When: 7pm on Friday 4 July 2025
Where: The Strines Nightingale, 105 Strines Rd, Strines, Marple, Stockport SK6 7GE

PLEASE NOTE: Any additional tickets will be made available via Ticketweb.co.uk.

Timings for Friday are: pub open 5pm, event doors 7pm, Leo Baby is on 7.15pm and Beans on Toast 8pm – with a DJ indoors after the show.

This show takes place in the woods – so please contact the venue regarding any mobility issues, as the woodland stage is currently not suitable for wheelchairs or those with difficulty on slopes.

The venue has limited parking so please look at alternative transport means where possible. More information at strinesnightingale.com.

We’re excited to welcome Beans on Toast back to the woodland stage at the Strines Nightingale!

Beans on Toast is coming to town!

To celebrate the release of his new book Wild Folk People, Beans on Toast is throwing a summer party at our venue, and you’re all invited.

A legend of the folk and festival scene, Beans’ new book is a heartwarming, rebellious, and deeply human collection of tales about the extraordinary characters who’ve inspired his songs.

Expect a night of music, stories, drinking and dancing, with support from special guest musicians and DJs (to be announced soon).

Each venue has been handpicked for its unique charm and character, just like the stories in the book. This promises to be a unique evening from the one-of-a-kind songwriter, storyteller, and performer.

Here’s a message from Beans himself:

‘Heading back to The Strines Nightingale this July for a gig in their beautiful woodland beer garden. This is a very special boozer on the edge of the Peak District. I played here last year, it was an absolutely banging night and quite the inspiring experience.

‘It’s now home to The Glastonbury Oak [pictured above] – a story you’ll hear about very soon in the form of a song.

‘On sale now, limited numbers, so don’t mess about.

‘Beans xxx’

Support comes from Leo Baby (‘alternative folk/indie soul music’), while DJ Tails will be spinning some bouncy beats after the show.

The Strines Nightingale is a lovely country pub, formerly called the Sportsman, which re-opened in autumn 2022. Strines is on the Piccadilly-Sheffield train line, and on the 358 bus route from Stockport to Hayfield. This show, which will take place on the woodland stage (pictured above) will run until 10pm at the latest.

This show initially sold out – but any additional tickets will be made available via Ticketweb.co.uk.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7pm on Saturday 5 July 2025
Where: Low Four Studio, Deansgate Mews, Great Northern, Manchester M3 4EN

Gratis – our series of free entry shows – returns, with Later Youth’s debut album launch!

Since fronting Manchester indie-folk favourites The Travelling Band, Jo Dudderidge has built a reputation as a sought-after producer, songwriter and session musician, working with an impressive roster of artists including Victoria Canal, Chloe Foy, Rose Gray, Stephen Fretwell, Human Interest, Joyeria, Bette Smith, and longtime collaborator Lissie.

With debut album Living History released on 4th July, Dudderidge steps back into the spotlight as Later Youth, his unmistakable voice and signature Wurlitzer electric piano taking centre stage, blending raw, heart-on-sleeve lyricism with fresh, idiosyncratic takes on classic rock, soul, blues, and alt-country.

This free entry show is the hometown celebration of Later Youth’s long-awaited debut album.

Special guest is Simeon Hammond Dallas, who makes intersectional feminist bangers.

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

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

This is a free entry show! Click here to reserve your place.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 8pm on Thursday 10 July 2025
Where: Night & Day Cafe, 26 Oldham St, Manchester, M1 1JN

PLEASE NOTE: Due to exceptional demand, this show has been upgraded to Night & Day Cafe. Original tickets are valid and all other details remain the same (except doors are now at 8pm). Additional tickets are now available.

We’re delighted to working with Nick Shoulders for the first time!

All Bad, the latest album from Nick Shoulders, released via Gar Hole Records (a label founded and co-owned by Shoulders), ultimately encapsulates everything that makes Shoulders’ inimitable form of country music so vital: a heady balance of dazzling musicianship and punk defiance, coupled with gritty eccentricity and a generational connection to the roots of the genre.

With a singing style inherited from his family’s vocal lineage, Nick’s songs achieve the rare feat of imparting difficult truths while inciting a certain joyful abandon, balancing a sound forged by years of hard travel with a heartfelt reverence for the origins of country music. In the spirit of Hazel Dickens and Jimmy Driftwood, the incisive yet wildly jubilant All Bad vocally objects to the reckless destruction of the natural landscape and development run rampant, while still offering plenty of joy and dance-ready rhythms. Spanning a variety of early country styles, the album’s infectious harmonies shine alongside everything from jangling cajun waltzes to surf-rock infused bluesy ballads – all tied together by a voice seemingly out of place in this century, yet ever ready to speak up about its problems.

