Tag: Guy Garvey

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John Bramwell takes solo route through songs new & Kloot at Pocklington gig

John Bramwell: Playing solo at Pocklington Arts Centre tomorrow night

HYDE singer, song-spinner and sage John Bramwell has been on a never-ending rolling adventure since working away from his cherished Mancunian band I Am Kloot. Next stop, Pocklington Arts Centre, tomorrow.

Leading light of those Mercury Prize nominees from 1999 to 2014 and screen goddess Cate Blachett’s “favourite songwriter of all time”, Bramwell will be spotlighting songs old and new, as well as his sophomore solo album, February 2024’s The Light Fantastic, in his Pock one-man show.

“I’ve been touring with my full band, then touring as a trio, and now some solo dates,” says John. “A different set of songs, of course. With this set there’s more Kloot in there and more from the new album, not The Light Fantastic , but the next one, out next March, on Townsend Music again. Three songs from that…

“…and stories from my past. Just funny stuff that happened with John Peel. Getting to tour with John Cooper Clarke and how he’d try out his gags on me on his way to gigs. Remembering my late friend Bryan Glancy [who played with Bramwell in The Mouth before he formed I Am Kloot].

“I’ve written a song about him, When The Light  Goes Out. I literally just had this dream about him and it was almost like the song was there.”

What happened with John Peel [the legendary late-night BBC Radio One presenter]? “I made this single, Black And White, as Johnny Dangerously, a name I got when I walked on stage, tripped up, went over the edge. The place went crazy. I got a massive cheer,” he recalls.

Pooling redundancy money from being relieved of his position in the Tesco wine and spirits department with a sum from his dad, John printed up vinyl copies of Black And Blue. “It was at the point when Peel said he couldn’t receive cassettes any more, so I went down to London on the train and waited for Peel to come out of his studio. ‘You’re John Peel,’ I said. He looked at his stomach and said, ‘it would appear I am’!”

Vinyl handed over, it turned out the trip was worthwhile. “Peel played it the following night. Among a lot of German industrial rock, and lots of bands with dyed black hair, of course, in the middle of all that, I’d released a ballad – but he played it!”

When playing Kloot songs, John will tell stories of what happened when making recordings. “Like not wanting to have the opening to Northern Skies, which to me is like Suspicious Minds, but Garvey [producer Guy Garvey, of Elbow], said no-one would notice – and he was right.”

Provisionally, he is toying with calling next year’s album Still Got The Magic. “I played a new song at one gig and it got an amazing reaction. I don’t write as much as I did: the quantity isn’t there but there’s still the quality,” says John.

“This new album will be purely a solo record. Just me, because my finger-style playing is really coming on, so I’m actually recording at home, a place near Monmouth, rather than on the boat that I rent by the River Wye at Symonds Yat.”

Pressing John on I Am Kloot’s legacy, he says: “As I find now, what people say to me, is that there’s a spirituality to it, the lyrics and the form, that I didn’t realise, being at the centre of it. It’s very emotional without being sentimental.

John Bramwell, centre, in I Am Kloot days with Andy Humphries and Peter Jobson

“So The Light Fantastic  really is the breakaway, but I think this new album, with me and the guitar, is more of a culmination of Kloot.

“Looking back, Moulin Rouge [released in April 2008] is my favourite Kloot album – and the least successful. I love the feel of it. It reminds me of how, when playing with Andy  [drummer Andy Humphries] and Peter [bassist Peter Jobson], we were really mashed together on those songs.”

Looking ahead, John’s next album after “Still Got The Magic” (TBC) will be a band record.  “That’s the key for me: rather than being purely solo, I look forward to working with the band  again, and after that, it’s great to bounce off new ideas.

“I’ve sprung this idea of doing an album every 18 months, and as the label has pointed out, that would mean I’d be touring all the time. If the health holds, I’ll be doing 90 gigs a year. I’ve got my stories, I’ve got my two guitars It’s what I’m meant to be doing. “

At this point, I praised on John for changing the word “trip” to “skip” in his opening lyric to The Light Fantastic: “As I skip the light fantastic/And I live my life of ease/I’ve put my heart out on elastic/And my soul upon the breeze”.  “I thought it was ‘skip’! I always thought that! Maybe in different parts of the country it’s different,” he says. “My girlfriend is Scottish and they have different meanings for some words.

“If I’d known it was ‘trip the light fantastic’, I wouldn’t have used it, as I don’t like the psychedelic stuff like LSD!”

It was time to mention John’s prodigiously long hair in the latest publicity photograph. “I’ve had it cut, though it’s still long. I went to get it cut to shoulder length, but the barber refused to cut it that far, saying it was magnificent and he’d cut it for free. So, it’s still long, not crazy, crazy long.”

John Bramwell, Pocklington Arts Centre, Friday, October 17, 8pm. Box office: 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.

“Cate Blanchett’s favourite songwriter of all time”? She chose the John Bramwell-penned Proof, from I Am Kloot’s Sky At Night, as her Desert Island Disc on BBC Radio 4 in December 2022.

John Bramwell’s promo, featuring Cate again: https://youtu.be/zmaLfoETfKc?si=lTHKO1o-jETZswaI

John Bramwell on writing songs for 2024’s The Light Fantastic

“AFTER both my mum and dad died, I started writing these songs to cheer myself up. “The themes are taken from my dreams at the time. Wake up and take whatever impression I had from what I could remember of my dream and write that.”

