughout 2019, the band have been busy writing material for their 10th album which will start to be showcased to audiences from February 2020.

Opening the show are Family Selection Box – a northern roasted blend of DIY indie.

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been postponed until April 2021. Original tickets are valid and all other details remain the same.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from the bar (no booking fee), Vinyl Exchange, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Thursday 2 September 2021
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been postponed until September 2021. Original tickets remain valid and all other details are the same.

We’re excited to be working with Alice Boman for the first time!

‘It’s a powerful feeling when you’re in that world and you lose track of time,’ says Alice Boman of the deeply hypnotic state she entered when making her mesmerising and long-awaited debut album, Dream On. This transfixed state is one that she also seamlessly plunges her listeners into. Her deeply textural, atmospheric and immersive sounds – coupled with her fragile yet engulfing and ethereal vocals – create something of a vortex that listeners are sucked in by. A world where ambient, dream pop and folk merge into a unique new form.

The profound sense of quietness that can be heard in her music stems from its simple roots. Initially a project that started at home when she was a teenager, the songs she was making were just ‘sketches’. Yet as soon as other people heard them, it was clear that there was so much more to her talents than simple home tinkering. Two EPs followed, 2013’s Skisser and 2014’s EP II, as did a wave of critical acclaim and an array of TV placements for her music on shows such as Transparent, Wanderlust and 13 Reasons Why. With her new reach, the Swedish songwriter captivated listeners one-by-one.

A period of reflection and concentration on songwriting followed, as did a run of stirring one-off singles made with producer Fabian Prynn: Heartbeat, Dreams and End of Time. Boman now finds herself in a place far away from the artist she started out as. ‘It’s like two different worlds,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even realise that this was something I could do for a living. Things feel a bit more certain now and it’s nice to be able to dive into it fully.’

Despite her debut album feeling fuller and richer, as well as being her most accomplished work to date, Boman’s intimacy remains intact. ‘I didn’t want to lose the nerve of intimacy,’ she says. ‘That’s an important thing for me.’ The songwriting for the album initially began in a similarly isolated and autonomous way. ‘I took instruments and recording equipment to a house in the countryside of Sweden for a few weeks to get away from everything,’ Boman says. ‘To just focus on writing and playing. No distractions. Sometimes you need that distance to get into a flow.’

Local support comes from Matthew Fortunati. Influenced by the music of Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Pedro The Lion, Bright Eyes and many more, Matthew Fortunati is an Italian American songwriter and composer based between Manchester (UK) and San Gemini (Italy). He first went on stage in March of 2015, supporting anti-folk Canadian artist Oldseed during part of his Italian tour. In May of the same year, he won the Indiepolitana music contest on the coast of the Adriatic Sea in Fano, a town in the Marche region of Italy. The award of the contest consisted in five shows through the country, which gave him visibility and the chance to book further gigs the same year.

In the summer of 2015, he released his first EP, The Best You Can Is Good Enough, with three independent labels: Astio Collettivo, Periferica Produzioni and Waves for the Masses. The fifteen-minute extended play reached the channels of Rolling Stones Italy and Rockit. In August of 2018, with the help of diNotte Records and General Soreness, he releases Super Taller, an eight-track album inspired by the life of his grandfather. In the summer of 2019, shortly after graduating from the University of Salford in creative music technologies, he was commissioned by New Creatives North and Arts Council England to produce a composition for BBC Arts, where he experimented with binaural field recordings, classical ensembles and electronics.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from the bar (no booking fee), Vinyl Exchange, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Tuesday 14 September 2021
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be welcoming Toronto’s Kiwi Jr back to Manchester!

Buildings burning in every direction; macabre unknowns in your friendly neighbour’s basement; undecided voters sharpening their pencils: under pressure we could call Kiwi Jr’s Cooler Returns ‘timely’. But what year is it, again? On their sophomoric smash-up released world-wide by Sub Pop Records, Kiwi Jr cycle through the recent zigs and looming zags of the new decade, squinting anew at New Year’s parties forgotten and under-investigated small town diner fires, piecing together low-stakes conspiracy theories on what’s coming down the pike in 2021. Put together like a thousand-piece puzzle, assembled in flow state through the first dull stretch of quarantine, sanitised singer shuffling to sanitised studio by streetcar, masked like it’s the kind of work where getting recognised means getting killed, Cooler Returns materialises as a sprawling survey from the first few bites of the terrible twenties, an investigative exposé of recent history buried under the headlines and ancient kings buried under parking lots.