Surrounded by a singing style passed down from a time before microphones, Nick’s childhood of bird call whistles and an over-exposure to southern gospel music eventually steered him toward an adolescence drumming for metal and punk bands, and subsequent years as an active illustrator and member of Arkansas’s heavy music scene. After numerous personal calamities and a growing obsession with the rural musical traditions of his lifelong home, Shoulders left the Ozarks and lived out of his van, singing on the street corners of the west while slowly being drawn to the vibrance of the New Orleans dance and busking world.

Following the release of Rather Low by the popular YouTube channel Western AF, which catapulted Nick’s songs to a vastly wider audience right as Covid-19 and lockdowns ensued, he’s seen rapid ascension into the world of touring music, playing alongside the likes of Sierra Ferrell and at major festivals. With the hard rhythms and heavenly melodies of the newest release, All Bad, Shoulders manages to concoct a body of work that is at turns sublimely freewheeling and profoundly illuminating, yet primed to permanently warp the listener’s perspective to glorious effect.

Special guest is Gravedancer – an Arkansan living in Scotland. His new album Doghouse Flowers is out now on all streaming platforms.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 16 July 2025
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to welcome Will Stratton and Trippers & Askers to Gullivers!

Points of Origin is Will Stratton’s eighth LP, and his third for Bella Union. His previous two albums, 2021’s The Changing Wilderness and 2017’s Rosewood Almanac, attracted positive recognition from the likes of Elton John, Alexis Petridis at the Guardian, Tom Doyle at Mojo, and Saby Reyes-Kulkarni at Pitchfork.

Will was born in Woodland, California in 1987, spent his formative years all over the greater Pacific Northwest and mid-Atlantic United States, and has lived and worked in the Hudson Valley town of Beacon, New York for the better part of the last decade.

‘Rich, filmic folk-country… a vivid, endlessly beguiling listen’ – Uncut, 8/10 (Americana Album of the Month)

‘Outstanding… Points of Origin is a rare gem of an album. It’s music bursting with poetry, narrative, filmic suggestions, and of course, life’ Americana UK, 9/10

Tour support comes from Trippers & Askers. Trippers & Askers is the folk/spiritual jazz project of musician, sound artist, educator and researcher Jay Hammond. The group’s latest album Acorn takes inspiration from Octavia Butler’s immersive and frighteningly prescient novel Parable of the Sower. As an intertextual work, Acorn brings together a wide array of collaborators that include members of Wye Oak, Califone, former Sun Ra member Ken Moshesh and comic artist John Jennings to explore the book’s narrative as it pertains to the very real political and emotional challenges of the present. The album was called ‘a shimmering homage to nature’ by the Guardian.

Local support comes from Jon Coley. Jon Coley is an acclaimed folk singer songwriter. He plays an eclectic mix of Blues, soul and folk, mixed with fresh original songwriting. He is renowned for his unique guitar playing passionate vocal performances, reminiscent of Van Morrison and Amos Lee. Jon is influenced by performers such as Nick Drake, Neil Young, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Sam Cooke, Bert Jansch, Wizz Jones, classic blues and especially the music of John Martyn. He has quickly become a legendary figure in his present home of Manchester, and his family’s native Liverpool, where his grandfather worked to book bands for the Cavern Club alongside Bobby Wooler and owner Ray McFall. After years of live touring, Jon released his Mercury nominated album If All I Ever Wanted Was All I Ever Needed to critical acclaim in 2021.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Thursday 24 July 2025
Where: The Strines Nightingale, 105 Strines Rd, Strines, Marple, Stockport SK6 7GE

PLEASE NOTE: This show has now sold out! 

We’re excited to welcoming Joshua Burnside to the Strines Nightingale for an intimate show!

Joshua Burnside is an experimental folk songwriter, singer and producer. He takes influence from alternative electronica and Irish folk, chopping and blending them with a mixture of found sounds, world music and unorthodox production methods.

Following an award-winning debut album and an acclaimed follow-up released during the height of the global pandemic, his music lives against the grain, in both style and spirit. Raised in the north of Ireland between the lush drumlins and hills of Strangford Lough, and the narrow entries and alleyways of East Belfast, Joshua’s music has defined and defied the post-conflict society of his home.

