Gilmore & Roberts: The Duo On Tour

Gilmore & Roberts: The Duo On Tour

Glasswerk is proud to present 2013 BBC Duo Nominees Gilmore & Roberts. Winning multiple awards the duo have made an established name in the folk community sporting original content and breathtaking songwriting. You can catch the incredible duo live on the following dates:

[Click dates to buy tickets]

21st October – Surya, London
29th October – Castle Hotel, Manchester

2013 BBC Radio Folk Awards ‘Best Duo‘ – Nomination

2012 UK Songwriting Contest, Acoustic/Folk category – WINNER (‘Doctor James’)

2012 Fatea Awards ‘Song of The Year‘ – WINNER (‘Doctor James’)

2012 fRoots Critics Poll, Album of the Year – Runner Up

People come here every day to see the show,” says Marom, a retired Israel Defense Forces colonel who now works in the tourism industry and brings groups to this point to gaze down on Syria’s bloodletting. “For people visiting the area, it’s interesting. They can go home and tell their friends, ‘I was on the border and I saw a battle.’”
Debra Kamin, The Atlantic, July 2014.

Conflict Tourism is the fourth album from award-winning duo Gilmore & Roberts. Following a year of touring in mainland Europe, Canada, and their native Britain, Katriona Gilmore and Jamie Roberts noticed a common thread running through their latest crop of original songs. Conflict, whether an internal struggle between positive and negative, or a healthy body and a disease, is an everyday phenomenon captured perfectly by these 11 tracks.

Previously nominated twice at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, Gilmore & Roberts cover a broader and more contemporary genre-spectrum than might be expected from a duo wielding guitar, fiddle and mandolin. Produced by Mark Tucker and featuring Matt Downer (Jamie Smith’s Mabon), Phil Henry (Phillip Henry & Hannah Martin) and James ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson (Bonnie Raitt), Conflict Tourism packs a considered punch from start to finish. From the industrial weight of ‘Cecilia’ and the insistent energy of ‘Peggy Airey’ to the hauntingly hypnotic ‘Jack O Lantern’, Gilmore & Roberts’ songwriting inflicts multiple earworms after a single listen.

Conflict is universal – everyone, everywhere, experiences it every day, in its smallest forms” says Katriona. “We liked the idea of being tour guides through a minefield of different decisions and drama.
“And good tour guides are passionate about what they’re showing you” adds Jamie. “They’re not detached from the subject. It’s personal – it’s people and stories. That’s the starting point for every song.

Having already made a name for themselves on the UK acoustic circuit, Gilmore & Roberts are known as much for their exceptionally dynamic live show as they are for their prize-winning songs. With international tours and a formidable new album newly wedged under their belts, the duo are racing from strength to strength. Pay no attention to tour guides who read from the script – these two speak from the heart.

Nick Harper To Tour Uk

Nick Harper To Tour Uk

Glasswerk presents folk legend Nick Harper on his autumn tour, stopping off in Manchester, Liverpool and London.

Friday 24th October
MANCHESTER Ruby Lounge – tickets

Saturday 25th October
LIVERPOOL Leaf – tickets

Sunday 9th November
LONDON Borderline – tickets

Nick was born in London and raised in Wiltshire. Having played the guitar from the age of 10 and surrounded by the likes of Keith Moon, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and Dave Gilmour as he grew up, it was no surprise when Nick made his recording debut on his father, Roy Harper’s, Whatever Happened to Jugula? in 1985.

Nick’s talent and energy entranced Roy’s fans and it was inevitable that he would begin touring and recording in his own right. The 1994 EP Light at the End of the Kennel was swiftly followed by his powerful 1995 debut long player Seed prompting The Independent to describe him as “hugely talented”.

After 6 studio albums, a double live CD and 2 EPs, Nick’s work is still as fresh and vital as that of his first solo release in 1994. The recently released sixth studio album, Miracles For Beginners, is a return to a more stripped-down acoustic based style, from the folk tale of the meeting of King Henry 8th and Francis 1st in 1520 in The Field Of The Cloth Of Gold. to a beautiful latin tinged paean to the the Bolivian President Evo Morales in Evo. But, as with his highly personal 2004 “family album” Blood Songs, he still has time to sing about the most important things in his world – family, friends, love, life.

Nick hit the iTunes no. 1 spot with his single Blue Sky Thinking taken from the album Miracles For Beginners. All proceeds from the single were donated to the Love Hope Strength Foundation. Nick has just returned from Nepal after setting a new world record for the highest gig on earth at Kala Pattar above Mt. Everest Base Camp on October 21st, whilst helping raise over £200,000 for the fight against cancer, before going on to play as part of the Love Hope Strength all-star band to approximately 20,000 people in Kathmandu.

A busy 2013 saw Nick on a major UK solo tour in support of his 8th studio album Riven. An epic recording with legendary producer Tchad Blake at the helm. Nick has also found time to play on new recordings with Lana Del Rey, Newton Faulkner and Steven Wilson this year, via his 6th appearance at Glastonbury Festival whilst also running his own charity concert in deepest Wiltshire in August – Devil’s Den Rocks!

www.harperspace.com

Summer Sessions In Liverpool

Summer Sessions In Liverpool

Set in an urban tranquil paradise, a wild summer garden encased in an ethereal memorial of the city of Liverpool, Glasswerk is proud to present Summer Sessions featuring live music, art and craft stalls, buskers, BBQ and other random entertainment. It’s an urban festival in a field.

Featuring acts such as Jon Gomm, Nick Harper and Keston Cobbers Club, Summer Sessions is a chance to relax and enjoy the weather while listening to some great music in interesting surroundings.

Ticket prices for the festival:
Saturday 16th August @ Bombed Out Church, Liverpool – £15.00 adv

TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE

Saturday 16th August
Headliner – Jon Gomm
www.jongomm.com
A folk affair of international renown with one of the world’s greatest guitarists, Jon Gomm, headlining this special event.
“Hands down the most amazing guitarist I have ever seen”–Tommy Lee (Motley Crue)
“One of the world’s most successful, gifted and inspirational guitar players” – Acoustic Magazine

Nick Harper www.harperspace.com
6 studio albums and Nick Harper is still enthralling audiences with his introspective, often political and caustic wit from stages near you –
“Dylan for the iPod generation, Betjemen with a guitar” – Guitarist (UK)
“His soaring vocal range and propensity for epic song place him somewhere between Rufus Wainright and Jeff Buckley” – Mojo

Keston Cobblers Club www.kestoncobblersclub.com
Keston Cobblers Club are a newer arrival on the UK scene with an uplifiting mix of sea shanties and stories of dancing cobblers –
“Keston Cobblers Club, what a great discovery” – Bob Harris Radio 2
“This is a band set for huge things” – The FourOhFive

More acts and details to be confirmed for both days.

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown - On Tour

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown – On Tour

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown

After 40 years and more performing, adventuring and recording, the indomitable force that is Arthur Brown has, in a cross generational collaboration with co-producers/musicians Sam Walker and Jim Mortimore, come up with a genre spanning, time travelling, world bending, heavy grooving and massively eclectic collection of songs.

You can see Arthur Brown and his very crazy show this autumn:

16 Oct Preston, Frog And Bucket
18 Oct Leamington Spa, Assembly Rooms
24 Oct Winchester, The Railway
25 Oct Tunbridge Wells, The Forum
31 Oct Guildford, Boileroom

1 Nov Dorchester, Corn exchange
6 Nov Bristol, Exchange
7 Nov Liverpool, O2 Academy2
8 Nov Hull, Hessle Town Hall
15 Nov Derby, Flowerpot
21 Nov Newbury, Arlington Arts Centre
28 Nov Fletching, Trading Boundaries

This is music made in the now with Arthur’s vital, soulful and acrobatic voice at the heart.
The album charts some of the adventures of Zim Zam Zim as he flits between worlds, universes, lives and realities.

Arthur and The Crazy World live band have been playing stages across mainland Europe in the past couple of years perfoming old songs and new ones with an energy that has been leaving those expecting a retro themed night out shocked, surprised or put out. When a 72 year old dynamo with a voice and stage presence that leaves a trail of dust in its wake takes the stage bedecked in full warpaint, backed by a band of players who can match his energy and power, the result is electric.

Arthur’s long career has been and continues to be one of true innovation and exploration. From pioneering theatrics in music with the worldwide hit ‘Fire’ in the late 60’s. Heavy involvement in 60’s London at UFO club. A close friendship with Jimi Hendrix. A role in The Who’s “Tommy”. An early pioneer of electronica. The first band to use a drum machine on stage (Kingdom Come). World travel. Spiritual travel and so much music played to so many people.

Hoodie Ledbetter at E.V.A.C

Hoodie Ledbetter at E.V.A.C

11 July @ E.V.A.C (East Village Arts Club)
Hoodie Ledbetter
Osaka Punch
Diamond Days
Call off The Search

Glasswerk is proud to present electronic duo hailing from Liverpool;Hoodie Ledbetter to accompany them on a special one off show in E.V.A.C (previously Barfly!) With diverse musical affiliations such as blues, drum and bass and electronic, Hoodie Ledbetter are surely set out to dominate the electronic world!

Hoodie Ledbetter

In the last eighteen months Liverpool guitar-driven electronic duo Hoodie Ledbetter have been making their name as a unique live experience. They set the recent Bestival show in Liverpool alight with searing lead guitar, drum and bass driven blues riffs and highly original vocal melodies allied with stinging raps. With synchs on X Box games and a collaboration with Basement Jaxx in the bag Hoodie Ledbetter are creating something truly special.

Frontman Kirk Ward is the guitar slinging bastard son of an orgy of wild western anti-heroes and rock gods. Think of Lee Van Cleef mating with Lemmy while Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck and Steve Vai nervously snigger and watch from the wings. All dreading the day this intimidating, instrumental interloper usurps them from their respective thrones.

A melting-pot of raucous, menacing, toe curling, rocking guitar showmanship delivered with a modern drum and bass/electronic speed-blues backdrop. The history, angst and expression of music is wound as tightly within this man’s DNA as it is on the strings of his guitar. The swagger and countenance of the delivery conceals no arrogance or false pretence. It is as honest as it is absorbing and inspiring. Take away his guitar and you’ll all still follow him under fire through any boscage.

“Our sound was born out of playing parties, covers of The Blockheads and Rage Against the Machine to the Kinks while jamming on hip-hop, drum & bass and r&b grooves for hours to keep the girls dancing so it was always diverse and kinetic’ says Kirk. ‘We stuck as many original tunes in as we could get away with and found that people loved it as long as the grooves were right…what’s clear is that shredding electric guitar is definitely not a thing of the past when it comes to blowing people’s minds…’
Described variously as “The Mohammad Ali of Guitar” (by none other than Prince’s guitarist Miko Weaver) and ‘a true guitar hero’ by local and national music press who described them thus…’

’Hoodie Ledbetter are a visceral and dynamic power duo in the most startling and entertaining manner possible…I needed oxygen after seeing them live…not to be missed’’
Hoodie are currently putting the finishing touches to their debut album in a remote studio on the north west coast of Scotland. An EP is due for a release in the very near future.

Hoodie Ledbetter Facebook

Osaka Punch

If you’re familiar with the live music scene in Brisbane, you probably fall into one of two categories: you’re a fan of Osaka Punch! (formerly The Kidney Thieves), or you’ve heard the name, and are yet to witness the spectacle of their live show firsthand.
On the eve of their first official release, the growing hype surrounding this local act is based solely on a virtuosic high-energy live performance showcasing the group’s ability to straddle any genre from authentic old-school funk to extreme modern metal. This flexibility has caused critics to draw comparisons to Frank Zappa and Mr Bungle, and has already earned them support slots with high-profile international acts and the creme-de-la-creme of the popular Australian scene.

Osaka Punch Facebook

Ben Montague In Manchester

Ben Montague In Manchester

Turn on the Radio and you will never be far away from hearing Ben Montague. He is undoubtedly one of the most talented singer song writer’s in the UK at present and since he burst onto the scene in late 2010 with his debut single “Can’t Hold Me Down” he has rarely left the airwaves and he will be seen supporting the ex Westlife global superstar Shane Filan on his much awaited ‘You and Me Tour’ which kicks off in Liverpool on 20th February 2014.

He is playing in Manchester in September:
5th September @ Gorilla, Manchester

Playlisted for 5 weeks “Can‘t Hold Me Down” was an incredible achievement for a first release; and his follow-up second single “Haunted” went even further, beating off the label backed competition to make the coveted BBC Radio 2 Record of The Week slot; and all of this without commercial backing.

His first full length album “Overcome” received high praise from radio stations up and down the Country and “Broken” his third single from the album, which similarly topped the Radio 2 -A List for 6 weeks, went further than these shores by going on to be the winners single in the Singapore version of the global “Idol” phenomenon.

