When: 7.30pm on Wednesday 5 March 2025
Where: The Castle Hotel, 66 Oldham Street, Manchester M4 1LE

We’re delighted to be working with The Ocelots for the first time!

The Ocelots are twin brothers Ashley and Brandon Watson from Wexford, Ireland.

Building on the folk-rock essence of their debut, the duo are excited to announce the release of their second album, Everything, When Said Slowly, on 7 February 2025. This album unveils a richer, more expansive sound, produced by long-time collaborators Cillian and Lorcan Byrne (Ailbhe Reddy, Susan O’Neill).

The narrative woven throughout the album explores themes of Irish migration, the perception of time, love, and the simple joys of cycling.

To support the album, the band are delighted to take the road in the UK for a string of dates around its release.

Support comes from The Memory Club. The Memory Club are a young indie-folk group based in Manchester. Utilising gorgeous harmony and brutally honest lyricism, the small collective relay a great deal of sentiment with a unique and playful charm.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Thursday 6 March 2025
Where: YES Pink Room, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

When: 7.30pm on Saturday 8 March 2025
Where: The Lending Room, 229 Woodhouse Ln, Woodhouse, Leeds LS2 3AP

We’re excited to welcome Sean Rowe back – this time, to Manchester and Leeds!

Though he grew up in the generally frozen landscape of Troy, New York, Sean Rowe spent many of his formative summers in DeLand, Florida where his father was a residential caretaker at a home for troubled youths. It was there, in a mercifully air-conditioned, mostly unused building filled with donated musical instruments, where he taught himself to play drums and then bass. Sean credits those early experiences for what has evolved into his distinctly low and percussive approach to guitar playing.

During those same years, when he wasn’t listening to heavy metal or building his early musical chops, Sean was in the woods exploring, foraging, and obsessively learning all that he could about the natural world around him. Since then, his fascination with the subject has only grown and through his web-series, Can I Eat This?, he’s found a means of indulging two of his great passions: music and nature. In each of the forthcoming episodes, Sean will guide a fellow musician on a foraging mission for all manner of wild foods. The two will use their harvest to prepare some tasty creations and end their adventure by performing a cover song together.

Over the course of his career, Sean Rowe has recorded five full-length albums and several EPs. His music has been used widely throughout film and television, with notable examples including NBC’s hit dramas The Blacklist and Parenthood. Rowe’s song To Leave Something Behind was one of two non-score tracks to be featured in Ben Affleck’s hit 2016 feature film, The Accountant. The song accompanied the film’s final scene and has since received nearly 14 million streams on Spotify alone.

MANCHESTER:

Support comes from Granfalloon. Richard Lomax (AKA Granfalloon) first embarked on writing songs for a proposed year-long journal in 2014 – a maddening yet rewarding journey that documented the fever dream of a chaotic year in the form of 52 pieces of music. This sonic journal rested until 2022 when 12 songs were reawakened, re-recorded under studio conditions, and released as Calendar – Volume I. It was to be the first instalment of a triptych; it focussed on traditional songwriting, and not quite traditional storytelling, to chisel out small, beautiful moments.

This was followed by 2023’s Calendar – Chapter II, a collaboration with fellow songwriter Lobelia Lawson. Chapter II took the ideas, concepts and rough sketches of 2014 and rewrote them entirely, making new songs and fresh pieces of music with Lobelia. Now, a decade after its initial conception, Calendar – Phase III completes the journey, taking those 52 ramblings, ideas, half-baked thoughts and overcooked dreams and turning them into a trio of albums.

Buy tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

LEEDS:

Support comes from Lewis Pugh. Lewis Pugh is a prolific songwriter influenced by everything from bluegrass, country, folk through to skiffle and punk. Brought up going to bluegrass and folk festivals with his family who were often performing, such as Cambridge Folk Festival and Edale Bluegrass Festival, Lewis’ appreciation of roots music came at a young age.

After playing in countless punk and metal bands from age of 12 until 26, Lewis gradually shifted back to the music of his upbringing. Self-releasing his first solo album in 2017, he has since released Dark Wheels turn Above Our Heads in 2020 and Bullets for Bread in 2024, finding a sound between country, folk and bluegrass with a distinct political slant. In between albums there have been countless singles and EPs, often raising money for homeless outreaches or food banks.

Buy tickets now.

The Leeds show is a co-promotion with the Brudenell.