Taking in the economics of existence, family, trauma and renewal, while set against a backdrop of tense electronica and lush Irish folk and traditional songwriting, Joshua has entrenched himself within the fabric of the modern folk canon, alongside the likes of Bon Iver, Ben Howard and Sufjan Stevens.

While his award-winning first album Ephrata took in lush landscapes, technological horrors, night terrors and wistful Columbian vistas (set against a bed of Irish folk, cumbia rhythms, and electronica), his critically acclaimed second Into The Depths Of Hell, took a far darker approach. Melding swirls of clanging metallic found sounds, alt-rock, and Irish songwriting traditions were supported by UK and US national radio and international tastemakers NPR, Guitar Magazine, CLASH, The Guardian, The Times and more.

His third album, Teeth Of Time, sits comfortably and confrontationally between the alt-folk realms of Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens while retaining the indie singer-songwriter and traditional folk elements of Josh’s signature songwriting.

Special guest is Myles McCormack. Whether as a solo artist, or through his vital presence in Belfast’s world-beating trad scene, Myles McCormack is a master of his quietly emphatic craft. Recent collaborations with the likes of Réalta and Cathy Jordan have doubled down on the strengths of his solo work. The follow-up to 2019’s Real Talk, Myles’ second solo LP, To Better All Things, doubled down on the promise of something special back in January. On highlights and Every Time, and One Day the Belfast multi-instrumentalist paired sublime harmonies and fingerpicking finesse to wonderful effect.

This show takes place at the Strines Nightingale – a lovely country pub, formerly called the Sportsman, which re-opened in autumn 2022. Strines is on the Piccadilly-Sheffield train line, and on the 358 bus route from Stockport to Hayfield. This show will run until 10.30pm at the latest.

Buy tickets now. 

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Friday 25 July 2025
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to welcome Lightheaded and Jeanines back to Manchester!

Jeanines and Lightheaded, two of the brightest American indiepop bands, have new albums coming out in June. Skep Wax Records (UK and Europe) are delighted to be co-releasing them alongside Slumberland Records (US).

Jeanines’ third album How Long Can It Last sees the New York band in total control of their songcraft, with thirteen miniature pop gems. Jeanines can fit in more melody and more breathtaking choruses in two minutes than most pop bands manage across an entire album. First single On And On demonstrates this perfectly. How can such a brief pop song be so overwhelming?

Lightheaded, from New Jersey, are one of the most exciting new US pop bands, and this album combines a brand new set of songs with five tracks from their delightful Good Good Great EP, a cassette-only release on Slumberland, now available on vinyl for the first time. Lightheaded bring together the songwriting discipline of Nancy and Lee with a modern appetite for noise and reverb. It’s possible to get utterly lost and absorbed in this album. The songs echo classics of the past but also feel like they’ve arrived from the distant future. It’s quite disorienting, but very exciting. The first single, Same Drop, is no exception to this rule.

A local opener will be announced closer to the show date.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Friday 8 August 2025
Where: The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham Street, Manchester M4 1LE

We’re delighted to be helping Anna McLuckie launch her new single!

Anna McLuckie is a Scottish singer, songwriter and Clàrsach player. Raised on classical and traditional music, Anna’s writing draws on her musical beginnings and also takes influence from her love of popular music and more experimental sounds. Her music sits in a world of contemporary folklore; her songs layered with interweaving harmonies, story led lyricism and free form structures.

Based in London, she has performed in places around the world from Rockwood Music Hall NYC, to a concert series in Russia, to house shows and folk sessions. She’s appeared at festivals across the UK and supported the likes of Jake Xerxes Fussell, Rozi Plain and Richard Hawley.

In 2024 Anna took part in the Making Tracks residency and toured the UK with renowned global roots musicians. She is currently being mentored by English Folk Expo (Soundroots UK) and Kick Arts UK.

Her first full length album The Little Winters is set to be released in the back end of 2025.

‘Lush indie-folk at its finest, with Anna backing her dexterous picking with some equally sublime vocals’ – Klof Magazine

‘A haunting collection of nu-folk poetry set to music’ – Only A Northern One

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

Photo by Andrea Terzuoli

When: 7.30pm on Monday 1 September 2025
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with Lily Seabird for the first time!