On the back of this commercial success Ben embarked on a series of Headline and Support tours including The Lighthouse Family, Stereophonics, The Wanted and Lawson.

“Tales Of Flying And Falling” Ben’s second studio album was released in early 2013 and its achievements started where Overcome had left off and made the much sough-after BBC Radio 2 “Album of The Week”, which Ben followed up with as a guest on the hugely popular Tracks of My Years with Ken Bruce.

Following the release of “Tales Of Flying And Falling” Ben hit the road for a headline tour, festival appearances including Isle of Wight and Cornbury and added further to his resume by supporting the super talented Amy Mcdonald on her sell out UK tour.

A self-proclaimed workaholic who has a deep love of music, Ben has been busy penning his next release, and since teaming up with the incredible Pledge Music and his ever growing fan base (reaching his pledge target with in a staggering 30 days), Ben is now ready to release his 3rd selection of new material in a brand new EP called -The Truth EP.

Teaming up with hit song producer Dan Gautreau (Alicia Keys, Ben Howard, Loveable Rouges) Ben and Dan have created an incredible selection of new material and his next single release ‘The Truth’–will be out March 2014.

Most recently Ben was announced as the principal support for the much awaited Shane Filan ‘You and Me Tour’ which kicks off in Liverpool on 20th Feb 2014.

Harry Manx - UK Dates In London and Manchester

Harry Manx – UK Dates In London and Manchester

“An Evening With Harry Manx” returns to the UK with another set of un-miss able shows in London & Manchester:
27th October @ Castle Hotel, Manchester
30th October @ Borderline, London

“Mysticssippi” blues man Harry Manx has been called an “essential link” between the music of East and West, creating musical short stories that combine the tradition of the blues with the depth of classical Indian ragas. He has created a unique sound that is hard to forget and deliciously addictive to listen to.

Harry forged this distinctive style by studying at the feet of the masters, first as a sound man in his formative years in the blues clubs of Toronto doing sound for the likes of Junior Wells, Buddy Guy and Willie Dixon, then under a rigorous five-year tutelage with Vishwa Mohan Bhatt in India. Bhatt, whose guru was the late, great Ravi Shankar, is the inventor of the 20-stringed mohan veena, which has become Harry’s signature instrument. Bhatt is best known for his collaboration on the Grammy Award-winning album “A Meeting By The River” with Ry Cooder.

Manx’s musical journey has seen him busking in the streets of Europe, playing in Japanese shopping malls, and even a time when he regularly bumped into none other than John Lennon for three months, on a daily basis as Manx took a job in a New York City studio where Lennon was recording his album “Mind Games”.

After playing the prestigious Montreal Jazz festivals numerous of times solo, the festival promoter asked Harry to put a band together for the 2012 show. That’s how Harry’s World Affairs band developed, a culturally diverse collective made up of Indian vocalist Kiran Ahlawalia, African musician Yeshe on various instruments and Hammond organ player Clayton Doley from Australia.

It was with his new band line-up that Harry recorded his new studio album “Om Suite Ohm”, which features mostly original songs with the members of World Affairs. The album was produced by distinguished musician/ producer/ engineer Hans Christian (Daniel Lanois, Robbie Robertson) and recorded between Wisconsin and Australia.

Harry has already been nominated by the Canadian Music Awards as Songwriter Of The Year for his song “Carry My Tears”, featured on “Om Suite Ohm”. The album also contains an unusual cover of jazz giant John Coltrane’s song “ A Love Supreme”. This album is a step away from past Manx albums, and contains a more electric Bollywood feel to it.

If you blend Indian folk melodies with slide guitar, add a sprinkle of gospel and some compelling grooves , you get a sound that goes down easy and leaves you hungry for more. The sort of sound that only Harry Manx can make.

Simian Ghost Announce UK Dates in June

Simian Ghost Announce UK Dates in June

Simian Ghost is an alternative pop act from Sandviken/Gävle, Sweden. It was initiated as a recording project by musician and visual artist Sebastian Arnström. His debut album, Infinite Traffic Everywhere, was received with blog praise and excellent reviews, topping the Critics Chart in Sweden and being voted Record of the Year by the readers of Dagensskiva.se.

Simian Ghost originally performed live as a trio, consisting of Sebastian on vocals and electronics, his brother Erik Klinga on drums and Mathias Zachrisson on guitar, (both members of Light Vibes). More recently, they have added two new live members Maja Agnevik on additional vocals and Wilhelm Magnusson on bass. They have already shared stages with the likes of Mount Kimbie, SBTRKT, Niki & The Dove and Tony Buck.

“Simian Ghost is by far one of Sweden’s most interesting pop acts to come out this year. We’re currently covering our bodies in coconut butter and hoping that they’ll shine some more sunlight into our dark lives…” ‐ Noisey / Vice

“Replete with honeyed harmonies and swooned by the affectionate caress of sun bathed sea breezes…” ‐ God Is in the TV

June UK dates:

Monday 9th June
The Black Heart, London

Tuesday 10th June
Gullivers, Manchester

Wednesday 11th June
Brudenell Social Club

All tickets available from www.ticketwerk.co.uk

Las Kellies Return To London To Play Oslo

Las Kellies Return To London To Play Oslo, Hackney

Las Kellies return to London on 15th May to play Hackney’s hippest new haunt Oslo.

Las Kellies started in 2005 when three girls met at a gig in Buenos Aires, decided to have a band together and borrowed their friend’s amps and instruments. Their third album, ‘Kellies’ – released by Fire Records and mixed by Dennis Bovell (see The Slits, Madness, Fela Kuti), sees Las Kellies mixing catchy garage sounds with dub and post-punk that has earned 8/10 in NME and 4/5 in BUZZ.

Singing in Spanish, English, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Catalan and French, Las Kellies spent several years ensuring their prominence on the Argentinian music scene. With their first record, ‘Shaking Dog!’ (2007), they created an irresistible blend of raw, spicy rock that owes as much to old rock and roll as it does the Raincoats, which turned out to be a veritable birthday party of a record.

In 2009 their second independent record, ‘Kalimera’, was released. That same year Las Kellies took the new, tighter songs on their first international tour, rocking the Old World, unleashing their infectious energy onto Europe with their garage rhythms, teasing impertinence and all-out fun live shows that incorporate the dress sense of Devo and the bounciness of ESG.

In September 2014 Fire Records released Las Kellies fourth studio album, Total exposure, with sensational feats. of Dennis Bovell and Ian Svenonius. In this sophisticated and classy record, dub and hip hop influence turned the raw and wild unique post-punk of Las Kellies into a more elegant, melodic and shiny sound.

Recorded in Estudios ION, a legendary studio of Buenos Aires, Total exposure was produced by Ivi Lee, dub master of Nairobi Dub (reggae backing band of Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor in South América). All this influences make Las Kellies new record their most substantial album.

Tickets £7 from here

Las Kellies Bandcamp

Oslo, 1a Amhurst Road, London E8 1LL

Charlee Drew Playing Two Dates Next Month

Charlee Drew Playing Two Dates Next Month

Glasswerk presents uprising star Charlee Drew, after touring with super-group 5ive on their ‘greatest hits’ tour Charlee is set to embark on a UK tour of his own,. Clocking up over 1.4 million views on Youtube with a fan base increasingly daily Charlee Drew is surely someone to keep your eye out for.

Charlee is playing two dates next month:
Tuesday 4th March @ Cluny 2, Newcastle
Wednesday 5th March @ Sound Control, Manchester

Pop singer/songwriter Charlee Drew originally from Leicester, United Kingdom, has continued to build an impressive fanbase and profile since first appearing on people’s radar via featuring, writing and producing on U.K rapper Skepta’s top 20 U.K album “Doin it again”, Charlee also musically directed and performed with Skepta on his two national academy tours, BBC Radio 1 Live lounge and Glastonbury amongst others. This brought him to the attention of international music mogul Melvin Brown and his U.K based management company So Star Entertainment, Melvin, who is responsible for breaking and managing acts including Akon and founding the record label Konvict Muzik with him in 2005 describes Charlee as a mainstream talent capable of breaking worldwide.

The last quarter of 2012 saw Charlee releasing his debut E.P “You Did Me A Favour” which received public praise, peaking inside the top 20 itunes singer/songwriter charts as well as BBC introducing. 4Music, Digital Spy & MTV all tipping Charlee for big things in 2013, his online profile has also continued to grow with immense effect, racking up an impressive 1.4 million youtube views.

2013 has not only seen Charlee sell out his first headline show and announce the release of his second E.P “Past The Distraction” featuring the lead single “Somebody Else” but also support 5ive on their sold out ‘Greatest Hits’ Tour.

Jon Gomm Announces UK Dates

Jon Gomm Announces UK Dates

Independent musician and virtuoso guitarist Jon Gomm released his hugely acclaimed album “Secrets Nobody Keeps” in November last year, he has announced he is performing the album in full in two exclusive dates:

16th May – 100 Club, London
17th May – Holy Trinity, Leeds

Not content with just rounding off a near sold out 30 date UK headline tour as well as appearances in China, South Africa and Europe, Jon will soon be announcing a full South American tour for April 2014 followed by a full tour of Ireland in May 2014.

The album has already been critically lauded with Total Guitar hailing it as “perhaps the best percussive guitar album we’ve ever heard” and awarding it a 5/5 review.

Produced by Whiskas, whose expertise at painting sonic landscapes in the studio and his background (as founder of the legendary DIY label Dance To The Radio and the band Forward Russia), made him the perfect fit musically and business-ethic-wise for the project, Secrets Nobody Keeps was 100% crowd funded in the short space of 4 weeks in a whirlwind PledgeMusic campaign that drew on the power of Jon’s millions of fans and viewers worldwide.

The album title itself, ‘Secrets Nobody Keeps’ is a nod to Jon’s gratitude for the power of social networks. Ever since the day a simple one word Tweet from Stephen Frylinking to Jon’s Passionflower video (nearly 5 million views and counting) started the snowball rolling on his career, he’s been an advocate of, in his own words, “having that private little moment of discovery on Youtube, then sharing the music everywhere.”

Facebook Page

Blackbird Blackbird in London

Blackbird Blackbird in London

BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD, originally the bedroom pop project of Mikey Maramag, is a synthpop band from San Francisco, CA

They are playing one date in the UK on their current tour:
21st February – Oslo, London

Blackbird Blackbird play the only UK date of their tour at London’s hottest new property, Oslo Hackney.

Blackbird Blackbird is the moniker of San Francisco-based wünderkind Mikey Maramag. His unique style of dreamy folktronica recalls influences from all ends of the musical spectrum; deeply textured, hypnotic songs pay homage to psychedelic pop the likes of Caribou and Washed Out, while the warmth of analogue instrumentation spliced with digital artifacts hints at contemporaries James Blake, Four Tet and Mount Kimbie.

www.facebook.com/BlackbirdBlackbirdSF
http://blackbirdblackbird.bandcamp.com/

James Walsh - Tour

James Walsh – Tour

James Walsh, former lead singer of Starsailor, is on tour this spring with a new album. Turning Point tour dates are:

Sunday 6th April – Birmingham Hare & Hounds
Tuesday 8th April – Leeds Brudenell Social Club
Thursday 10th April – Manchester Deaf Institute

Get your tickets now!

Former Starsailor frontman announces debut solo album and April tour = On 7th April Solo Records will release TURNING POINT, the debut solo album by James Walsh.

TURNING POINT is a collection of 11 incredible compositions, which showcase James’s maturity as an exceptional songwriter and unique vocalist. The solo venture has afforded him the freedom to explore new influences, creating his most personal and diverse album to date. It was recorded in late 2013, at the legendary Fisher Lane Studios and produced by Harry Rutherford.

Since leaving multi-million selling band Starsailor, James has continuously challenged himself as a singer and songwriter, working with a diverse range of musicians and on a variety of projects, including: the 2011 experimental soundtrack ‘Lullaby’, which he made in collaboration with Sacha Skarbek (Adele) based on author Chuck Palahniuk’s screenplay; recording at the North Pole with Norway’s Tromso Chamber Orchestra, and writing songs for the soundtrack of the film Powder (based on the Kevin Sampson book).

TURNING POINT tracklisting:
1. Turning Point
2. Better Part Of Me
3. Empire
4. That Man
5. Firing Line
6. Broken You
7. We Could Try
8. Fading Grace
9. If I Had The Words
10. Isabel
11. Better Luck Next Time

Mark Morriss (ex Bluetones) Announces UK Tour

Mark Morriss (ex Bluetones) Announces UK Tour

Extra data added due to popular demand!

23rd Feb – Water Rats London

Glasswerk is pleased to announce that Mark Morriss (of Bluetones fame) is back on the road in spring 2014, promoting his new album ‘A Flash of Darkness’, complete with full band.