Not so long since their debut Football Money in archaeological time, unending grey eons later in the dog years of quaran-time, spiritually antipodean Canadians Kiwi Jr return to disseminate this year’s annual report to the shareholders, burying the incriminating numbers in the endless appendices of a long-form narrative record, a 3,000 word tract for stakeholders to pore over. Opener Tyler builds a Frankenstein of all your musician exes; don’t you remember ‘falling apart in the green room while they drank half the headliner’s rider?’ In Waiting In Line we’re still slumbering at the bar, agitation skyrocketing contemplating ‘what breed of beast protects the back door’. We hear ‘it isn’t past until it burns,’ in Maid Marian’s Toast but what explains the accompanying and extensive itinerary of incinerated Eastern Canadian eateries? Investigated off the clock by Kiwi’s amateur arson division, suspicion is cast on all: The Cook, The Regular : Ms. Scarlett, Colonel Mustard. Throughout these crises, histories, and head games Kiwi Jr. don’t expect you to be taking notes or checking dates – and on the back nine, when Omaha demands proof that ‘Woodstock ever happened in the first place,’ perhaps the freewheeling guitar groove underfoot tells us all we need to know about who’s been flipping through the festival files, air-drumming along to the complete 10-CD set. These stories – memories of Augusts past, unrepressed and transcribed fast – go down easier thanks to meaningful changes enacted in 2019’s KiwiCares Pledge: delivering on a promise to transition from Crunchy to Smooth by 2021, the caveman chug of Football Money has been steamed and pressed with the purifying air of a saloon piano – operated with bow-tie untied – and a spring green side-salad of tentatively up-tempo organ taps and freshly fluted harmonica.

A chronically detuned spin of the dial through swivel-chair distractions and WFH daydreams, an immersive ctrl-tab deluge cycling through popular listicle distractions like the un-entombing of Richard III, or the deja vu destruction of the Glasgow School of Art, Kiwi Jr sing this song to an indoor audience, crisscrossing canceled, every other prestige distraction source wrung dry, only songwriting remaining to deliver engrossing tales to the populace, just how I imagine it worked in the old days. Fixing loose ingredients into a sturdy whip, Kiwi Jr beam in live from the 9-5, striding into 2021 with a mastered brainwave that comes equally from the back room of the record store as the penalty box. And how do we, left holding this box of deliberate entanglements, sign off to those as yet uninitiated, undecided, uncertain, unseen, absent return coordinates – Best Wishes, Warm Regards, Good Luck? Cooler Returns, Cooler Returns, C o o l e r R e t u r n s !

This show is a co-promotion with Now Wave.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Dice.fm, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 15 September 2021
Where: The Stoller Hall, Hunts Bank, Manchester M3 1DA

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been moved to September 2021, and now takes place at Stoller Hall. Original tickets remain valid, and your ticket outlet will be touch to confirm these new details.

We’re delighted to be working with the Handsome Family again – this time, at Stoller Hall!

The Handsome Family have written some of the most haunting and beautiful songs in American music. During a 30-year career, Brett and Rennie Sparks have created songs that transform the mundane landscape of modern life into a place of mysterious portent.

Handsome Family songs take place in parking lots and big box stores, under overpasses and in airports. They sing about Custer’s last stand and automatic lawn sprinklers in the same song. Rennie’s lyrics often focus on the myriad creatures that live at the edges of the man-made world: the sparrows, rats, cockroaches and crows that share our cities.

Many great songwriters have covered their work, among them Jeff Tweedy, Jason Lytle and Andrew Bird as well Christy Moore. David Bowie wrote the words, ‘The Handsome Family’ in a notebook right before his death. Who knows what could have been?

Handsome Family shows are famously relaxed. Their songs can be dark, but there’s always laughter on stage. Rennie sings as well as plays Autoharp, banjo and uke bass. She often introduces songs with seemingly unrelated stories. Brett, with his stentorian voice, is a powerful presence at centre of the stage.