Since 2023, Lily Seabird’s life has been in perpetual motion, spending nearly half of that time on the road performing her own music and as a touring bassist. While she thrives in transit, back home she is anchored by ‘Trash Mountain’, a pink house surrounded by other artists situated on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington’s Old North End. Here, Seabird has found belonging, friendship, and inspiration. It’s a place that hosts artists, puts on shows, and has been passed along in her friend group for the better part of the decade. It’s a symbol of transition and stability: something always evolving and growing but never losing its soul. It’s only fitting that Seabird named her new album Trash Mountain, as it also contains its namesake’s qualities. Over nine delicate but sturdy tracks of intimate folk rock, she pares her songwriting down to its most resonant essentials. It’s an album of unwelcome exits and uncertain futures, but there’s resiliency and hope at its core.

Where Seabird’s previous records – 2024’s Alas, and 2021’s Beside Myself – were written over the course of a year, Trash Mountain practically poured out of Seabird: three months of songwriting in spring 2024, followed by four days of tracking with Kevin Copeland (Hannah Frances, Lightning Bug, Allegra Krieger) in his Southern Vermont studio in the summer. While the grief that enveloped Alas,, which dealt with her best friend’s suicide, still lingers, it’s settled into healing and reflection on Trash Mountain. On It was like you were coming to wake us back up, Seabird vividly paints a brief moment of seeing a person outside her house who bears an uncanny resemblance to her dearly deceased. Rather than mourning, she finds comfort and healing in the vision. ‘In the past, I used to come to songwriting when I was in crisis,’ admits Seabird. ‘Only recently have I come to songwriting when I am feeling other things beyond emergency and disruption.’

The album’s arrangements are markedly sparse and intentional, a shift from the layered Alas, and Beside Myself, allowing Seabird’s writing to soar and stand starkly centred. Only three songs feature her longtime touring band in guitarist Greg Freeman, bassist Nina Cates (Robber Robber), and drummer Zack James (Dari Bay, Robber Robber). On the stunning How far away, she’s backed only by a piano played by Sam Atallah which makes for elegiac catharsis. ‘I’ve finally accepted that I’m a singer-songwriter,’ she says with a shrug. ‘Not everything has to be some big rock song.’ Seabird cites Elliott Smith, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen as influences on Trash Mountain, and much like the latter, her evocative, emotionally potent lyrics find her looking for cracks in the darkness where light comes in.

‘Vermont singer-songwriter Lily Seabird is one of SXSW 2025’s most compelling new voices… crushingly honest songs, and her weathered voice gives them a spellbinding quality… Seabird gave the performance that everyone would be talking about on their walks or rides home’ – Rolling Stone

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7pm on Friday 5 September 2025
Where: YES Pink Room, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

We’re excited to be welcoming The Burning Hell back – to YES this time, with special guest Jon McKiel!

The Burning Hell is the ongoing musical project of songwriter Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Sharratt, often including additional comrades and collaborators. Their densely populated genre-shifting songs are packed with an abundance of literary, historical, and pop-cultural forebears, heroes and villains, subjects and objects, stories and hooks. They move with heavy rhyme and a light step, incorporating a frequent fixation on apocalypse and ruin into work that celebrates participation in a mutually created, ever surprising, and even occasionally beautiful world. Which is to say they’re good dance partners and they want to dance with you.

Now based in the woods of rural Prince Edward Island, The Burning Hell has famously ventured to every out-of-the-way island and inland neglected by the less adventurous, emphasising presence and connection across latitudes, longitudes, and time, affirming a commitment to the political power of sharing music. It is a profoundly optimistic gesture delivered by way of killer tunes and joyful live performances.

When Mathias and Ariel aren’t on the road or in the studio with the band, they pursue art projects at the intersection of ecology and sound with their collective Idlefield Art Lab. Recent ventures have included mobile, solar-powered recording studios in Scotland and Canada, and off-grid recording projects in abandoned farms and lighthouses.

Ghost Palace, The Burning Hell’s newest album, was released in March 2025 on You’ve Changed Records in North America and BB*Island everywhere else.