Dates are:

22nd Feb – Water Rats London – SOLD OUT
8th Mar – Ulcheldre Centre, Holyhead
9th Mar – Ruby Lounge Manchester

“You are the scream of a jet/ You are a whispered amen/It’s not a question of if anymore/It’s a question of when…”
‘It’s Hard To Be Good All the Time”

Can it really be twenty years since Mark Morriss first shimmied into our lives as singer with The Bluetones?

Apparently so. But thirteen hit singles, three Top Ten albums and a collaboration with a national treasure later -more of which shortly- – his ability to sieve poetry from the colander of every day life remains unique.

“I always try to add little things that most songs wouldn’t use,” he says of the lyrics on his remarkable first solo album ‘proper’, A Flash Of Darkness.

“If I can squeeze a mention of Bergerac into a song (as he does in surefire smash ‘Consuela’) then I’m happy.”

While it might not take Jersey’s finest to track down a copy, it’s fair to say that the release of Mark’s folk-infused solo debut, Memory Muscle, in 2008 was low key, despite string arrangements from the legendary composer David Arnold.

However, it wasn’t until The Bluetones split up in October 2011 that he thought seriously about his next move.

“To be honest I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says with typical candour.
“So I threw a lot of irons into the fire.”

While one of these resulted in him writing the music for David Walliams’ audio books (“great fun”), he was still writing songs. Only this time, with a view to other people singing them.

“It really freed me up. But the songs I came up with were so personal I realized they might be difficult for anyone else to sing them.”

Rather than let the songs, as he puts it, ‘end up on the shelf’, Mark headed to ‘a shed in Surrey’ with long term Bluetones collaborator Gordon Mills. As the sessions progressed, so the pent-up frustrations of the past few years poured out.

“Personally I went through quite a difficult time, and is often the way, that was translated into the songs.”

If there’s a confessional, cathartic edge to A Flash Of Darkness, it also comes with tunes of tungsten-strength. ‘Guilty Again’ is a conscious nod to ‘70’s soft-rock icon Andrew Gold, while ‘This Is The Lie’ splices a jaunty sea shanty against some brutal self-analysis.

Throw in a pair choice covers – a dreamy take on The Shins’ Pink Bullets’, an acoustic overhaul for Kavinsky’s electro noir ‘Nightcall’, best known from the ‘Drive’ soundtrack- and you’ve got an album which proves that a dark night of the soul often brings artistic illumination.

“The album title refers to that moment when you’ve just turned off the light and everything remains semi-lit for a split second,” says Mark, referring back to his lowest point.
“It’s a revelation of a bad thing, rather than a good thing.

Whisper it, but Mark Morriss’ light bulb moment might just have resulted in his best album yet.

Mark Morriss (ex Bluetones) Announces UK Tour

Mark Morriss (ex Bluetones) Announces UK Tour

Mark Morriss, ex lead singer of indie Britpop legends The Bluetones, is on a UK tour in spring 2014 complete with a full band.

22nd Feb – London Water Rats
8th Mar – Holyhead Ucheldre Centre
9th Mar – Manchester Ruby Lounge

You are the scream of a jet/ You are a whispered amen/It’s not a question of if anymore/It’s a question of when…

It’s Hard To Be Good All the Time

Can it really be twenty years since Mark Morriss first shimmied into our lives as singer with The Bluetones?

Apparently so. But thirteen hit singles, three Top Ten albums and a collaboration with a national treasure later -more of which shortly- his ability to sieve poetry from the colander of every day life remains unique.

“I always try to add little things that most songs wouldn’t use,” he says of the lyrics on his remarkable first solo album ‘proper’, A Flash Of Darkness.

“If I can squeeze a mention of Bergerac into a song (as he does in surefire smash ‘Consuela’) then I’m happy.”

While it might not take Jersey’s finest to track down a copy, it’s fair to say that the release of Mark’s folk-infused solo debut, Memory Muscle, in 2008 was low key, despite string arrangements from the legendary composer David Arnold.

However, it wasn’t until The Bluetones split up in October 2011 that he thought seriously about his next move.

“To be honest I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says with typical candour.
“So I threw a lot of irons into the fire.”

While one of these resulted in him writing the music for David Walliams’ audio books (“great fun”), he was still writing songs. Only this time, with a view to other people singing them.

“It really freed me up. But the songs I came up with were so personal I realized they might be difficult for anyone else to sing them.”

Rather than let the songs, as he puts it, ‘end up on the shelf’, Mark headed to ‘a shed in Surrey’ with long term Bluetones collaborator Gordon Mills. As the sessions progressed, so the pent-up frustrations of the past few years poured out.

“Personally I went through quite a difficult time, and is often the way, that was translated into the songs.”

If there’s a confessional, cathartic edge to A Flash Of Darkness, it also comes with tunes of tungsten-strength. ‘Guilty Again’ is a conscious nod to ‘70’s soft-rock icon Andrew Gold, while ‘This Is The Lie’ splices a jaunty sea shanty against some brutal self-analysis.

Throw in a pair choice covers – a dreamy take on The Shins’ Pink Bullets’, an acoustic overhaul for Kavinsky’s electro noir ‘Nightcall’, best known from the ‘Drive’ soundtrack- and you’ve got an album which proves that a dark night of the soul often brings artistic illumination.

“The album title refers to that moment when you’ve just turned off the light and everything remains semi-lit for a split second,” says Mark, referring back to his lowest point.
“It’s a revelation of a bad thing, rather than a good thing.

Whisper it, but Mark Morriss’ light bulb moment might just have resulted in his best album yet.

Eleanor McEvoy announces shows!

Eleanor McEvoy announces shows!

Glasswerk is proud to present…

Eleanor McEvoy

Gullivers, Manchester – 4th February, 2014
Surya, London – 13th February, 2014

McEvoy’s life as a musician began at the age of four when she began playing piano. At the age of eight she took up violin. Upon finishing school she attended Trinity College, Dublin where she studied music by day and worked in pit orchestras and music clubs by night.
McEvoy graduated from Trinity with an Honors Degree in music, and spent four months busking in New York City. In 1988 she was accepted into the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra where she spent four years before leaving to concentrate on songwriting.
She built up a following in clubs in Dublin with her three piece band, Jim Tate on bass, Noel Eccles on drums, and latterly Bill Shanley on guitar.
During a solo date in July 1992, she performed a little-known, self-penned song, “Only a Woman’s Heart”. Mary Black, of whose band McEvoy was a member, was in the audience and invited her to add the track to an album of Irish female artists. The album was subsequently titled A Woman’s Heart and the track was released as the lead single.
A few days before A Woman’s Heart was released, Tom Zutaut A & R from Geffen Records, who had previously signed Guns & Roses, Motley Crew, and Edie Brickell, offered McEvoy a worldwide recording deal after watching her perform at The Baggot Inn in Dublin.
The album went on to sell over three-quarters of a million copies in Ireland alone and was (and remains) the biggest selling Irish album of all time.

Glen Matlock & The Philistines To Play London

Glen Matlock & The Philistines To Play London

Glasswerk is proud to present…

Glen Matlock & The Philistines
Plus guests

Surya, London – 4th December

“Glen’s latest album, Born Running, recorded with his band The Philistines, offers up twelve more punchy and direct examples of his innate ability to craft timeless, melodic rock songs. It has an added poignancy insofar as it features the last recordings of guitarist Steve New, one of Glen’s oldest friends and fellow founder-member of The Rich Kids, who died in 2010. Also in the band’s line up is drummer Javier Weyler, the current drumming incumbent with The Stereophonics, as well as guitarist James Stevenson, who, like Glen is a musical survivor from the original School of ’76 British Punk Rock. The album is produced by Jim Lowe, who has produced numerous hugely successful albums for The Stereophonics.
Born Running is the latest salvo from a musician and songwriter who is never satisfied with resting on his considerable musical achievements; there is much more to come from this hugely gifted individual.”

Big Boy Bloater announces tour!

Big Boy Bloater announces tour!

Glasswerk is proud to present…

Big Boy Bloater
Plus guests

Castle Hotel, Manchester – 29th November
Surya, London – 5th December

British R&B kingpin Big Boy Bloater brings you an intimate and unique ‘one-man show’ featuringsongs old and new in his unique and inimitably gruff and entertaining rootsy style.He has been lauded as ‘one of the great blues men of our time’ by Jools Holland, described as ‘thenext big thing in blues’ by Classic Rock Blues magazine, ‘a phenomenal guitarist’ by Mark Lamarr andfunk and soul legend Craig Charles says ‘I love this guy, he has a voice that sounds like it’s beensoaked in turpentine for the last decade!’. With credentials like that you know it will be an eveningof great musicality and fun and a chance to get up close and personal with the Big Boy!

Keston Cobblers Club announce Tour!

Keston Cobblers Club announce Tour!

Glasswerk is proud to present…

Keston Cobblers Club
Plus Guests

Sun, 09 Feb – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Mon, 10 Feb – The Deaf Institute, Manchester
Tue, 11 Feb – Hare & Hounds, Birmingham

“Every song is an absolute killer!” Dermot O’Leary, BBC Radio Two
“One of the best new discoveries I’ve made” Steve Lamacq, BBC 6 Music
“If summer should ever arrive, its soundtrack should be ‘Beam’” **** Financial Times

Based on folklore but full of modern kick, the Keston Cobblers Club was formed in 2009 by siblings Matthew and Julia Lowe, who gathered school friends to revive the legacy of the old struggling Cobbler of Keston and his foot-stamping, shoe-scuffing music club. With beautiful harmonies, an oom-pah tuba line and a mish-mash of accordion, guitar, banjo, piano, harmonica and mandolin, the Cobblers make music that will make you dance “until your shoes wear out”.

Having played BBC Radio Two sessions for the likes of Dermot O’Leary and Steve Lamacq, the band have also been championed by the BBC’s Bob Harris and Simon Mayo, as well as the Financial Times among others. They’ve played festivals including Glastonbury, Secret Garden, Bestival, Green Man and Cambridge Folk Festival, and have been winning over audiences all over the country.

Following on from their sold-out debut headlining tour in September 2013, the band will return to the stage in early 2014.

www.kestoncobblersclub.com
www.facebook.com/kestoncobblersclub
www.twitter.com/kestoncobblers

The Birthday Suit to play Manchester & London

The Birthday Suit to play Manchester & London

The Birthday suit is the solo project of Idlewild guitarist / songwriter Rod Jones. Their debut album, The Eleventh Hour, was released on 11th November 2011 and saw a return to the noisy pop moments that originally established him as a
legend in the UK music scene.

Formed with Roddy Woomble and Colin Newton in Edinburgh in 1995, Idlewild spent the last 16 years becoming one of Scotland’s most beloved indie rock acts. But after seven studio albums, four top 20 singles and numerous world tours, including supporting bands such as REM, Pearl Jam, U2 and The Rolling Stones, the band decided to take a break to
concentrate on their individual solo projects.

The Eleventh Hour delivered some of the most passionate, ?ery and powerful songs Rod has ever written. It creates a sound that captures the sound of early Idlewild albums, such as 100 Broken Windows – an album that was recently
voted the number one Scottish album of the last decade by readers of The Skinny magazine.

Rod has been busy the last few years with a range of projects, including working with the Scottish Mental Health Foundation on the “Music Like A Vitamin” shows in 2008, the release of his debut solo album, the folk-tinged A Sentimental Education in 2009 and spending 2010 teaming up with Emma Pollock to bring together artists from
Frightened Rabbit, Twilight Sad (among others) on the critically acclaimed First Edition album as part of the Fruit Tree Foundation.

Sharon Shannon to play St Philips Church

Sharon Shannon to play St Philips Church, Manchester

Glasswerk proudly presents…

Sharon Shannon

15/11/2013 – St. Phillips Church, Manchester

SHARON SHANNON Sharon Shannon has music at her fingertips….literally! The accordionist from Ireland has achieved legendary status throughout the world and has made the much-maligned accordion ‘cool’ in her home country. Renowned for her collaborations, not just in Irish traditional music, but through all musical genres, Hip-Hop, Cajun, Country, Classical and Rap.

Sharon has recorded and toured with a who’s who of the Irish and Global Music Industry, including Bono, Adam Clayton, Sinead O’Connor, Jackson Browne, John Prine ,Steve Earle, Mark Knopfler, The RTE Concert Orchestra, The Chieftains, The Waterboys, Willie Nelson, Nigel Kennedy, Alison Krauss and Shane MacGowan – a list that is testament to Sharon’s versatility as well as talent.

She has entertained US President Bill Clinton and Irish Presidents Robinson and MacAleese and more recently The Sultan of Brunei in Australia. Sharon records and produces her albums at her own studios ‘Poets Corner’ outside Galway in Ireland; and she owns her own record label – The Daisy Label.

The genre-defying star has had multi-platinum album sales and has had several number one albums, singles and DVDs in her home country.
A prolific composer, Sharon is currently writing an album of traditional tunes for full Concert Orchestra arrangement. She is also working on a new album with guest singers to be released in 2009 – and has just completed working on Neil Jordan film with Colin Farrell.