When: 7.30pm on Friday 7 March 2025
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to be working with Jim Ghedi once again – this time, with his band!

On his new album Wasteland, Jim Ghedi has created something huge. Intense, brooding, bold, at times apocalyptic, and remarkably vast. A profoundly bold sonic statement that is some of the most rich, far-reaching and ambitious work that Ghedi has created to date – pushing the boundaries of what what folk music can be in 2025.

Wasteland is a record that is unafraid to plunge into the darkness of the modern world and embrace the weirder, edgier and more unnerving moments that come from doing so. It is an album that captures all the enormity of life from the micro to the macro, zooming in on the personal as well reflecting on broader societal issues.

‘Wasteland is about the idea of a place once known or familiar that is now broken down and unrecognisable,’ says Ghedi. ‘It’s about exploring the process of watching someone’s surroundings and environment collapse.’ And within that you have a lot going on. ‘It also explores death, personal loss, grief, mental health and how the natural world provides solace and meaning for that loss and how these worlds blur into one another.’

Lead single Wasteland sets the tone for the album, a remarkable and one of Ghedi’s entirely original composition. A stunning piece of work that while rooted in an environment being corrupted and broken – ‘there’s violence on these hills,’ Ghedi sorrowfully sings, before claiming this is no longer somewhere that can be called home – it is also a stirringly beautiful composition that soars and glides as it opens up, as sweeping strings swoop and in and out of Ghedi’s twangy electric guitar.

The accompanying video for Wasteland was shot and directed by Jordan Carroll in various parts of the Peaks District. ‘The idea was initially inspired by the album artwork featuring Jim sitting in a quarry, dressed in a 17th-century gentry outfit. We asked ourselves: why is this character there, asleep on a stool? There was something fantastical about it, so we filled in the blanks and built a story around it.’

The decision to incorporate more fuller sounds, such as electric guitar and huge drums, results in a notable shift and evolution in tone for Ghedi. ‘The lyrical content needed something more band-driven and loud to deliver them,’ he explains. ‘Incorporating the electric guitar in my songwriting was also a big part of opening the sound up, using drop tunings pushed me to use my voice in a wider range, which forced me to use falsetto a lot which I haven’t previously done before. That then opened the sound up and gave me creative ideas for bigger arrangements and to sonically really push things.’

Recorded over two years at Tesla Studios in Sheffield, with David Glover engineering and producing, the album features a wide cast of musicians such as David Grubb (fiddle), Daniel Bridgwood-Hill (fiddle), Neal Heppleston (bass), Joe Danks (drums), Dean Honer from I Monster (synths), Cormac MacDiarmada from Lankum (vocals), Ruth Clinton from Landless (vocals) and Amelia Baker from Cinder Well (vocals).

When Ghedi began working on this album he felt a little lost, unmoored, and unstable. Unsure of himself and the world around him. ‘I felt very frustrated with the state of England after moving back home to Sheffield from living in Ireland for a couple of years,’ he recalls. Yet while this album is one that has unquestionably come from a tricky place for Ghedi on a personal level, it’s also a record that contains flashes of hope and beauty amidst agonising demise and loss. ‘It was definitely quite a dark time writing the album and working on it,’ he says. ‘But it was also a joyous and uplifting experience. There was a real positive force around it and it felt quite cathartic and so much energy and enthusiasm was getting put into it. Also, I think this album is the closest I’ve got to the sound I’ve been working towards over the years. It feels like it’s at a place which most represents me.’

Despite all the turbulence that underpins this record, in the process of creating his masterpiece Ghedi has musically found a place he can now call home.

‘One for mounting your steed and venturing, howling, towards a boggy front line: the Sheffield folk musician gets brilliantly apocalyptic on this rallying, medieval-tinged battle cry’ – the Guardian

Main support comes from Zandra – ambient, droney; very simple but delicately quiet and reserved.

Opening the show is R.Loomes. R.Loomes crafts moody, atmospheric guitar compositions with lots of big, dark spaces and drifting points of light. Her sparsely dense riffs and poetically charged vocals merge to create plangent, melodic doom inspired folk.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Saturday 8 March 2025
Where: Hallé St Peter’s, 40 Blossom Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 6BF

PLEASE NOTE: Due to exceptional demand, this show has been upgraded to Hallé St Peter’s. All other details are the same and original tickets remain valid.

The upgraded show has now sold out.

We’re excited to be working with Fionn Regan for the first time.