There are a lot of new faces at shows these days, lured by Far From Any Road, which became a global hit after it was used as the theme to season one of True Detective. Both Bruce Springsteen and Guns ’N Roses and have used Far From Any Road as walk-in music.

In 2020 Loose Music will release their first two records, Odessa (1995) and Milk & Scissors (1996), on vinyl LP. This will be the first time these records have been released in Europe. A tour of Europe in spring of 2021 is planned.

About the making of their first records, Brett says:

‘I tried to form a band when we first moved to Chicago in 1992. After rehearsing with a string of mullet-headed yacht-rockers, I gave up and decided to make a band with my wife Rennie playing bass and my friend Mike Werner on drums.

‘Rennie and Mike were new to their instruments and my guitar playing was very limited. But that was back in the post-punk days and you could do what you wanted, it didn’t matter if you were technically good, as long as you had songs and ideas.

‘We were influenced by early country and DIY indie rock, and played both kinds of songs in the same chaotic, distorted style. We played every no-pay gig on Chicago’s Division Street we could book.

‘At one of these shows we were all wearing sailor outfits and drinking heavily. My glasses fell off my face and when I stomped on a distortion pedal I broke them in half— that was the night Patrick Monaghan of Carrot Top Records asked if we wanted to put out a record on his new label. That same night Dave Trumfio offered to record a free, professional “demo tape” for us.

‘We were astounded that anyone was paying attention to our songs given our chaotic stage presence.’

For Handsome Family fans these records are a must. Odessa reveals the early style of the band and Milk & Scissors illustrates how their songwriting transformed after Rennie began writing lyrics. On their spring 2020 tour they plan to play selected gems from these new/old records.

Tour support comes from Daniel Knox. With a baritone as dynamic as it is indestructible, Daniel Knox narrates compositions with a perverse and sometimes comical wit, guiding the listener through sprawling worlds that exist just out of frame. His work has inspired a diverse cast of collaborators that lie inside and outside his realm of alternative Americana, such as Jarvis Cocker, Thor Harris (Swans, Freakwater) and The Handsome Family with recent performances that include the likes of Rufus Wainwright, Andrew Bird and Swans.

One year on from his critically acclaimed grand, holistic album Chasescene – an album which confirmed his posItion as both a ‘rare talent’ (Loud and Quiet) and as a ‘master storyteller’ (The Observer) – Daniel Knox has announced a new mini-album, I Had A Wonderful Time. The mini-album will be released on 13 December via Knox’s own label H.P Johnson Presents, alongside the reissue of his 2015 self-titled album – an incredible work of world-building and song-craft, under-appreciated at the time but now reissued on blue vinyl. Knox lives and works in Chicago.

The Stoller Hall is a new, high-spec concert hall situated within Chetham’s School of Music in the centre of Manchester. It opened in April 2017.

This is an all ages show. Under 14s must be accompanied by an adult.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Stollerhall.com, Dice.fm, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Saturday 18 September 2021
Where: The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham Street, Manchester M4 1LE

We’re delighted to be working with Gwenifer Raymond for the first time.

Gwenifer Raymond began playing guitar at the age of eight shortly after having been first exposed to punk and grunge. After years of playing around the Welsh valleys in various punk outfits she began listening more to pre-war blues musicians as well as Appalachian folk players, eventually leading into the guitar players of the American Primitive genre.

She released her sophomore LP Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain at the end of 2020 to rapturous response. Her debut You Never Were Much Of A Dancer emerged on Tompkins Square to the same response in 2018. She has found herself equally embraced by fans of old-west and equally, by left-field/experimental audiences.

Appearances throughout the UK and the EU as well as the US marks her out as one to watch.

‘Just about anybody with an interest in the new school of American primitive will tell you that Welsh guitarist Gwenifer Raymond is one of its most promising proponents’ – Stereogum

‘On an album richly influenced by her birth country, she tries to invent a new style: Welsh primitive, she calls it, infused with folk horror, conjuring up coal trains steaming along the foot of her garden and tall, eerie trees, black against the grey sky’ – the Guardian

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Dice.fm, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7pm on Sunday 19 September 2021
Where: The Deaf Institute, 135 Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HE

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been postponed until September 2021. Original tickets are valid and all other details remain the same.

We’re delighted to be working with Tokyo Police Club for the first time!