Sharon’s last album ‘The Galway Girl’ has gone 4 times Platinum in Ireland and the title track has won the Meteor Award for most downloaded song for the last two years. This year’s Meteor Awards honoured Sharon as the youngest ever winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sharon is currently on an Irish Tour, an intimate acoustic line up off the back of a residency in Lanzarote, a sell out Christmas Tour of Ireland and the Magners sponsored UK tour.

Mojo Fury to play London!

Mojo Fury to play London!

Glasswerk is proud to present…

Mojo Fury
Altrego
Us

02/11/13 – Surya, London

Mojo Fury hailing from Belfast are back on the road pledging for another album, the alternative, bass’y modern rock band create vibrant electronic feel. Among with their stringy hard guitar melodies, this gives them an exceptionally distinctive sound , Mojo Fury are definitely not a band to miss.

I’m sure you’ve heard people saying that the music industry is changing, well, this is it: we are a real band who create real music, and luckily we don’t have a major label wasting thousands of pounds in fancy studios or on flashy videos. We just wanna get the music out there because we believe in it.

To Kill A King play Blade Factory

To Kill A King play Blade Factory

Glasswerk is proud to present….

To Kill A King
The Keston Cobblers Club

23/10/13 – Blade Factory, Liverpool

To Kill A King’s sound begins with lead singer Ralph Pelley mounter’s acoustic songs. Around which, the band work in drums, bass, electric guitar, keyboards and other instruments. They focus on Pelleymounter’s lyrical narrative, with accompaniments ranging from tender instrumentals to climactic orchestral passages including strings, brass and five–?part harmonies.

This combination has been described as “Rousing orch–?folk… multi–?layered songs complicated in structure but straight to the emotional point” by the
Guardian, “Sky–?scraping folk” by The Fly &”Dark lyrical musings…matched by epic musical sensibilities” by Mojo

To Kill A King released their debut single ‘Fictional State’ on Communion in 2011. Since then, they have embarked on 2 UK headline tours and sold out Hoxton Bar&
Kitchen, the Garage and XOYO (as part of Q Magazine’s ‘Now: The Sessions’series). Their second single (from 2011’s’Crooked Saint EP’) Bloody Shirt was iTunes single of the week (50,000+ downloads), received Radio 1 airplay from Zane Lowe and Huw Stevens, Radio 2 airplay from Nemone and was playlisted on XFM and Absolute Radio.

In 2012, To Kill A King came in to their own with the release of ‘Word of Mouth EP’ a collection of live recordings from their Fortress Studios lock up. The lead track from this EP ‘Howling’ receiving critical acclaim & the release culminated in a sell out show at London’s Cargo. This was bookended by their program of ‘Guerilla gigs’ (Acoustic sets played nationwide in unusual and secret locations such as the DLR, river banks, shops, National Trust properties & train stations) & over 60 living room shows. This completed a busy summer for To Kill A King, who performed at thirteen festivals including Bestival, Wilderness and Field Day and supported Lucy Rose, Bastille and Dispatch, before heading out to Europe in November in as main support to Two Gallants across Germany, Brussels & Paris, including an appearance at Germany’s Rolling Stone Weekender. The new album ‘Cannibals with
Cutlery’ is produced by Jim Abbiss (Adele, Bombay Bicycle Club), Charlie Hugall (Florence and the Machine & The Maccabees) and Andy Green (Keane, Paulo Nutini) and is set for release on February 24th 2013.

The first single from the album, ‘Cold Skin’ is to be released simultaneously, with a 2nd single scheduled for March 2013.

Ben Montague to play Manchester

Ben Montague to play Manchester

Glasswerk is proud to present…

Ben Montague
Plus guests…
Kristyna Miles

12/10/13 – Nexus Art Cafe, Manchester

Local pop sensation hailing from Kent, Ben Montague provides an incredible approach to pop applying rhythmic pop to alternative rock amongst his outstanding vocals, after encountering his music we are sure Ben will instantly enthral you. Racking up almost 100k views on youtube, forward is the only direction for Ben.

If the name Ben Montague sounds familiar, that would be because you heard his debut single ‘Haunted’ which became a major radio hit two years ago, and he has just received the accolade of ‘BBC RADIO 2 Album of the week’ with his new album ‘Tales of Flying & Falling.’

Recorded at Rockfield with producer Dave Eringa (Manic Street Preachers, Idlewild, Kylie) ‘Tales Of Flying And Falling’ is a set of songs that make sense together; that document a relationship that was right, went wrong, then came right again. “This was always my dream – to make an album with one producer, in one studio,” says Ben. “To take my time and make sure every song sounded as good as it could. Working with Dave was amazing. He’s a rock guy; I write pop songs. We bonded over old-school desks and old-school mics and a love of authentic, epic music.”

‘Tales of Flying and Falling’ was released on 21st January and was immediately made Radio 2’s Album of the Week.

Ben, who was the main support for The Wanted & Lawson on their UK Arena Tour in 2012, has just finished a full UK theatre tour with Amy Macdonald, and has supported the likes of James Walsh, The Lighthouse Family and The Stereophonics. Ben will be relentlessly hitting the road this Autumn to showcase songs from his albumsOvercome, Tales of Flying & Falling & his latest EP.
The full list of dates and more information are at www.benmontague.co.uk

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown on Tour!

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown on Tour!

Glasswerk is proud to present…

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown
Plus Guests…

18/10/13 – The Kazimier, Liverpool

He is the God of Hellfire, and he brings you FIRE! No really, he does. Back in his 1968 prime, Arthur Brown really wasn’t fucking around. Watch the contemporary Top of the Pops footage of the finest Yorkshireman ever to leave the Dales, his flaming helmet burning like Osiris reincarnated in Manchester, and then try telling me that Alice Cooper – and a whole generation of latter-day shock merchants – didn’t take a large part of their blueprint from the man. The make up? Check. The demonic scream? Yep. The pioneering theatrical presentation? All present and correct. As Vince Crane, his keyboard player and band-mate so succinctly put it, “I felt compelled to work with this mad bastard, because he had a rapport with, and control of, the audience that was quite remarkable.”

With a voice like Whitby’s answer to Screaming Jay Hawkins, a dark and dangerous preoccupation with the macabre, and a natural talent for showmanship of the truly unforgettable kind, Arthur Brown should have been massive. He should have shocked and charmed audiences in equal measure, been denounced by picket lines of elderly ladies from the Highgate Women’s Institute, and accidentally set light to Madison Square Gardens before age crept in, gradually turning him into a much loved British institution, like Ozzy Osbourne or Battersea Power Station. However, Arthur’s only drawback was that he was, as Vince Crane pointed out, utterly barking mad. “His biggest downfall was the fact that he could write,” mused Vince Crane. “He buggered up his whole career by signing things without any advice.” Not much given to careful considerations of legal contracts, or the niceties of royalty payments, advance arrears or income streams, Arthur’s initial success with “Fire” did not lead on to proto-metal superstardom, but instead, despite several excellent solo albums, to years of desperate grovelling around in the music industry dirt, trying to drum up interest and sales.

The material on Strangelands dates from late 1969, and was recorded at Jabberwocky Studios in the preposterously-named Dorset town of Puddletown. Jabberwocky’s equipment and amplification gear had all been installed and built by a renegade ex-GPO traffic controller Ian Bowden, who went under the moniker of ‘Boob’. Really, you couldn’t make this shit up. Attempting to leave behind the style of the breakthrough hit “Fire,” Brown and the band were attempting to find a new direction for their music. To some extent this is evident in the wild stylistic variations of the songs that comprise Strangelands – from the uber-heavy psych Ur-metal of “Purple Airport of Love”and “All Over the Country” (on which Brown’s vibrato vocal stylings set the template for metal vocalists like Bruce Dickinson, an avowed Brown fan, over the twenty odd years that followed), to the weird kick-drum driven Sly Stone funk of “The Lord Doesn’t Want You,” to the abstract mellow Hawkbreeze of “The Planets of the Universe” – this really is all over the place: but in a glorious, ramshackled, sketchbook-of-a-genius kind of way. The fact that Brown and the band are trying things on for size in no way diminishes how great the songs sound, or how enjoyable it is to hear a true original grasping uncertainly for the future. With Strangelands, your musical cup truly runneth over.

There is, however, a second true original present on the record, a man whose potential significance to British music was sadly never fully realised, the dark matter at the heart of the Crazy World universe, drummer Drachen Theaker. Having been wildly impressed with the young Captain Beefheart when the two bands spent a week together in the south of France in 1967, Theaker had taken the Don’s primal Mojave fusion of blues, R&B and free jazz, and fused it together with his obsessive love of Bartok, to create the filius nullius that was Rustic Hinge / High Tide. As with The Deviants and The Pink Fairies, the band’s were a fairly loose proposition, and the point of genesis between The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Rustic Hinge / High Tide, can sometimes be difficult to distinguish. Brown never sang any of the Rustic Hinge songbook, his place being latterly taken by ‘Rustic’ Rod Goodway, which many suspect was largely due to Brown feeling threatened by the creeping influence of Van Vliet.

The tracks that make up the second half of Strangelands are instrumental, falling between vocalist stools (Goodway was not summoned down to Puddletown until 1970), and feel akin to the tapes of The Magic Band practising the Trout Mask Replica material that surfaced as part of the Grow Fins box-set. On “Litmus Transformation,” “Opus Pocus” and “Crystallised Petard,” Theaker guides the band by the same star that the Captain sailed by. There is some truly awesome BBC-shot footage of Rustic Hinge playing outside at Puddletown in magic hour sunshine, all outlandish costumes and foliate faces, looking like a demented group of woodwose let loose with electric instrumentation. Theaker’s kit is augmented with dustbin lids and various car spares, and the ‘Guinness Is Good For You’ pub umbrella is just the cherry on the top.

Yet this is no mere slavish copying; on “Kinesis” the band launch into a frenzied blast which sounds entirely their own, guitars grinding and Theaker thrashing away behind the kit like a demented jazz octopus, Robert Wyatt gone to the bad. It’s incredible to think that Theaker also played with Love (yes, that Love, he obviously had a fondness for demented and God-like frontmen) and The Mothers of Invention). The final track, the majestic and melancholy “Macedonia,” showcases Theaker’s classical influence and training, the sounds of the Balkans seeping through into his visionary rock by way of his hero Bela. No-one would make music like this in Britain, or anywhere else for that matter, for a very long time indeed. A Hawk and a Hacksaw could drop this into their set and no-one would notice the join. It is a tragedy that Theaker was never afforded more time and space to write and record in his own right throughout the early part of the 1970s. I for one am convinced that the music he would have made would have been utterly idiosyncratic, innovative and outstanding. Sadly, Theaker died of a brain tumour in 1992, so these loose, disjointed fragments must unfortunately serve as his musical epitaph.

Arthur Brown’s career, however, hit a decided upswing during the 1990s. Having influenced every macabre rocker from the aforementioned Alice Cooper to Kiss to Marilyn Manson, Brown has become increasingly in-demand for guest appearances, collaborations and gigs across the world, including festivals such as Glastonbury and Wicker Man. When performing with The Pretty Things at the world live premier of SF Sorrow at the South Bank in 2001, Brown took the role of narrator. Afforded a short solo spot, Brown did what every single person in the sold-out Royal Festival Hall was hoped for: he strapped on the flaming helmet once more, set it ablaze and treated the audience to a blistering rendition of “Fire.” Not only that, but he performed a truly awe-inspiring feat of athleticism, running from the stage to the back of the auditorium using only the backs of the seats as firm footing. Not even Iggy could do that.

James Walsh announces Liverpool & Manchester shows

James Walsh announces Liverpool & Manchester shows

Glasswerk is proud to present…

James Walsh
Plus Guests…

02/12/13 – The Kazimier, Liverpool
03/12/13 – Ruby Lounge, Manchester

“The songs have been pouring out of me. I feel much more like a singer-songwriter now, living it and breathing it” – James Walsh.

Sometimes you just have to walk away from something, follow your heart, take a leap in the dark and start afresh. After almost a decade with his enormous yet somehow tender, fragile voice fronting Starsailor, James Walsh has emerged as a singer-songwriter in his own right, with an acoustic guitar and some big, new tunes to travel wherever the road may take him. Towards the end of Starsailor’s decade of success, he’d started playing acoustic gigs to promote the band abroad, and started to enjoy the new found “freedom” of playing without a safety net.

Buy tickets HERE!

TEITUR to play in Manchester

TEITUR to play in Manchester

Glasswerk presents…

TEITUR

5/11/13 – Gulliver’s, Manchester

Teitur (born Teitur Lassen 1977 in Hoyvík) is a Faroese musician, singer-songwriter and producer. He is a winner of multiple Danish Music Awards and has toured globally since his debut release, Poetry & Aeroplanes, in 2003.

