When: 7.30pm on Tuesday 3 October 2023
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be hosting the Manchester leg of Kathryn Williams and Polly Paulusma’s The Big Sky tour!

As labels buddies on One Little Independent Records, Kathryn Williams and Polly Paulusma met on a songwriting retreat. They have also written songs together and tutored songwriting courses at Arvon Foundation. Their friendship developed and strengthened, supporting each other over lockdown. Being fans of each other’s work, it seemed a foregone conclusion that they would get on the road at some point. Finally after many years of talking about their Thelma and Louise tour dreams (hopefully without the killing or the cliff) they have pulled together a beautiful intimate month-long tour up and down the country, both playing headline solo sets and also coming together for a few songs together. Lucky audiences will get two concerts for the price of one from two of the most respected British independent singer-songwriters this country has to offer.

Kathryn Williams is a Liverpool-born, Mercury Music Prize-nominated singer-songwriter with 16 albums under her belt. Before her last release, Night Drives (which entered the official folk album charts straight to number 2), the label OLI celebrated her career thus far with a 20 CD two book box set anthology strewn with her art. She has written a novel The Ormering Tide, which debuted to critical acclaim, and was listed in The Bookseller as a bestseller for the north and she hosts her own popular podcast ‘before the light goes out‘, which was put in the top ten best music podcasts by the Guardian. Kathryn tutors at Arvon, Moniack Mhor, and The Writing Squad and writes songs with many diverse artists around the world including Paul Weller, Ed Harcourt, Beth Nielsen Chapman and Michele Stodart.

‘Sombre, majestic, extravagant’ – Uncut Magazine

Polly Paulusma’s shed-recorded debut Scissors In My Pocket received international critical acclaim upon its 2004 release by One Little Independent. She toured the USA, supported Bob Dylan, Jamie Cullum, Divine Comedy and Marianne Faithfull and played Glastonbury. In 2012, she founded Wild Sound, now an OLI folk imprint, and signed nine artists. She completed her PhD in 2020, which informed her eighth album Invisible Music — folk songs that influenced Angela Carter (four stars, the Guardian) and her book (Bloomsbury, 2022). She tutors for Arvon, Cambridge and ICMP. Her ninth and tenth albums The Pivot Upon Which the World Turns (2022) and its sister When Violent Hot Pitch Words Hurt (2023) were recently released to critical acclaim; she is now working on a collaboration with double bassist Jon Thorne exploring relationships between song and prose.

‘Complete, pure and personal’ – MOJO

Buy tickets now. 

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