After more than five years away, Tokyo Police Club are making their eagerly anticipated return to the UK and EU.

‘Sorry,’ says keyboardist/guitarist Graham Wright of the lapse. ‘We kept meaning to “come back next year”, but the whole operation sort of fell victim to the big black hole of uncertainty that was swallowing everything for a minute there.’

He’s referring to the period of indecision that befell the group after they finished touring their twin 2016 EPs, Melon Collie and the Infinite Radness Parts 1 and 2. By that point it had been more than ten years since the band, then not even in their 20s, burst onto the scene. Their debut EP, A Lesson In Crime, was only 17 minutes long, but it launched them on a stratospheric ascent that saw them tour the world many times over and grace the stages of festivals from Coachella to Glastonbury.

The band’s star continued to burn bright over the ensuing years, but as the first decade of their career came to a close they found themselves unsure of their position in the ever shifting music industry, and indeed of whether or not they wanted to continue. All of them, that is, but singer and bassist Dave Monks, who implored his bandmates to not just walk away, telling them ‘Fuck no. We at least gotta go make Abbey Road first, and go out with a bang.’

The others listened, and after a series of fruitful writing sessions in a decommissioned rural church, they decamped for Los Angeles to work with producer Rob Schnapf. Schnapf, famous for his work with Beck, Elliott Smith and The Vines, had previously worked with the band on their 2010 fan favourite Champ – an LP which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. That ‘bang’ eventually coalesced into the band’s latest long player, the semi self-titled TPC. But a funny thing happened somewhere along the way: suddenly, they didn’t feel like ‘going out’ at all.

‘The feeling that we were so close to breaking up gave us the freedom to enjoy each other more, to enjoy making music together,’ says drummer Greg Alsop. ‘If we’re not doing it for the sake of being a successful band, but just trying to make an album we’re happy with, it takes the pressure off. The expectation was just that we’d do something that would make us happy.’ And, by all accounts, it did.

Rather than serving as a victory lap, the TPC tour saw a rejuvenated and re-energised Tokyo Police Club playing a setlist packed with old favourites and new hits to sold out venues across Canada and the United States. And now, at long last, they’re bringing the show back across the Atlantic.

‘I’m still annoyed that we took so long,’ says Wright. ‘But it does feel right that we’re coming back now. We toured there a lot when we were a new band, and in a way we kind of feel like a new band again.’

This show is a co-promotion with Tokyo Industries.

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

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Dice.fm, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 8pm on Wednesday 29 September 2021
Where: Night & Day Cafe, 26 Oldham St, Manchester, M1 1JN

PLEASE NOTE: This show has been postponed until September 2021. All other details are the same, and original tickets remain valid.

We’re delighted to be welcoming Jesse Malin back to Night & Day!

Jesse Malin — whom the Times says ‘writes vivid songs with killer tunes and sings them with scary conviction’ — and Lucinda Williams — the southern troubadour once named ‘America’s best songwriter’ by Time magazine — first met in the early 2000s at a jazz club in NYC’s West Village. In a joint 2017 Rolling Stone interview, the two discussed their ‘shared love of miscreants, misfits, the misunderstood and the mysteries of everyday lives binds them across the Mason-Dixon line’.

‘From the early frontier days of hardcore in New York to all the punk rock and singer/songwriter touring,’ says Malin, ‘it’s all been about survival and reinvention. I wanted to make an open-sounding record with the space to tell these stories. I like to write about characters and people I meet along the way. The dreamers, schemers, hustlers, romantics, lovers, leavers and believers.’ Many of the dreamers, schemers and so on from Jesse’s own life contribute to Sunset Kids, his new album of highly personal songs being released 30 August 2019 on Wicked Cool Records.

Sunset Kids first took shape at The Hollywood Bowl, when Jesse accepted Lucinda’s invitation to see her open for what turned out to be Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ final concert. The bittersweet experience inspired one of the new album’s highlights, Shining Down, a rainy day jangle about ‘keeping alive the spirits of the ones we’ve lost’. During that same visit, the idea came about of three-time Grammy-winning Lucinda producing Jesse’s next record.

‘Lucinda has a great eye for finding the beauty in broken things and a knack for always picking the right take. Once she started dancing in the control room, we knew we had it.’