Since 2001 he has dedicated himself to playing and writing music in English full-time, and has released five studio albums as a solo artist. He has additionally produced, written for, or worked with multiple international artists including Seal, Corinne Bailey Rae, Nolwenn Leroy, Gordie Sampson, Nico Muhly, and Tina Dico.
His songs have appeared on major motion picture soundtracks and numerous compilations, and in 2010 he was invited to perform for the Queen of Denmark’s 70th birthday celebrations.

After finding both a publishing deal and a record contract with Universal Records, the Faroe Islands awarded him its 2004 “Businessman of the Year” award. His first major album, Poetry & Aeroplanes, released in 2003, was recorded in Los Angeles and Spain and featured a number of prominent studio musicians and the production of Rupert Hine.

Within months of its debut, the record found a following among many of popular music’s inner circle. Extensive touring in the US and Canada and rave reviews and industry/musician buzz led to opening slots on tours with Suzanne Vega, Glen Phillips, Aimee Mann, and John Mayer. John Mayer later described the album in his Esquire magazine article: “it may be one of the best albums to come around in the last five years…Music like this is jet fuel on the fire of a broken heart. Even if you think the flame has died, there’s at least one lyric that’ll hit that last hot spot, and then you’ll find yourself as fucked as you were the day you lied and said you never wanted to see her again. Enjoy.”

Teitur was featured on MTV’s You Heard it First program. While not picked up by mainstream radio, several of the songs on Poetry & Aeroplanes found airplay on major television and motion picture soundtracks, most recently in the 2006 films Aquamarine and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Teitur continued to tour extensively in 20 plus countries, building a firm following and respect amongst media and the musician community, despite the lack of commercial marketing by Universal Records.

BUY TICKETS HERE!

Morcheeba to play Manchester

Morcheeba to play Manchester

17th November @ Gorilla, Manchester
Morcheeba plus guests

Glasswerk is proud to present tri-pop veterans Morcheeba, now embarking on a world tour for the release of their new album.

With a career spanning over 18 years and with millions of album sold worldwide, Morcheeba return with their 8th studio album – Head Up High due for release on October 14th 2013 via [PIAS] Recordings.The follow up to 2010’s Blood Like Lemonade sees the band enlist Chali 2na (Jurassic 5), James Petralli (White Denim), Rizzle Kicks, Ana Tijoux and Nature Boy highlighting the magnitude of their career and influence on a wide variety of artists old and new.

Today see’s the band return with their first new material since 2010’s Blood Like Lemonade; Gimme Your Love (with accompanying lyric video created by Steven Spencer the sees the single artwork come alive) is available to hear/watch via Vevo and available to the fans as an instant-grat track via iTunes when pre ordering the album.


When Morcheeba last toured Brazil, they stayed in a Sao Paolo hotel with a swimming pool bar called the Skye Bar on its roof. One day, singer Skye Edwards was swimming in the pool when the manager came up and told her, “You do realise this pool is named after you, Skye?

This gives some measure of how far and how deeply the band’s influence has spread since they first sketched out the blueprint for trip-hop with their debut album Who Can You Trust? some 18 years ago. It’s a journey which has taken the brothers from their native Kent and Skye from East London to performing for tens of thousands of ecstatic fans in South America and China, along the way releasing seven successful albums of modern music which reflect the most positive aspects of contemporary culture. Paul Godfrey, the band’s beatmaster and production wizard, remembers the impact that Big Calm, their second album, had across the world. “People were almost religious about it” he marvels. “I’d get stopped in the street in New York by people who’d been going through a really bad time, and they’d say it was our music that helped get them through this bad period. I still get messages regularly to that effect. It’s easy to be cynical but the reality is that’s what music did for us too.”

That positive, healing aspect of Morcheeba’s music is in full effect on their eighth album Head Up High, reflecting a series of significant changes in the trio’s lives. Paul’s multi-instrumentalist brother Ross Godfrey, for instance, finally joined his bandmates in becoming a parent for the first time in May this year. “It’s a trip, it’s a whole new phase of my life,” he says. He also moved back to London after spending several years working as a film composer in Hollywood. “When I talked to other movie composers, they’d say, ‘You’ve got a successful recording career – why would you want to do this?’. But I think it’s something I want to continue doing and grow into. I loved being in Hollywood, but it never felt like home, and now I’m back with friends and family in the UK it’s really nice.”

Paul meanwhile, found that a health scare proved to be a blessing in disguise. “Ironically, after 2010’s Blood Like Lemonade, I found out I had Type 2 Diabetes, and that my blood was indeed like lemonade!” he explains. “I had to change my diet and cut out sugars and carbs – it was incredibly effective , a massive wake-up call that helped stabilise my moods. Feeling healthier, I felt better about myself so going into this record I felt really positive rather than with my usual depressed, victim mentality. Skye and I really connected on this album, more than before. We found we had so much common ground. I have a huge respect for her. She’s done three solo albums, and she’s brought that experience and determination back to our project.”

Like Brian Wilson, Paul prefers not to accompany the band on tour, so while Ross and Skye are jaunting round exotic distant lands, he stays home in France, working on the grooves and structures that will go to make up the next Morcheeba album. This time, he was heavily influenced by working on a project with composer Janko Nilovic. “He’s a French sound-library legend,” explains Paul. “In recent years he’s been sampled by the likes of Jay-Z, Raekwon and The Beatnuts, so he’s finally making some money out of getting completely exploited in the ’60s and ’70s. I’m a big fan of his, so I looked him up in Paris and got to work with him. It’s amazing the way he puts together instrumental combinations. He taught me so much, particularly regarding basslines, and completely changed my approach to arrangement.” Paul began to investigate analogue synthesis more deeply, creating his own bass sounds rather than relying on sampled lines. “Where before we’d always been quite linear and followed the drums, it freed me up to compose more irregular basslines and create more movement.

That new sense of movement in turn prompted Ross and Skye to enthusiastic creativity in fleshing out Paul’s structures with textures and melodies. “We knew we wanted it to be more uptempo” says Skye, “we wanted to write some songs that could be played on the radio and add them to the live set to change it up a little. It feels like a positive step into the future for Morcheeba. Where Blood Like Lemonade was touching back more on our roots – that sounded a bit like the next album on from Big Calm, but this is moving forward.

We pushed ourselves to do lots of different kinds of things on this album,” agrees Ross. “We experimented with areas of music we don’t normally delve into; but at the same time it still feels like a comfortable sweater you put on, because we’re really feeling at home working with each other.” As the band’s main instrumentalist, Ross is responsible for most of the musical colour, tints and tones. “When you write songs, they take you in different directions,he believes. “It’s almost like they take you where they need to be, stylistically.

On Head Up High, Ross uses a lot of lap steel guitar to produce atmospheric, spacey sounds, and there’s even a largely acoustic track, “Under the Ice“, featuring hand percussion and a charango, the Peruvian stringed instrument using an armadillo shell as its body (after which the band’s fourth album was named). “ Paul and I bought it in a Parisian, classical music shop,” says Ross. “I’d been to Peru and had seen them playing Charangos, but we’ve never really played it traditionally, which is strumming it; we use it more to pick out arpeggios and melodies. I taught Skye the part for ‘Under The Ice‘, and she played it at an acoustic show we did in Switzerland, while I played guitar. It was really good, so I think we’re going to try and incorporate that into the live show from now on.

The biggest changes in the band’s sound, though, are provided by the retrained post-dubstep elements coming through in some songs such as the wobbly synth bass underpinning the urgent dancehall throb of “Make Believer“, and the jerky rhythm of the bittersweet “To The Grave“, a song about guilty secrets. “It kinda nods a bit to dubstep culture,” admits Paul. “That’s one of the good things about having teenage kids playing all that nasty stuff! Rather than be the cynical old dad, I try and appreciate what it is they like about it and, when I understand, I know I’m not getting too old after all. So I incorporate a few different things, but keep it within the framework of Morcheeba, which is pretty wide anyway.

In the elastic, buzzy synths of “Hypnotized“, which in typical Morcheeba manner, blends Paul’s turntable scratches and Ross’s bluesy guitar and harmonica into a piece that defies simple genre description – all the more so for the fiery Spanish rap by Ana Tijoux, whom Paul first encountered watching an episode of Breaking Bad. “I thought she was incredible,” he recalls. “While she was recording her vocal for ‘Hypnotized‘, she was heavily pregnant and we didn’t know if she was going to be able to do it; I think she went into labour about a day later.

Ana Tijoux isn’t the only guest featured on Head Up High. Rappers Nature Boy Jim Kelly and Jurassic 5’s Chali 2Na appear on the sinister, edgy “Release Me Now” and the infectious, loping strider “Face Of Danger” respectively, the latter song a celebration of shame-free liberation and self-determination which finds Skye wisely asserting, “I don’t need religion or a self-help sage”. “I’ve always loved Chali’s deep voice, and wanted to work with him,” says Paul. “It was pretty touch and go, because he had an art exhibition at the time, but he pulled it out of the bag.

Elsewhere, Jordan and Harley from Rizzle Kicks appear on the slinky tambourine hip-hop groove of “To Be“, essaying a typically outrageous rap involving a risqué pun concerning Hollandaise sauce. “When he came up with that line he was so chuffed,” chuckles Paul.

Working with them impressed my teenage kids!” says Skye. “Jordan, particularly, is really driven, he knows an awful lot about music. I don’t know whether that track will work as a single, ‘cos he’s talking about adding drugs to his girlfriend’s steak – but at least he’s not killing her for being too fat this time!

A lot of that generation, like Rizzle Kicks, Plan B and Adele grew up on Morcheeba,” says Paul, “so there’s this weird loop in time, where young influential artists are fans of ours.

But it’s not just rappers that guest on Head Up High: three tracks also feature the smoky vocals of White Denim guitarist James Petralli, who brings a soulful blues tone to “Call It Love” and blends beautifully with Skye’s voice on the brief “I’ll Fall Apart” and album closer “Finally Found You“. All three songs also feature Petralli’s lyrics, while Ross gets to display the full gamut of his guitar prowess, with a delicate break on the latter and an all-out, Hendrix-style blitz on “Call It Love“.

For the other tracks, Paul wrote lyrics using the cut-up method devised by William Burroughs and most famously employed by David Bowie. “I took phrases I admired from a load of my favourite books – writers like Philip K. Dick – put them in a bag and drew them out, putting relevant ones together, and the mood and feeling of a song would come together from that,” he explains. “It was just a nice, fresh way of approaching it. With the English language, it’s so difficult to reinvent the wheel, despite its flexibility.

It’s an attitude typical of the band’s approach to their art overall: Morcheeba have never been a band ready to rest on their laurels. “I always need to feel we’re moving on and making progress,” says Paul. “When we make new records, all we want to do is blow our fans away, and hopefully make some new ones.” With Head Up High, Morcheeba more than fulfill those ambitions.

Morcheeba Website

Morcheeba Twitter

Morcheeba Facebook

Morcheeba Tickets

Big Boy Bloater Announces Solo Shows

Big Boy Bloater Announces Solo Shows

Performing live

29th November – Castle Hotel, Manchester
Big Boy Bloater

13th December – Surya, London
Big Boy Bloater

Rip-roaring vocals and soulful songs have long been missed, Big Boy Bloater relives this with his charcoal bouncy melodies producing the most nostalgic experience, traveling back to the 50’s – 60’s. For a reminiscent experience or to experience the sound of history get yourself to the closest show! Big Boy Bloater is not to be missed.

British R&B kingpin Big Boy Bloater brings you an intimate and unique ‘one-man show’ featuring songs old and new in his unique and inimitably gruff and entertaining rootsy style.

He has been lauded as ‘one of the great blues men of our time’ by Jools Holland, described as ‘the next big thing in blues’ by Classic Rock Blues magazine, ‘a phenomenal guitarist’ by Mark Lamarr and funk and soul legend Craig Charles says ‘I love this guy, he has a voice that sounds like it’s been soaked in turpentine for the last decade!’. With credentials like that you know it will be an evening of great musicality and fun and a chance to get up close and personal with the Big Boy!

www.bigboybloater.com
www.facebook.com/thebigboybloaterpage
www.twitter.com/bigboybloater
www.youtube.com/bigboybloater

Ben Montague - Manchester

Ben Montague – Manchester

12 October @ Nexus Art Cafe, Manchester
Ben Montague
Plus Kristyna Myles and more

Local pop sensation hailing from Kent, Ben Montague provides an incredible approach to pop applying rhythmic pop to alternative rock amongst his outstanding vocals, after encountering his music we are sure Ben will instantly enthral you. Racking up almost 100k views on youtube, forward is the only direction for Ben.

If the name Ben Montague sounds familiar, that would be because you heard his debut single ‘Haunted’ which became a major radio hit two years ago, and he has just received the accolade of ‘BBC RADIO 2 Album of the week’ with his new album ‘Tales of Flying & Falling.’