‘Funny, sardonic, and literate. Add in a new-wavey, Loaded-era VU sensibility, and it’s impossible not to be swayed by these acerbically funny story songs’ – Mojo

‘Super literate and fantastically droll, over backings that range from bubbling synth pop and acoustic folk to rattly punk and even a spot of semi-calypso. Silver Jews and Jeffrey Lewis spring to mind on the terrific Birdwatching; Bird Queen of Garbage Island sounds like a glorious revival of Tom Tom Club‘ – Uncut

Tour support comes from Jon McKiel. The songs of Jon McKiel are born of the bruised marshlands of remote New Brunswick, from the craggy shores of the Atlantic coast; places where nature is a powerful wonder and the made-world is in slow decay. His new album, Hex, is a bloodshot pop record steeped in our dystopian present, tempered, across its ten tracks, by an existential umami. It’s the follow-up to 2020’s cult favorite Bobby Joe Hope, which Aquarium Drunkard called ‘an unlikely masterpiece’ and Gorilla vs. Bear listed as one of their favourites of that god-forsaken year.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7pm on Saturday 13 September 2025
Where: Low Four Studio, Deansgate Mews, Great Northern, Manchester M3 4EN

We’re delighted to present the Manchester debut by Danish duo Bremer/McCoy!

With 400,000 monthly listeners, Bremer/McCoy have, against all odds, created their own subdued cosmos in a noisy era. Appropriately, Kosmos is the title of the duo’s sixth album. Here, they aim to convey a worldview rooted in deep connectedness and a sense of freedom. The raw material includes tracks that have been simmering for 15 years, alongside pieces that emerged in an intense moment within 15 minutes.

Kosmos is a statement without exclamation marks or large fonts. It’s the attempt of two Danish musicians to capture the world they stand for – and wish to share with others. The album represents a worldview, and in Bremer/McCoy’s cosmos, we can meet each other without words.

‘Humans have always played music. We’ve sat around fires and sung. We’ve danced. When we play together or listen together, we communicate wordlessly. And right now, it’s important to remember to communicate, as many feel we are in tough times. What we represent is an apolitical communication. One of my biggest concerns is division. The fact that people’s political stances prevent them from talking to each other, despite so much common ground. Everyone enjoys a walk in the forest, and I believe everyone feels a fundamental joy and peace when experiencing something beautiful being created,’ says Morten McCoy.

At the group’s concerts, this intimate and immediate atmosphere arises. The starting point for Kosmos was to capture the emotions from their concerts on record. Hence, they approached the initial studio session as if they were performing a concert and began improvising. Their improvisation style is unique: they don’t improvise solos but songs. They don’t riff aimlessly but delve into a story. They don’t know what story they’ll tell when they start, but they discover it together.

They share a common background and have known each other since Ryvangen Lilleskole. Yet, they are two men living very different lives today—Morten McCoy lives in a commune on a farm with his wife and children, while Jonathan Bremer leads a fast-paced city life. In music, however, they always find each other because they can be fully present together.

‘We are very flow-oriented. One must be careful not to try to force too much into the music or have a plan for what one wants. Only when you remove all ego is there room for what needs to happen. If a musician thinks, ‘This and that should happen now,’ they stand outside the music. We want to play as if we are merely listening to the music as it arises. That is ultimate freedom,’ says Jonathan Bremer.

This approach is clearer on this album than any of their previous ones. For instance, the first single Higher Road was made in a single take, with both instruments and effects applied in the moment. The tracks contain themes of meditation, prayer, gratitude, and a quiet optimism on behalf of all of us. A song like the single Alting løser sig (Everything Will Work Out) is so named because they had a loose idea and began playing to see what would happen. Out came a song fitting for the duo’s cosmos, dealing with the notion that fear is a poor driving force; instead, one should try to trust that things will be okay. Hvor du er (Where You Are) came about because they were in the studio with Hans Philip long ago, where he put random words together as they played. Among them was ‘indtil, hvor du er’ (‘until, where you are’), which became the starting point for a separate Bremer/McCoy track. Ideas and melody fragments can need ‘to marinate for 10 years,’ as Jonathan Bremer puts it. Bøn (Prayer) comes from that pool. It is lifted from a theme the duo often played live but never managed to weave into an album. But when Jonathan Bremer played a bass ostinato, everything fell into place. As things tend to do when Bremer/McCoy put themselves and their listeners in a trance-like state.

Bremer/McCoy will follow up Kosmos with a series of concerts in the country’s largest cities this fall. The tour concludes with three concerts in the Conservatory Concert Hall in Copenhagen. In between, there is also a Scandinavian tour, where the duo will visit both Sweden and Norway. Additionally, a tour in Central Europe is expected in 2025.

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

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

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook