Fine Live Music • Open Til Late
BBC Radio 6 Music’s Steve Lamacq is touring some of the UK’s iconic independent music venues to support the IVW initiative, where he will be stopping off at Birmingham’s own Sunflower Lounge. Steve says that “Now, more than ever, it’s important to support small, grassroots venues around the country, because, while a lot of them continue to thrive, we’ve seen many of them shut down and many still under threat”.
Cosmo Pyke (that’s his real name) is an 18-year-old songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Peckham. Raised on a diet of blues, jazz, hip hop, and neo-soul, he writes warm, lo-fi songs that he describes as “spacey, beautiful, and lazy”.
Belfast duo Exmagician released Scan The Blue on Bella Union earlier this year showcasing a heady mix of guitars meeting synths and spiraling threads of psychedelia from the latest musical incarnation of longtime collaborators Danny Todd and James Smith.
The project of Doran Edwards, Weird Dreams began as a psych-pop duo before evolving into a meditative synth pop act. Edwards and Craig Bowers formed Weird Dreams in 2010 while they were working at an East London vintage clothes shop and bonded over their mutual love of the Beach Boys, David Lynch, and ’60s girl groups. Channeling those interests that bonded them back on the shop floor, this version of Weird Dreams sounded — you guessed it — dreamy and weird, with reverb-drenched catchy pop hooks laced with dark sentiment bouncing along to clean, California-soaked guitar lines.
Three years on from previous band Cheap Cuts, neither Gaz Roberts or his Warringon bandmates have had much time to ponder their brush with the pop scrapyard. With the name changed and the songs duly written, they’ve signed to James Endeacott’s hugely respected 1965 Records, been invited to play Billy Bragg’s leftfield stage at Glastonbury, enjoyed lots of airplay and had influential BBC DJ Steve Lamacq call Gaz “a great northern storyteller”, comparing him to Jarvis Cocker and their gigs to the first time he saw Pulp.
Bedford singer-songwriter Tom Grennan is 21 years old and the newest signing to Sony ATV publishing & Sony’s new Insanity label.
James TW is no ordinary teenager. The British 18-year-old is a soulful singer-songwriter with a big voice and even bigger aspirations.
When October Drift appeared at the start of 2015 with their beefy yet melodic sound, they had the confidence to win over all audiences. Ever since then, from multiple sold out tours up and down the UK, to growing online hype around their sparse but eloquent releases, they’ve done just that, becoming a major success story on the independent circuit.
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Weirds have been destroying venues across the UK for the past year with their blistering sonic assault of motorikdriven, druggy grunge.