Recorded at Rockfield with producer Dave Eringa (Manic Street Preachers, Idlewild, Kylie) ‘Tales Of Flying And Falling’ is a set of songs that make sense together; that document a relationship that was right, went wrong, then came right again. “This was always my dream – to make an album with one producer, in one studio,” says Ben. “To take my time and make sure every song sounded as good as it could. Working with Dave was amazing. He’s a rock guy; I write pop songs. We bonded over old-school desks and old-school mics and a love of authentic, epic music.”

‘Tales of Flying and Falling’ was released on 21st January and was immediately made Radio 2’s Album of the Week.

Ben, who was the main support for The Wanted & Lawson on their UK Arena Tour in 2012, has just finished a full UK theatre tour with Amy Macdonald, and has supported the likes of James Walsh, The Lighthouse Family and The Stereophonics. Ben will be relentlessly hitting the road this Autumn to showcase songs from his albumsOvercome, Tales of Flying & Falling & his latest EP.
The full list of dates and more information are at www.benmontague.co.uk

Judy Collins Plays London And Manchester

Judy Collins Plays London And Manchester

We are very pleased to announce that the legend, Judy Collins, will be visiting the UK and performing two very special dates this autumn in London and Manchester. The shows will be at two of the UK’s most atmospheric venues for live music; Union Chapel in London and St Ann’s Church in Manchester. Get your tickets quickly so as to not miss the rare opportunity to see one of the original folk ambassadors, and see a show filled with classic hits and wonderful anecdotes from Miss Collins’ long and varied career.


30th September – St Ann’s Church Manchester
1st October – Union Chapel London

Judy Collins has thrilled audiences worldwide with her unique blend of interpretative folksongs and contemporary themes. Her impressive career has spanned more than 50 years. At 13, Judy Collins made her public debut performing Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos but it was the music of such artists as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, as well as the traditional songs of the folk revival, that sparked Judy’s love of lyrics. She soon moved away from the classical piano and began her lifelong love with the guitar.

In 1961, Judy Collins released her first album, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, at the age of 22 and began a thirty-five year association with Jac Holzman and Elektra Records. She interpreted the songs of fellow artists – particularly the social poets of the time such as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton. Judy was instrumental in bringing other singer-songwriters to a wider audience including poet/musician Leonard Cohen – and musicians Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman.

Judy Collins is also noted for her rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” on her 1967 album, Wildflowers which has since been entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Winning “Song of the Year” at the 1975 Grammy Awards was Judy’s version of “Send in the Clowns,” a ballad written by Stephen Sondheim for the Broadway musical “A Little Night Music.”

Judy has continued an impressive musical career with an extensive catalog from every decade throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and up to the present. On July 27, 2010, Collectors’ Choice Music will reissue (digitally remastered) nine CDs of Collins’ Elektra titles: Fifth Album (1965), In My Life (1966), Whales & Nightingales (1970), True Stories & Other Dreams (1973), Bread & Roses (1976), Running for My Life (1980), Times of Our Lives (1982), Home Again (1984) and Christmas at the Biltmore (1997). These albums contain newly commissioned liner notes by Ritchie Unterberger that include interviews with Collins.

Judy has authored several books, including the inspirational memoir Sanity & Grace, focusing on the death of her only son and the healing process following the tragedy; it speaks to all who have endured the sorrow of losing a loved one before their time. She is also co-director, with Jill Godmillow, of an Academy Award-nominated film about Antonia Brico, the first woman to conduct major symphonies around the world—and Judy’s classical piano teacher when she was young. In 1999, Judy founded her own record label, Wildflower Records – a grass roots artist driven label committed to nurturing fresh talent. The aim of the label is to develop long-term relationships with artists and their representatives in a way that Judy’s own career was nurtured by major labels. For more information about Wildflower Records you can visit the label’s website at
www.wildflowerrecords.com

Judy Collins’ social history has always been linked with her musical history. Judy is drawn to social activism and is a representative for UNICEF and campaigns on behalf of the abolition of landmines, amongst many other causes.

Judy’s two latest creative projects, due out June 2010 are: a new CD, Paradise (Wildflower Records), a collection of 10 songs that include duets of Judy with the legendary Stephen Stills and Joan Baez; and Over the Rainbow(Imagine Publishing) a magnificent oversized children’s picture book and 3-song CD set, featuring artwork by renowned painter Eric Puybaret illustrating the lyrics of this #1 movie song of all-time, coupled with Judy Collins’ enchanting recording of the title song makes this destined to become a beloved classic storybook, delighting children of all ages for decades to come.
Judy Collins, now 71, is still writing, performing, and nurturing fresh talent. She plays 80 to100 dates a year around the country. Judy Collins, a relentlessly creative spirit, is a modern day Renaissance woman who is also an accomplished painter, filmmaker, record label head, musical mentor, and an in-demand keynote speaker for mental health and suicide prevention. She continues to create music of hope and healing that lights up the world and speaks to the heart.

Judy Collins on Facebook

Keston Cobblers Club

Keston Cobblers Club

26/09/2013 @ Borderline, London
Keston Cobblers Club
**SOLD OUT**

27/09/2013 @ The Castle Hotel, Manchester
Keston Cobblers Club
**SOLD OUT**

29/09/2013 @ Castle Hotel, Manchester (Added due to demand)
Keston Cobblers Club

30/09/2013 @ Hare And Hounds, Birmingham
Keston Cobblers Club

01/10/2013 @ Nice’N’Slaezy, Glasgow
Keston Cobblers Club
guests

After selling out London and Manchester dates within days of going on sale, it’s obvious that The Keston Cobblers Club hype hasn’t gone unnoticed! Bringing back folk’y fun to modern day music we would strongly advise checking these guys out. Please continue reading to find out more information and access the Cobblers website!

The band is based on the folklore of the old, penniless cobbler of Keston. His business was struggling and he would cheer himself up by throwing barn dances for the villagers. The rip-roaring dancing would wear out the soles ofthe villagers’ shoes, and so the cobbler was never short of work again! (See “Story” for the whole shebang!)

Keston Cobblers’ Club have brought back the old Cobbler’s club and everything it stands for: the music making, the collaboration and event eh raucous barn dances! “One, For Words“, their debut album, is a celebration of this. With a strong themeof nostalgia and letter writing, it is filled to the brim with 13 splendid songs.

Keston Cobblers’ Club have established a great reputation for their professional, yet completely DIY approach to making a record. From the recording process, artwork, films and promotion, they have done everything themselves.

Cobblers is all about collaboration, and many talented musicians also play frequently with the band. Thanks to the wonderful Helen Thomson and Harry Stasinopolous.

Keston Cobblers Club Website

The Mend Head Out On UK Tour Dates

The Mend Head Out On UK Tour Dates

The mastermind behind Britain’s biggest and best boy band has done it again. Nigel Martin-Smith who founded Take That over two decades ago has discovered four rare young talents with a hard-hitting message to convey to kids about crime. Meet The Mend; lead singer Craig Worsley from Fulwood, Preston, Jayme Kontzle from Crewe, Dean Kelly from Stockport and Kris Evans from Alkrington, Middleton.

The band now head out on their first headline tour dates in July this summer, taking in shows at the major UK cities of Birmingham, London and Manchester.

For a bunch of lads rounded up from auditions at inner city schools and estate community groups, they’ve had a whirlwind twelve months as finalists on Britain’s Got Talent, before supporting girl group Little Mix earlier this year and releasing debut single Where Were You? which reached #67 in the UK singles chart.

Watch the ‘Where Were You?’ video here:

“You know, we’re just normal lads” says member Jayme Kontzle “We’re not rough and we’re not angels either. We’ve all had a bit of mither, but we’ve found our way out of it because that way of life is not the way to go if you want to achieve anything. We feel privileged to be given this opportunity to do what we love doing most. Singing and writing is what it’s about.”

Out to fix “Broken Britain” the band are four individuals who, unlike most male vocal groups, write all their own material, with denouncements of knife crime and anti-social behaviour featuring heavily in their profound lyrics. Catch them at the following headline dates this year before they start selling out much bigger venues; as the lyrics to one of their songs suggests, they’re on their way From The Bottom To The Top.

‘The Mend’ Summer 2013 UK Tour Dates:
July 11 Birmingham Institute – Tickets – http://tinyurl.com/themendbirm
July 12 London Borderline – Tickets – http://tinyurl.com/themendlondon
July 13 Manchester Club Academy – Tickets – http://tinyurl.com/themendmanc

‘Where Were You?’ is available for download via iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/where-were-you-ep/id596465435

Honey Ryder - Tour

Honey Ryder – Tour

Honey Ryder Tour

09/07/13 – Hare And Hounds, Birmingham
10/07/13 – Surya, London
11/07/13 – Castle Hotel, Manchester
12/07/13 – The Shipping Forecast, Liverpool

When Honey Ryder started sketching ideas for their second album, Marley’s Chains, they had no idea they were about to embark on a journey that would take them to a five star recording studio in Thailand and to Nashville to write with a host of Grammy Award-winning musicians. Were it not for the sumptuous, country and folk-fused pop songs they brought back to London, the trio would have to pinch themselves to be sure the past two years truly happened.

Formed by singer Lindsay O’Mahony and initially a duo, Honey Ryder self-released a debut album ‘Rising Up’ in 2009. A rock record with folk influences, Rising Up received widespread critical acclaim and led to the band supporting Will Young on a 19 date theatre tour and Michael Bolton in UK arenas. The album spawned two Top 40 UK singles and saw the band flown to Austin, Texas and the south of France for performances at South By South West and Midem, respectively.
At Midem, playing a Brits showcase alongside Paolo Nutini and Jamie Cullum, Honey Ryder found a fan in ex Sony executive Chris Craker, who invited them to be the first act to record at his newly-built, state of the-art, residential recording complex south of Bangkok. First, the band – which includes guitarists Jason Huxley and Matt Bishop – spent a month writing songs in Phuket.

“We left with lots of hooks, riffs and lyrics, and as soon as we arrived, our surroundings inspired us,” explains Lindsay. Having the sun beating down on the balcony, being opposite a beach, in a completely different culture, gave our songs a sunnier, more upbeat feel. We were watching elephants and swimming in the afternoons. It couldn’t have been more different to working in London.

“Jason joining changed our sound naturally too. Jason is into the finger-picking style of Glenn Campbell and Mark Knopfler and he’s a huge Simon & Garfunkel fan, which pushed us in a folk-pop direction. This album was never going to sound like our first because we weren’t the same band.”
While playing support tours, Honey Ryder had reworked songs from Rising Up to be performed acoustically. Writing in Thailand, they stuck with the same stripped down, acoustic structure that forced their melodies to the fore. After a month of recording in spectacular surroundings, for the first time as a live band rather than relying on overdubs, the trio came home assuming their second album was almost complete.

After tinkering with the dozen tracks in their West London studio, however, Honey Ryder had an idea. They sent the song You Can’t Say That to Paul Worley, the man who signed and produced The Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum.

“The man is a Nashville legend,” says Jason. “None of us knew him personally – we found his email address online – but listening to the country influence in You Can’t Say That, we realised he would be perfect for the project. We asked if he’d take a listen and he mailed back immediately to say he’d love to. For a month we heard nothing. Suddenly, he called to say he loved the song so much he wanted to fly us all out to Nashville to play it to Lady Antebellum. By the time we arrived, he had set up sessions with a real Who’s Who of top Nashville writers. We were supposed to stay a few days, but it went so well we were there for weeks.”
Never having co-written with such esteemed company before, Honey Ryder took song concepts, hooks and melodies to the sessions, determined to stick with the sound of the Thailand sessions.

“They have a very methodical way of writing in Nashville,” explains Jason. “A verse and a chorus have to be complete before lunch, the entire song finished in a day. We really worked out there, sometimes with writers that were more pure country or bluegrass than pop, but we learnt a lot from everyone.”
Among Honey Ryder’s collaborators were Tom Douglas (Lady Antebellum’s I Run To You, Tim McGraw, Martina McBride), Blair Daly (Rascal Flatts, Keith Urban, Faith Hill) and Rivers Rutherford (who has written US No.1s for Dolly Parton, Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw).

Marley’s Chains, the first single from the album, Lindsay co-wrote with Emerson Hart, the frontman of multi-platinum selling, post-grunge group Tonic. Months ahead of its release, Marley’s Chains was snapped up for the soundtrack US TV series Body Of Proof – the episode airs in April.

“I went out to a ranch to write that song with Emerson,” recalls Lindsay. “I had read a quote in a book about the ghost of Marley and discovered it was a reference from Scrooge. I based the lyrics on the idea of regret weighing you down and stopping you from moving on with your life. We came up with the hook and first verse straight away, then got stuck, but knew the song was so good we had to complete it. We squeezed in another session at the end of the trip and it was finished in a flash.”