With November’s tour having long-since sold out, and his new album O Avalanche out 1 November via Nettwerk Music Group, Fionn Regan announces news of an epic UK and Ireland tour for February and March 2025.

Fionn Regan has shared the singles Islands, Headphones, Blood is Thicker Than Wine and Farewell from O Avalanche.

‘I float sometimes when you’re around,’ sings Regan on Islands, setting the weightlessly romantic tenor for his seventh album. Written in Mallorca, O Avalanche is an album of levitating intimacies, abstract and intuitive yet infused with a tangible sense of the elevating ties between environment and emotion. Between its sun-dappled backdrops and lambent arrangements, the result is a set of sublime songs and something more: it’s a record to float with, immersive, uplifting and transporting.

His first since 2019’s beautiful Cala, it’s also an album that is, in Regan’s words, ‘very much on a level’ – shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Regan explains, ‘I see it sort of like a film that starts cinematically and develops in abstract ways. It moves in different sequences, backwards and forwards. And if you’re thinking about it in a visual way, there’s a quality about it where it’s always magic hour.’

Rippling like the sea, Islands sets that magic-hour mood, using images of the sun and moonlit dances on Spanish sand to set a dreamy scene. That flow leads to Valencia for the luminous Teix Mountain, which evokes the off-piste mountain spirit of its title and the album as a whole. Its rarefied sense of romanticism also extends to the title track, where Regan’s long-standing friendAnna Friel provides beautifully delivered vocals for an almost hallucinatory hymn to companionship. Braided with haunting references to storms and ‘summer ghosts’, it’s a song lit with inner faith, breaking out in the declaration, ‘I believe there’s a light that brings good souls together’.

From here, O Avalanche moves from a sense of loved-up drift to a state of serene, unforced resolve. ‘Written in a dream,’ says Regan, Farewell is a tenderly up-tempo take on partings, sorrowed yet beautifully becalmed in its looping arrangement. Into the Light of the Sun has a feeling of resolution about it, unfurling ‘like a burst of energy,’ says Regan, while album closer Deià Song/Llucalcari resembles a soft, supple awakening from a dream of summer, eyes wide open in readiness for new horizons.

‘I feel like the album has got quite a lot of bottled-summer energy running through it,’ says Regan. It took him two or three albums’ worth of material to find the songs that felt simpatico – the ones that ‘started to hang out together and fought their way to becoming the album’. Capturing the mood, Regan wrote the record while staying in Mallorca, a place he describes as his ‘true north’: ‘There’s a sense of an artistic energy there, where you step back a little from the main drag of bigger cities. You’re sat there in the mountains looking towards the cities, rather than the other way. There’s a kind of focus, a feeling that you’re tuned in to something.’

Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his debut album, 2006’s Mercury Prize-shortlisted The End of History. Since then, he has travelled between band-based detours and the gleaming likes of 2011’s 100 Acres of Sycamore, whose worry-worn beauty Dogwood Blossom drew new audiences when it found kindred spirits in two TV shows, romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’s This Is England 86. Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for 2017’s The Meeting Of The Waters while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and made an honorary member of the Trinity College Literary Society. ‘I feel really lucky in the sense that the music I make has its own climate or landscape,’ says Regan.

Co-produced with Ian Grimble, O Avalanche steers Regan’s off-the-main-drag feel for climate and landscape towards another creative peak, forging a record to lose yourself in. ‘It’s like you’re looking into this world where there’s a depth of field, it’s summer, and you’re floating into and out of it,’ he says of the album. ‘The songs can come together in the moment, so it’s not a conscious thing, but when I listen to the record it feels like there’s an eternal optimism about it – a kind of upward-feeling energy.’ With the gentlest of touches, O Avalanche will sweep you off your feet.

Tour support comes from Lemoncello. Laura Quirke and Claire Kinsella’s collaboration charms audiences into a world of intimate observations and uncomfortable questions with irresistible chemistry, charisma, and humour. ‘Why are all the good men, too old, taken or dead?’

The rare alchemy of the duo’s voices together cuts through a minimal and dramatic soundscape; coloured by the warmth and grit of Kinsella’s cello, and distinctly underpinned by Quirke’s cyclical, trance-like guitar playing. While embedded in Irish and folk roots, Lemoncello’s sound embraces the freedom of carving out its own song structures, entwined with a love of off-kilter indie-pop, jazz extemporisation and romantic and contemporary classical music.