In addition to this rare turn in the producer’s chair for Williams, she co-wrote and sang on the evocative country-flavoured Room 13, which Malin calls ‘the heart of the record in a lot of ways, about those meditative moments far away from home, where you’re forced to reflect on the things that really matter’.

The album also features Chemical Heart, an upbeat pop basher located at a mythical point on Queens Boulevard where Paul Simon and The Ramones intersect, namechecking Bernie Taupin and Jake LaMotta among others. Shane is a gentle ballad about one of his heroes, the lovably shambolic Shane MacGowan of The Pogues.

‘My first album, The Fine Art Of Self-Destruction, was about finding glory in the wreckage,’ says Malin of the album which was upon release Uncut’s Album of the Month. ‘Sunset Kids is about owning it. The failures, the victories, the moments. And moving up from there.’

After reflecting on his life while walking the streets of London, jamming riffs in an East Village basement and writing songs in Florida hotel rooms while visiting his ailing father, the ambitious 14-song album was recorded on both coasts between the two artists’ touring schedules.

It opens with the pre-apocalyptic confession Meet Me At The End Of The World Again, which includes backing vocals by Malin confidante and collaborator Joseph Arthur. Another key guest contribution comes courtesy of Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, who co-wrote and sang on Strangers & Thieves.

‘Billie Joe was in town and I showed him where we hung out when we were kids in the hardcore days,’ Malin recalls. ‘A couple days later, I got a text and he had finished the song. He went into the details of his experience in the Bay Area with that scene, and also my experiences, which were very parallel in New York.’

Those early days found a young Jesse ‘riding the subway trains from Queens to the record stores and nightclubs in dirty, pre-Disney New York City’ and never looking back. His band Heart Attack put out the first New York hardcore single God Is Dead when Malin was 14 years old. He later went on to acclaim as the frontman for the fast and loud D Generation, whose albums were produced by Ric Ocasek, Tony Visconti and David Bianco.

Bianco is one of the Sunset Kids referenced in the album’s title. The engineer, who won a Grammy for his pristine sonics on Tom Petty’s Wildflowers and produced the first major-label release of Jesse’s career, passed away suddenly after overseeing the initial sessions for Sunset Kids in his L.A. studio.

‘Playing music is something I need to do. Singing under those hot lights every night is a great exorcism. We get to put together this pirate ship of characters and go around the world making trouble and singing our guts out.’

As the line in crucial cut When You’re Young says, ‘Don’t waste your life on things that don’t get better’. Malin concludes: ‘It’s about finding ways to survive and navigate through all this stuff. Being compassionate and loving in a world that will break your heart. But you’re still here. You wake up again and put one foot in front of the other and live every day like it could be your last.’

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 29 September 2021
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re excited to be working with Adrian Crowley!

One stormy night in Ireland, Adrian Crowley’s brother brought home a wounded crow. After taking care of it for a time, the crow flew away on its own, leaving an impression behind: Crowley wrote a story, which would later become the aptly titled Crow Song on this, his brand new record & ninth studio album The Watchful Eye of the Stars. He sings, ‘And I was joyous for you, but shattered none-the-less.’

Suffused with a hazy and surreal quality, Crowley describes Watchful Eye’s poignant narratives as those which insisted themselves upon him. After the fact, it seemed these songs came to him more or less fully formed. ‘It’s a beautiful and mysterious thing,’ he says. Perhaps it is a tendency to hold onto memories (‘It’s taken me so long to write to you / Well I just couldn’t find a pen,’ he laments in Bread and Wine), that allows him to unleash them lyrically in completion. For Crowley, the creative process is an organic event rather than a practice he feels compelled to regulate or control. He approaches lyrics much like he does short story writing. ‘The songs straddle the conscious and subconscious world and some are even psychedelic in my mind, but to me they are all at once true stories and born of another place,’ he shares.

In making the album, Crowley moved between studio and at home recording, while John Parish (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey) produced. The pair worked from tracks made initially by Crowley on a charity shop three-quarter-size nylon string guitar or Mellotron: ‘In this way, John wanted to keep some of the magic of that first take’, says Crowley. Contradictions and complexities are left intact, initial recordings were limited to one or two takes, and the songs feel more like a dream recounted upon waking.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are available from Dice.fm, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

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