Before Honey Ryder left Nashville, they recorded six songs at Ocean Way, a studio used by the likes of Dolly Parton and Kings Of Leon, including the brooding World’s Away and Fleetwood Mac-like You Won’t Find Me.

“The standard of musicianship out there is incredible,” says Lindsay. “In a day, we had assembled a band that included a Russian banjo player who records with Lady Antebellum and Taylor Swift, Mark Knopfler’s bass player, Stevie Nick’s keyboardist and the best drummer I have ever heard. After listening to the songs twice on a dictaphone, we recorded most of them in one take.”

Marley’s Chains is a pop album with its feet in folk and country that sounds both classic and contemporary and fits to the current trend for a return to real music.
“Mumford & Sons have broken the mould for folk music in Britain, but we’re not trying to sound like any other artists and I don’t think we do,” says Lindsay. “We’re not trying to be groundbreaking or trendy. We want to write classic songs that will stand the test of time and I hope that’s what we’ve achieved with this album.”

Website

Jon Gomm - Tour

Jon Gomm – Tour

Jon Gomm Tour

30-Aug-13 Newport, 200 Club
31-Aug-13 Swansea, The Garage
01-Sep-13 Sittingbourn. Avenue Theatre
04-Sep-13 London, Surya
05-Sep-13 Bristol, Thekla
06-Sep-13 Devon, The Factory
07-Sep-13 Cardiff, The Moon Club
09-Sep-13 Guilford, The Boileroom
10-Sep-13 Worcester, Marrs Barr
11-Sep-13 Birmingham, Hare & Hounds
12-Sep-13 Liverpool, Leaf Cafe
13-Sep-13 Leeds, Brudenell
14-Sep-13 Manchester, Sound Control
16-Sep-13 Nottingham ,Bodega
17-Sep-13 York, Fibbers
19-Sep-13 Belfast, The Black Box
22-Sep-13 Lincolnshire, Alchemy Festival
23-Sep-13 Hull, The Backroom
24-Sep-13 Wavendon, The Stables
25-Sep-13 Bury St Edmonds, Apex
27-Sep-13 Eurocentral, Berits & Brown
28-Sep-13 Troon, The New Troon Folk Club
29-Sep-13 Edinburgh, The Voodoo Rooms
02-Oct-13 Newcastle The Continental
03-Oct-13 Newcastle, Cluny 2
04-Oct-13 Macclesfield, Cabin 5150
05-Oct-13 Huddersfield, Bar 1:20
06-Oct-13 Penrith ,Penrith Playhouse

Jon Gomm – Guitar & vocals

“One of the world’s most successful, gifted and inspirational guitar players” – Acoustic Magazine

“Wonderful to watch. Genius.” – Stephen Fry

“Hands down the most amazing guitarist I have ever seen!” – Tommy Lee (Motley Crue)

Leeds based singer songwriter, guitar virtuoso and Youtube viral sensation Jon Gomm is today pleased to announce a mammoth twenty nine date solo headline UK tour for September and October 2013. Following a meteoric rise to fame last year after receiving support from a certain Mr Stephen Fry on Twitter, Jon Gomm’s story is the modern embodiment of a musical, metaphorical, rags-to-riches tale that has captivated the imagination of millions of listeners.

After touring the world on the back of the success of his Passionflower video, which now stands at just over 4,249,000 views and counting, Jon is pleased to be able to return to the UK to give something back to the fans that gave his very unique take on acoustic music a voice right from the start, as well as showcase brand new material from his forthcoming album Secrets Nobody Keeps (release date TBC) that will be fan funded via a PledgeMusic campaign.

His eclectic musical style is drawn, magpie-like, from influences including Michael Hedges, The Beatles, Radiohead, Steve Vai, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix and a whole host more, all lovingly appreciated and expertly crafted into Gomm’s signature sound. An ambassador for the appreciation and enjoyment of all forms of music, as well as embodying the true spirit of the 21st century independent musician, things haven’t always been this good for Jon.

“It’s surreal; it’s really hard to cope with” Jon explains of his newfound notoriety “I’ve spent my life gigging, and the last 10 years doing my take on the solo singer-songwriter acoustic thing. I never cared about being in the shadows, and I fully expect to return to them one day.”

For a man who’s finally clawed his way to success after a long and rocky road of sleeping on sofas and playing in car parks in Barnsley, Gomm is still ever the rationalist and is at pains to stay connected to his roots and his fanbase at every possible opportunity, even if now his celebrity endorsements and TV appearances occasionally get in the way of doing what he still loves more than anything, which is sharing his music with the people who made this all possible; his fans.

“It’s been a crazy and amazing 12 months for me” says Jon of the upcoming tour, humble as ever “and that’s thanks to my fans here in the UK that started the snowball rolling by sharing my music far and wide, and also for supporting me at tiny gigs all over the country for the past decade. But since I got all popular all of a sudden, it seems I’ve been playing everywhere else on the planet, and I haven’t actually had time for a solo UK tour. So it’s about time all my fellow Brits got to see me play the youtube classics, and I’ve got some new stuff I really want them to hear as well, if that’s OK.”

Jon Gomm Website

Mike Dignam - Tour

Mike Dignam – Tour

Mike Dignam Tour

19/09/2013 Sound Control, Manchester
20/09/2013 o2 Academy2, Newcastle
21/09/2013 Cockpit3, Leeds
23/09/2013 O2 ABC, Glasgow
24/09/2013 o2 Academy2, Sheffield
25/09/2013 Fibbers, York
27/09/2013 o2 Academy2, Oxford
28/09/2013 Institute, Birmingham
29/09/2013 Rescue Rooms, Nottingham
01/10/2013 Man On The Moon, Cambridge
03/10/2013 UATG, London
04/10/2013 The Haunt, Brighton
05/10/2013 B2, Norwich
07/10/2013 The Exchange, Bristol
08/10/2013 The Moon Club, Cardiff
13/10/2013 Crescent Arts Center, Belfast

In September/October 2013, singer/songwriter, Mike Dignam, who recently supported Lawson on their sell-out UK arena tour, takes to the road for his inaugural headline tour; ‘The Great Escape’.

In 2008 at aged 18, with an ignited confidence after winning the ‘Youth Music’ National competition, Preston-born Singer/songwriter, Mike Dignam independently wrote, recorded and released his debut EP ‘World of Our Own’.

The release was the catalyst for the organic recruitment and growth of an army of fans. Engaged with Mike’s music and journey they supported him as he was invited to perform at ‘Rock in the Park’ alongside JLS, Tiao Cruz and Mr. Hudson, embarked on a UK tour with Gabrielle Aplin and fuelled the release of his second offering; a live acoustic EP.

The development continued through 2011 and 2012 as Mike joined Joe Brooks, Elliot Minor, Nick Harper, Roachford and Kate McGill on UK tours, culminating in an invite to perform at the Rockness festival with Paolo Nutini, The Wombats, Katy B and Lucy Rose.

Writing credits came thick and fast as Mike was invited to write with the ‘Steelworks’ team, ‘The Invisible Men’, Janet Devlin and co-wrote The Mend’s (Britain’s Got Talent finalist’s) debut single; “Where Were You”. Rounding off the year, Mike was asked to support Lewis Watson on his sold-out UK tour.

Mike’s second studio EP and his third release; ‘Paint’, triggered a nomadic European tour as he traveled the record through street performances and pop-up gigs from the UK and onto the mainland, passing through France, Brussels, Germany and Austria. Upon his return to the UK he was invited to tour with Lawson on their 18-date, UK & Ireland sell-out arena tour.

Sponsorship offers from Fly53 and an endorsement by Hofner Guitars (joining the likes of Sir Paul McCartney) reinforced that Mike, through his music and loyalty to his fans, was becoming an artist of credibility and noteworthiness. With a passion for sharing his music with his fans, Mike released a third studio EP, ‘Young’.

With the new studio record set for release in the summer, a June/July tour in partnership with local HMV stores, festival performances and a 15-date headline tour of the UK & Ireland, 2013 continues to go from strength to strength for Mike Dignam, making him an artist to take note of.

Mike Dignam Website

Dave Mcpherson - Manchester

Dave Mcpherson – Manchester

Dave Mcpherson of INME on tour playing his solo stuff, is nothing new. But, this time he is out with a full band. Expect some folk infused with Dave’s signature rock voice.

Dave Mcpherson
Petter Carlsen
MyLyricalMind
9th May
Ruby Lounge, Manchester
Doors 7.30pm, £8adv

Dave Mcpherson started working on solo material as early as 2004 during down-time from InMes touring cycle. He has released a long string of independent EPs, all hand made and self released, and has toured extensively playing close to 200 shows annually. His debut album The Hardship Diaries was released in 2011. An unofficial release “Death By Sunset” followed later that year and contained the best of Daves early and unofficial material. As a stark contrast to his debut, this album was much more stripped back and featured just one vocal and guitar track (recorded live) with no orchestration.
A sophomore album (title decided but as of yet unknown) is currently in the recording process and will feature full band arrangements with Dave providing all instrumentation on the album. Known song titles include “Lady Luck”, “Kingdom”, “Snowball” and “Her Majestys Prism”. A release is tentatively scheduled for early 2013.

Petter Carlsen
Beautifully atmospheric, his music has been identified by Anathema as something very special. Indeed, Danny Cavanagh states that ”once I heard Petter Carlsen’s incredible voice and beautiful songwriting, as well as his warm personality, I always felt that he would be connected to and part of the inner circle of Anathema for a long time to come. Quite apart from being a great friend, he is the most talented musician I have ever met in my life.”

The Tricks - Manchester

The Tricks – Manchester

15/05/13
The Tricks
Castle Hotel
Manchester

Plus:
Horsebeach
Nude


Among with joining the electrifying community of the uprising rock’n’roll stars why not like the Facebook page for a FREE EP, as an immensely generous offer to keep you rocking and updated with the latest Tricks news!

facebook.com/itsthetricks

Horsebeach:
facebook.com/horsebeachband

Nude:
facebook.com/BANDWITHAPLAN

“The Tricks are largely an independent, DIY success story, building a devoted army of fans through near continuous live activity.” Clash Magazine

“Appearing to a raucous crowd, it quickly becomes clear exactly why The Tricks sell out every one of their London gigs… 4 Stars” The Fly, live review

“Jagged and melodic pop, with electrifying guitars and a frantic but fetching chorus.” This Feeling, ‘Part Time Lover’ single review

“Loud, energetic and vitally unpretentious rock ‘n’ roll that has its roots in their beloved influences of Americana that they combine with their unabashed Britishness.” Disorder Magazine

“Top notch.” The Digital Fix, ‘Not Too Young’ single review

The Tricks are a rock ‘n’ roll band that have established a dedicated fan base through their electrifying live shows and their love of touring.
The Tricks are bros Joel Hodge (lead vocals/bass) and Ash Hodge (drums), John Bisset and Eliot Crabtree (both guitars).
The four buddies grew up together in Hertfordshire, listening to Indie and Rock ‘n’ Roll records, writing songs in their teenage bedrooms and playing local pub gigs.
As soon as they were old enough, the boys decamped to London and began to get involved in the City’s music scene and after stints in various gigging bands, they stopped messing around and formed The Tricks.

Around this time, one cold winter, John and Eliot moved into a vast abandoned warehouse in Hackney and turned it into The Tricks HQ; it was here, in an attempt to distract them from the sub-zero temperatures, that the band began to write, rehearse and record… This is where The Tricks sound was formed.
The Tricks then established themselves by gigging extensively around London and the UK which led to a show at London’s Bush Hall; this is where they caught the attention of Los Angeles-based record label Unison Music Group.
In a whirlwind, The Tricks were flown out to LA and spent two months working with Grammy-Nominated producers, Bruce Witkin and Ryan Dorn, on tracks which would provide the basis for their debut E.P.

Beginning in August 2012, The Tricks released a download-only single in four consecutive months; this coincided with the band’s popular and eclectic monthly club night in Dalston, East London. These singles, ‘Part Time Lover’, ‘On Trial’, ‘Not Too Young’ and ’49 Mercury’, quickly became live crowd pleasers and in November 2012 The Tricks released their debut 7” vinyl EP ’49 Mercury’ which featured all four songs; In support of the EP, The Tricks embarked on their first headline UK tour.

After an exciting and busy 2012, The Tricks returned to L.A in January 2013 to record some new tracks which would complete their debut album.
On their return from Los Angeles, The Tricks went straight back on the road on an 8-date tour culminating in a sold out show at Central London’s The Social.
Due to demand the boys will be heading out on a headline tour in May, beginning in Birmingham on the 11th and ending in their hometown of London at The Lexington on the 17th May.

The Tricks release their blistering new single, ‘Better’, on the 29thof April and their debut album will follow later this year.