‘They write like Wet Leg and sing like Laura Marling’ – Joshua Burnside

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

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Tuesday 11 March 2025
Where: Band on the Wall, 26 Swan Street, Manchester M4 5JZ

We’re excited to be welcoming The Weather Station back – this time, to Band on the Wall.

The Weather Station – the project of Toronto-based Tamara Lindeman – announces her return with Humanhood, out 17 January via Fat Possum, and releases lead single/video, Neon Signs. Humanhood, the most arresting album Lindeman has ever made as The Weather Station, follows 2021’s Ignorance, ‘an invigorating and poignant chapter in an already impressive career’ (Stereogum). It was written during one of the most difficult periods of Lindeman’s life and rendered with a rock band with improvisational chops just as she began to recover by reckoning with a complicated truth: sometimes, life simply tries to dismantle us, no matter how good everything may seem, and we must accept that in order to survive.

From the outside, 2022 likely appeared a year of glory for Lindeman. Ignorance, in which her ‘shape-shifting avant-folk [reached] a kind of apex, as she sings coolly about climate grief, love, lust, healing, and the upheaval of self-discovery’ (New Yorker), was one of that year’s highest praised records. It was a time of touring, travel, and activism alongside Ignorance’s more austere companion, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars. But at an ostensible new professional peak, she was also struggling with a mental health crisis. Working through a crisis of meaning, she wrote from within the confusion of the experience to create the songs that would ultimately become Humanhood, a narrative album that, listened to front to back, transcribes the journey from dissociation back towards connection.

It takes only 10 seconds for Lindeman to pull us to the floor on Neon Signs, the opening song on Humanhood. ‘I’ve gotten used to feeling like I’m crazy – or just lazy,’ she sings, her voice at once a soft whisper to a confidant and a full-throated confession to a crowd. ‘Why can’t I get off this floor? Think straight anymore?’ she sings of our true modern malaise, that unbound sense of not knowing how or what it is we’re supposed to contribute to this fractious world, or if we even have the energy or will to try.

‘I wrote Neon Signs at a moment of feeling confused, upside down, at that moment when even desire falls away, and dissociation cuts you loose from a story that while wrong, still held things together,’ Lindeman explains. ‘The song came with multiple strands entwined; the way that something that is not true seems to have more energetic intensity than something that is, the confusion of being bombarded with advertising at a moment of climate emergency, the confusion of relationships where coercion is wrapped in the language of love. Ultimately though, isn’t it all the same feeling?’ The Neon Signs video, co-directed by Lindeman and Jared Raab, is a journey through different sets of eyes, perpetually shifting perspectives between people and objects.

Humanhood was recorded over two sessions in fall of 2023 at Canterbury Music Company with drummer Kieran Adams, keyboardist Ben Boye, percussionist Philippe Melanson, reed-and-wind specialist Karen Ng, and bassist Ben Whiteley. The songs were left open; Lindeman and co-producer Marcus Paquin wanted to hear the sudden sparks made by these new encounters, to witness everyone react in real-time to the songs and sketches she supplied. They all dropped into the fugue, shaping the hazy unease that is so endemic these days into tangible sound. Other friends eventually added their own pieces, like old-time updater Sam Amidon, ace guitarist James Elkington, and textural magus Joseph Shabason. In the final stage, mixer Joseph Lorge helped make sense of these musical webs, and the album was crafted into a near continuous piece of music, with interstitial instrumentals fading into and out of songs. Textures repeatedly shift between organic and synthetic; synths merging with sax, electronic drums shifting into banjo, as songs coalesce and then disintegrate in a direct echo of the emotional experiences that inspired them.

Much of Humanhood is a riveting and real document of what it means to be lost, to be hamstrung by confusion, unease, and grief for a period so long you begin to wonder if there is an end. As with Ignorance, the first person lyrics point to a wider resonance; we’re all dealing with ourselves through climate disaster, as the world totters near a breaking point, and none of it is easy or precedented. On previous albums, Lindeman mostly wrote about her past, turning backwards to gain perspective. But for Humanhood, she wrote from the present as she tried to work through it. Humanhood, then, radiates with new urgency – and emerges as a sort of tether, offered up here for anyone else feeling disconnected from the vertiginous reality of right now.

Tour support comes from Georgia Harmer. Known for her dulcet voice and sincere lyricism, Georgia Harmer is a bright star of an artist, rising from the core of Toronto’s tight-knit music scene. Her songs guide listeners through a wide landscape of emotions, gliding seamlessly between triumphant anthems and bucolic ballads. Following the success of her debut album, Stereogum noted that she has ‘established herself as a noteworthy talent’, and SPIN Magazine named her a 2022 artist-to-watch, exclaiming that ‘for Georgia Harmer, it’s a matter of when, not if”.

Harmer’s sophomore record, Eye of the Storm, is set for release in summer 2025. This offering features esteemed collaborators such as mixing engineer Tucker Martine (R.E.M., Neko Case, Modest Mouse), and musical contributions from Matt Kelly (City & Colour) and Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station). Harmer has also partnered with acclaimed artist and photographer, Norman Wong, to create music videos and album artwork.

This is a 10+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

This show is a co-promotion with Now Wave.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Thursday 13 March 2025
Where: Hallé at St Michael’s, 36-38 George Leigh Street, Ancoats, Manchester M4 5DG

We’re excited to be welcoming Martin Kohlstedt back – this time, to St Michael’s.

Martin Kohlstedt is among the outstanding composers, pianists and producers for instrumental music and electronica. His past albums and their respective reworks were rewarded with international recognition and concert tours throughout the whole world.

With his live performances Kohlstedt sets standards on how cutting edge electronica production can intermingle with analogue and acoustic approaches ranging from classical piano and electronic music to ambient and field recordings in an effortless way. Kohlstedt intuitively combines inspirations and influences from fundamentally different worlds and soundscapes into a unique musical amalgam and forms it into something that feels more like a living body than a list of pieces. An immersive live experience.

He describes his style of work as modular composition; his pieces are always in movement and never resort to a definitive form – even during concerts. Improvisation is an important part of his creative process, and so are the interaction with his audience on equal footing, the courage and sometimes audacity to fail and the interaction with people, space and context.

For this Martin Kohlstedt collaborated with renowned partners such as the Leipzig Gewandhaus choir and artists like Douglas Dare, Sudan Archives, Henrik Schwarz, among others, as well as labels like Warner Classics. Apart from his own compositions Kohlstedt writes music and scores for movies, plays, podcasts and audiobooks. Under the name of «Edition Kohlstedt» he runs his own label and tries to do justice to his responsibilities as an international artist with a reforestation project close to his birthplace.

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

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

Buy tickets now. 

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Thursday 13 March 2025
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

PLEASE NOTE: This show has now sold out! Watch this space for further The Loft dates in the future.

We’re delighted to be working with The Loft for the first time!

Original Creation Records legends The Loft tour the UK in March in support of their forthcoming ‘debut’ album.

The band plays Gullivers on Thursday 13 March – their first Manchester show since playing the legendary Hacienda club with Terry Hall’s Colourfield back in May 1985.

The original line up of Pete Astor, Dave Morgan, Bill Prince and Andy Strickland embark on their first ever UK club tour, 40 years after the classic Up The Hill And Down The Slope topped the indie singles chart.

Since their infamous onstage split at London’s Hammersmith Palais in 1985, their status as one of the UK’s most influential guitar bands of the 1980s continues to grow and to influence a host of younger artists.

‘We have great memories of Manchester and the Hacienda – you could get your hair cut in the club,’ says guitarist Andy Strickland. ‘We also made our only TV appearance from the old BBC studios on Oxford Road and went back to do a Marc Riley 6 Music session there in 2011.’

‘It’s incredibly exciting to not only be setting out on tour again, but now with a brand new set of songs to play alongside some of our, ahem, “greatest hits”,’ says drummer Dave Morgan. ‘The Loft has always been just the same four people and it’s a real thrill to be playing across the UK with the band again. We’re sounding better than ever…’

Don’t take their word for it. Get your tickets now.

‘Seminally seminal’ – Steve Lamacq

Local support comes from Autocamper. Autocamper effortlessly retrofits the jangle pop sounds of the ‘80s without the C86 revisionism. Think Sarah Records-era The Wake fused with the shambling, melodic impulse of McCarthy and The Close Lobsters, but with one foot always firmly in the present.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7.30pm on Thursday 13 March 2025
Where: Band on the Wall, 26 Swan Street, Manchester M4 5JZ

We’re excited to be welcoming Beans on Toast back to Band on the Wall.