Andy Cairns (Of Therapy?) Solo Tour

Andy Cairns (Of Therapy?) Solo Tour

Andy Cairns

13th May @ Hare And Hounds
/Templeton Pek/George Gadd

31st May @ Ruby Lounge
/Exit State/Greg Larkin

For the last 20 plus years, singer/guitarist Andy Cairns has helped redefine the global rock scene thanks to his work in Therapy? Opening their account in 1990 with the release of their incendiary first 7” single ‘Meat Abstract,’ the track saw Cairns and Co. lauded by the likes of the late great John Peel and by the time they released their first album [‘Babyteeth’] a year later, they were hailed as a more cerebral, much-welcome alternative to the then cock-rock cluttered musical climate and spear-headed a new wave of music whose impact is still felt to this very day.

Uniting punks, metalheads, indie kids and everyone in-between with their un-pigeonhole-able and unmistakable sound, the Ballyclare, Northern Ireland-born musician has happily straddled multiple genres over the course of 13 studio albums and counting. Inspired by the likes of Captain Beefheart, the Ramones, Husker Du and many more, Cairns’ songs have taken him to stages, stadiums and festivals across the world and Therapy? have shared bills with Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, the Rolling Stones and other household names along the way.

The last two decades have yielded plenty of career highlights for the tunesmith. For example, Therapy?’s fourth album, the Mercury Music Prize nominated, million-selling ‘Troublegum,’ was a huge commercial success that featured era-defining songs such as ‘Screamager,’ ‘Nowhere’ and ‘Die Laughing.’

1999’s ‘Suicide Pact-You First’ reaffirmed the band’s status as an ambitious, life-affirming act that evoked the spirits of Beefheart (‘He’s Not That Kind Of Girl’) and the Blair Witch (the acoustic ‘God Kicks’ was recorded in a wood at 2am) and 2012’s ‘A Brief Crack Of Light’ was a critically acclaimed tour de force which saw Therapy? at the peak of their creative powers.

This year, Andy looks set to enjoy yet another highlight in his ongoing musical journey and, with the blessing of his band-mates (bassist Michael McKeegan and drummer Neil Cooper), is about to embark on his first ever solo acoustic tour. Planning to scour every inch of his back catalogue in preparation for the jaunt, Andy also aims to debut some new Therapy? cuts too (we repeat, Therapy? aren’t splitting up).

“I fancied a challenge,” commented Cairns on the upcoming trek. “I’m hoping to take around two to four new songs with me on tour and I’m also going to go through all of the Therapy? albums and see what works in that format. I’m really looking forward to the shows.”

MC Lars - Tour

MC Lars – Tour

MAY

17 ROZZYS ROCK NIGHT
HOLLYHEAD WALES

19 RUBY LOUNGE
MANCHESTER

23 KAZIMIER
LIVERPOOL

28 SURYA
LONDON

I was born in Berkeley, California in the autumn of 1982 to a librarian / teacher mother and an Australian American attorney / artist father. I was a child in the era of Reagan prosperity and was blessed with a loving, suburban family life and home in the Oakland Hills. My parents sent me to private schools and as a kid my favorite activities were drawing comics and listening to music. In 1993 my father got a job as the general counsel for an agricultural company in the Salinas Valley, so we packed up and moved two hours south to the Monterey Peninsula. Home to John Steinbeck, Beverly Cleary, Hank Ketcham, a popular annual jazz festival and a famous aquarium, the artistic “quaintness” of Carmel and Carmel Valley was initially isolating and confusing. I missed the energy and excited of the San Francisco Bay Area. I had to trade my weekly cartooning classes for Catholic school and uniforms. I lost touch with my Oakland friends.

But music and art were always there for me. I met my best friend, Tim Thompson and our fifth grade bond has lasted to this day. We listened to “Weird Al” Yankovic tapes over and over again and laughed and laughed. He helped me make sense of the confusion I felt as an eleven-year-old artistic kid and we made videos, songs and cartoons at our supportive parents’ houses. I focused on my grades and studied incredibly hard in middle school. I had big red glasses and a giant retainer. I drew comics, wrote songs and took guitar lessons. I formed a band as a seventh grader and we played the school talent show. For the introverted, sensitive kid I was, music helped me connect with other people. I was clueless when it came to girls, but that didn’t matter. I made up the pseudonym Lars Horris came from the 1995 Ben Stiller movie “Heavyweights” (Lars) and the 90s TV show “Dr. Quinn, Medcine Woman” (Horris). I thought they were both hilarious names, so in the true spirit of hip-hop, I appropriated them.

For high school I attended a college prep institution in Pebble Beach called Stevenson – it was really rigorous and strict but the opportunities there helped launch me and my career. Half of the students lived on campus, the other were local, and there were plenty of kids from far away places like Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Germany. We had amazing resources, including our own 1,000 watt radio station, an amazing art studio and a giant theater with incredible production capabilities. I continued to play music with my punk band but discovered that I also could make songs on my own, thus saving the headache of organizing band practices. I learned ReBirth RB-338, Cubase and MIDI, spending every free minute arranging beats and writing lyrics. The Korean kids taught me how to breakdance in the ballet studio on the weekends and I played guitar in the school’s jazz band during the week. My musical and cultural education had begun.

Sophomore year, my teacher Biff Smith had us read Macbeth and assigned us to write a parody of it. I was intrigued by the witches’ chant (“Double, double toil and trouble / fire burn and cauldron bubble”) and decided to turn it into a rap. “Rapbeth” was my first real song, recorded over a house beat I made when I was sixteen. I performed it in assembly one day and despite the drama teacher’s assertion that I had haunted the theater forever, afterwards I had never felt more accepted. I continued to write raps and perform them and built a reputation around my school as an original “white rapper” in the pre-Eminem era.

Around this time I got into the Insane Clown Posse. I thought “the Great Milenko” was a strange, disturbing, beautiful masterpiece and their rage and intensity helped me channel some of the adolescent frustrations of being a smart, awkward prep school kid living in the secluded town of Carmel Valley with hours and hours of homework a night and no girlfriend. I never partied in high school – I was straight edge by default because drinking and smoking weed were not part of my world. We lived so far away from town that it was hard to meet up with people after school or on the weekends. Also, because of all of the boarding students were under the school’s care, Stevenson had a policy that if you were caught drinking at a party, even on the weekends, you could get expelled. Thus, while kids at other schools got wasted and hooked up on the weekends, I kicked it solo, using my free time to write songs and make CDs. I made about five albums in high school, two that I would burn and sell that later ended up on the torrent sites (“Nothing to Fear” and “Insectivorous”).

Junior year I was in a musical called Oklahoma!, which toured England the following summer. I loved how groups like the Bloodhound Gang and the Fun Lovin’ Criminals were so huge in the UK – quirky, white boy rap was marketable over there. Little did I know, I would continue to tour England for years and years to follow. As a senior I dated a brilliant poet girl from Minnesota – we fell in love but eventually broke up. I had less time for music that year and I learned about relationships and the challenge of balancing one’s creative life with one’s career. On the first day of Christmas break I found that I had gotten accepted to Stanford. I had written my essay on freestyling and the art of performance.

Stanford is an amazing place but I never quite felt like I fit in with the fraternity, pre-law, pre-med, athlete crowd which seemed to dominate the student culture. So KZSU, the Stanford radio station, became a haven for me, and I delved into the gigantic collection of hip-hop vinyl that dated back to the 1970s. “The Drum” was a Sunday night program that allegedly was the first hip-hop radio show on the West Coast. Working at the radio station, I reorganized the records and studied their cover art. I had three hours a week to fill with music so I familiarized myself with all of the important songs in hip-hop’s history. I started each show with Aesop Rock’s “Daylight” and would always end with Run-DMC’s “Proud to Be Black”. I was one of the only white hip-hop DJs at the station at the time, so the other DJs would joke that I was coming in to play “country” and “polka” music. Nevertheless, my show was popular and I played music by Atmosphere, Sage Francis and Eyedea who back in 2002 were all still very underground. I was on the crest of something new and it felt amazing.

I went to Oxford in the winter of 2003 to fulfill my Shakespeare requirement. It was scary at first – I didn’t know anyone so I reached out to any and every band I could find in the area to make friends. There was an online database of all of the local groups, which I used to contact as many people as possible. I got an overwhelming response and before too long I had every weekend booked with shows. My reputation grew and grew around the area; the quirky, nerdy twenty-year-old kid with the laptop and Shakespeare rhymes was something everyone wanted to see. A played a show with Mark Gardener of a shoegazer band called Ride and was signed to Truck Records after their then A&R man Paul Bonham met me at the show. We had a meeting the next day and I offered to help play the Trucks artists on the Stanford radio station. It was mutually beneficial and awesome and it felt very right.

That fall, after working at a summer camp for Stanford alumni near Lake Tahoe for the second time, I returned to the UK for a 10-day tour with my father as tour manager. An industry scout named Tom Gates from Vancouver based management company / label called Nettwerk read a review of one of my shows while he was in the UK with a band called Brand New. He contacted me about wanting to hear more music and we met in San Francisco that November and talked about my goals and dreams. I flew to New York to work with a Long Island producer named Mike Sapone and in December of 2003 we recorded the majority of “the Laptop EP” in his basement. Someone at MTV heard about the EP. They came to Stanford to film a piece on my life that focused on how hip-hop become such a strong part of college culture in 2004, followed by an article in Rolling Stone.

I took senior year off to tour with Say Anything, Gym Class Heroes and Bowling for Soup and released “the Graduate” after finishing my senior year in the summer of 2005. I received my BA in 19th century American literature and decided to pursue my music career before going to back to get my masters and PhD (which I still plan to do). Nettwerk helped me set up my label, Horris Records, and along with my company MC Lars LLC, I was set to do everything independently without need a major label. Through all of this I learned about the importance of being independent and owning one’s masters, discovering how to use the changing industry machine of the end of the twentieth century to launch myself into the twenty-first. The timing could not have been better.

In 2006 I toured Japan, Australia (where I had a hit song) and the UK multiple times, where I had always felt at home. I opened for Simple Plan, T-Pain, Snoop Dogg and Nas. “The Graduate” sold over 20,000 copies independently, even though I was telling people to steal my music. I left Nettwerk in 2008 to team up with Jaret Reddick from Bowling for Soup, and Horris Records joined forces with his label Crappy Records to release “This Gigantic Robot Kills” and “21 Concepts (But a Hit Ain’t One)”. “Weird Al” played accordion on a track from “Robot Kills” after getting in touch with me in 2006 – a beautiful example that sometimes life can go full circle.

In 2008 I made an album with my hacker rapper friend YTCracker and toured with MC Frontalot, but struggled somewhat with my label by the press as a “nerdcore” rapper; I felt the term had a novelty factor to it. I had not come up in an Internet-based online forum rap community, rather I had made a name for myself by being one of the earlier DIY MCs who actually toured but had also happened to rap about intellectual topics. I had played guitar and bass in punk bands as a teenager and felt that the term applied more to rappers who didn’t do shows and hung out online; I prided myself on the live energy my band and I brought and the work and time it took to put on an actual show. Nevertheless, the nerdcore community embraced me even though I encouraged the kids to listen to listen to hip-hop outside of the genre. I later realized that instead of polarizing the scene, I could bring the fans together by appreciating that some of these kids were even listening to hip-hop at all. Perhaps it was a cool thing that it took rhymes about Star Wars, computer games and Edgar Allan Poe to get them jumping, hands in the air. These days I still tour with Frontalot and mc chris, but we don’t talk about the subgrene that much. We celebrate the fact that we can make indie hip-hop for a living and follow in our heroes’ footsteps as professional rappers and that’s pretty much it.

In 2009 I recorded an EP with my friend K.Flay, a fellow Stanford alumni that I discovered and had been mentoring since 2004. In 2011 I signed Coheed & Cambria drummer Josh Eppard’s hip-hop project Weerd Science to my label. We played festivals in Europe together that spring and the entire Warped Tour that summer. His incredible album “Sick Kids” came out on Horris Records that May and my album “Lars Attacks!” dropped in September, featuring collaborations with hip-hop legends KRS-One and Sage Francis. Both albums were entirely funded through Kickstarter – a crowd sourcing pledge site that allowed fans to pre-order each CD. CNN came to my apartment in Brooklyn to talk about my perspective on downloading and the new media economics of running an indie rap label. It was a busy year that also saw the release of my first mixtape, “Indie Rocket Science”.

These days I’ve returned to focus on to the literary rap component of what I do. I’m releasing a series of EPs based on various authors I admire (Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville and William Shakespeare to start with) and am putting out a series of albums that focus entirely on books. I am putting together a pilot for an educational hip-hop television show for kids and I am writing a book about the history of hip-hop culture. I continue to do educational hip-hop outreach work with such groups as the Nantucket Historical Association and am teaming up with the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum to raise awareness and preserve our nation’s incredible literary history. In addition to this, I’ve been continuing to work with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, raising awareness of suicide in an effort to end it worldwide. Hip-hop is a beautiful and amazing thing and I feel blessed that it discovered me when it did. Stay tuned, we’re just getting started.