Cult legend and all-round hero Beans on Toast will take to the road this winter for The Wild Goose Chase, an extensive tour of the UK.

Playing songs from his extensive back catalogue alongside some newfangled pagan hymns from his new album Wild Goose Chasers, out 1 December, Beans will be joined onstage by long-term musical companion and piano virtuoso King Killership.

Support will come from incredible Australian songsmith and storyteller William Crighton.

This show will be a celebration of music, friendship, nature, and what it means to be human. Everyone is welcome.

‘Perhaps the defining voice of a generation’ – Louder than War

‘A travelling troubadour for the ages’ – Three Songs and Out

This is a 10+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7pm on Saturday 15 March 2025
Where: YES Basement, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

PLEASE NOTE: This show has now sold out! Watch this space for details of future Joshua Burnside shows.

We’re delighted to welcome Joshua Burnside back to Manchester!

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 Amy May Ellis. Embark on a journey to the North York Moors – a wild and wide-open landscape full of nature and beauty, history and mysticism – through the enveloping music of Amy May Ellis. Raised in a remote dale in the middle of the Yorkshire uplands, Amy’s warm and delicate folk-leaning DIY songs are steeped in the culture, scenery, folklore and wildlife of the countryside that surrounded and shaped her as a child, and continue to shape her understanding of the world today.

Since 2018, Amy has released a series of four EPs, each exploring an element; Weathered by Waves, We got Fire, Where my Garden Lies, and When in the Wind have all received support from BBC 6 Music, BBC introducing, Uncut Magazine and Rough Trade. They have also fuelled headline tours around the UK and Ireland and landed Ellis a spot at Brighton’s Great Escape festival. She has guested for artists such as Michael Chapman, Alessi’s Ark, Hiss Golden Messenger, Tiny Ruins, Ryley Walker and Willy Mason. Now based in Bristol, Amy has released her debut album Over Ling And Bell with Lost Map Records, a label based on the Isle of Eigg off the west coast of Scotland.

‘A soundtrack for anyone looking to reconnect with the wild’ – For The Rabbits

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook

When: 7pm on Saturday 15 March 2025
Where: The Rat & Pigeon, 33 Back Piccadilly, Manchester M1 1HP

We’re delighted to be working with Easter again – for our first show at the Rat & Pigeon!

Manchester indie-rockers Easter return with Facsimile of a Dream – their latest album, released via Scratchy Records.

Produced by Simon ‘Ding’ Archer (PJ Harvey, The Pixies, The Fall) at 6db studios in Salford, the album title refers to the lockdown period in one sense, a document of that time – but also, as frontman Tom Long states, it ‘harks back to pre-lockdown, when there was actually a possibility of some change on offer. There were solutions to many of the problems we face now, but that dream was crushed.’

Easter have built a reputation as one of the city’s best-kept secrets. Spurred along by singer/songwriter/guitarist Tom Long with a stable of Manc-underground shredders, they’re a formidable live act who’ve found admirers in Huw Stephens and Tom Ravenscroft at BBC 6 Music and garnered praise from Uncut, Record Collector and NYC’s The Big Takeover, while building a loyal fanbase across the UK.

For all of Manchester’s illustrious musical history, it’s hard to bring to mind a local act that they compare or aspire to. Instead Easter’s binoculars are fixed on the fuzzy indie-rock of Dinosaur Jr and Teenage Fanclub with added twin-guitar weaving recalling Television, Chris Forsyth and even Wishbone Ash. Only in Tom’s vocals are there hints of their surroundings with occasional echoes of Morrissey and, a few junctions away across the M62, Dave Gedge.

‘A welcome throwback to the wry, self-lacerating alt.rock of the early 90s’ – Uncut

Main support comes from Bristol’s Lifter. Lifter proudly take musical cues from a diverse range of sources, including slowcore, folk, country, and indie rock, and deftly showcase this throughout first album Clasping Hands with the Moribund, which came out in October. A handful of influences would include The Fairport Convention, Sparklehorse and Duster.

Opening the show are Claw The Thin Ice. Claw The Thin Ice are four ageing friends, dedicated to a life of crafting surging emotional rock music that combines DIY aesthetics with arena-rock hooks. Since 2012, they have been constantly crafting and reshaping their sound – 2025 will see the release of their long-awaited new album Fever Dreamer, which pushes their sound to the outer reaches and beyond.

Book tickets now.

Attend on: Facebook