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REVIEW: Futuresound Group presents Elbow, Live At York Museum Gardens, Thursday ***1/2

Here for the cheers: Guy Garvey leading Elbow at Live At York Museum Gardens on Thursday night. Picture: Andy Hughes

NOT all eyes are on Cardiff Principality Stadium for the “rock’n’roll reunion of the century”. York has its own fiesta of outdoor delights this week: Elbow on Thursday, Nile Rodgers and CHIC on Friday, Richard Hawley tonight and the inaugural York Comedy Festival in a Sunday fun-day finale.

Welcome to Leeds promoters Futuresound Group’s second summer of Live At York Museum Gardens, where one big change from Shed Seven’s 30th anniversary revels last summer greets you on arrival.

The stage has moved: no longer in front of the Yorkshire Museum, from where the slope down to the Ouse made viewing more difficult from the back. Now, it is sited against the backdrop of the St Mary’s Abbey ruins, as was the custom with the four-yearly cycle of the York Mystery Plays from their revival for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

And, on the evidence of your 5ft 7ins reviewer’s (disad)vantage point for the first three songs, viewing was still elusive from the rear ranks of a sold-out 4,000 crowd. A case of more heads than Elbow as Starlings, 2024 album Audio Vertigo’s best song, Lovers’ Leap, and new number Adriana Again passed out of sight.

Elbow room only: Thursday’s packed crowd in York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes  

One chap cannily resorted to placing his phone camera above his head to watch. Meanwhile, determined to avoid a feeling of “what an imperfect waste of time”, a request to move to the seating by the museum was very kindly accommodated by event staff, facilitating the full picture for this review from Station Approach onwards:  now Elbow could “be everything to me tonight” in the Bury band’s “34th year together” .

You may disagree, but Station Approach, from 2005’s Leaders Of The Free World, is still Guy Garvey’s finest lyric, his best distillation of life and love in a northern town. He is up there with Jarvis Cocker as the north’s supreme gift of the gab as a frontman too, his wit as dry as this summer’s grass.

He reaches regularly for “beautiful”: “beautiful” singalongs; “beautiful night”, “beautiful historic city”, then teases York by suggesting that this “history”, the Jorvik past, the 10th century abbey ruins, are nothing but manufactured tourist attractions, constructed in 1962, like a northern Milton Keynes. 

Later he would make a joke of his singing causing a temporary sound malfunction: “I like to think I destroyed it with that last performance,” he says.

Elbow’s Guy Garvey joining Ripon folk singer-songwriter Billie Marten – regularly featured on his Guy Garvey’s Finest Hour show on BBC 6Music on Sunday afternoons – during her supporting set. Picture: Andy Hughes

Far from it, you can add Garvey’s singing to that list of the beautiful. He is very much the fulcrum, the focus, the master of ceremonies, especially as Elbow – as unglamorous as their name and body part – don’t really do Las Vegas “showbiz”. Well, aside from a five-piece choir, a trio of brass players and a gleaming, huge mirror ball, stage front, for Mirrorball (yes, yes, I know,  what did the Romans ever do for us?).

The dark blue stage backdrop, reminiscent of a fossil and Leeds United’s third kit last season, does not change, like those abbey ruins to either side. That is not a problem in itself, although projections of the band’s performance would have been beneficial for those further away from the stage, just as they had such an impact in the Sheds’ shows in 2024. 

The problem is more when some songs hover close to dirges: Great Expectations, Her To The Earth, The Birds, for example, while Balu, Puncture Repair and Things I’ve Been Telling Myself For Years are graceful but glide by.

The audience chatter rises notably on those occasions, before either Garvey’s humorous banter or a change of pace for the blood-stirring Good Blood Mexico City, from Audio Vertigo, makes its mark.

Robin Hood’s Bay folk luminary Eliza Carthy opening Thursday’s Live At York Museum Gardens bill with The Restitution. Picture: Andy Hughes

On an evening that had begun with sets by Eliza Carthy & The Restitution and Ripon singer-songwriter Billie Marten, by now the night was darkening and stage lights brightening as Elbow hit their stride with “the whistling song”, Lippy Kids. “Build a rocket, boys,” comes the audience refrain en masse. Mirrorball, Magnificent (She Says); they are on a roll now, and it’s all gonna be magnificent from here on in.

Even Sober, from their new Audio Vertigo Echo elbow EP, elicits the most unlikely singalong, its perkiness at odds with the sobriety within. The crowd chanting rises for set-closer Grounds For Divorce, before being surpassed by the encore double delight of My Sad Captains (“Oh my soul”), Station Approach’s contender for Best  Elbow Song Ever, and One Day Like This, the one more commonly crowned with that title.

It took its time, but from Lippy Kids onwards, “one night like this a year did see me right”.

Elbow’s set list, Live At York Museum Gardens, July 3 2025, 8.30pm to 10.30pm

1. Starlings (from The Seldom Seen Kid); 2. Lovers’ Leap (Audio Vertigo); 3. Adriana Again (new, Audio Vertigo Echo elbow EP); 4. Station Approach (Leaders Of The Free World); 5. Kindling (Little Fictions); 6. Puncture Repair (Leaders Of The Free World); 7. Great Expectations (Leaders Of The Free World); 8. Her To The Earth (Audio Vertigo); 9. Balu (Audio Vertigo); 10. Good Blood Mexico City (Audio Vertigo); 11. The Seldom Seen Kid (Flying Dream 1); 12. Things I’ve Been Telling Myself For Years (Audio Vertigo); 13. The Birds (Build A Rocket Boys!); 14. Lippy Kids (Build A Rocket Boys!); 15. Mirrorball (The Seldom Seen Kid); 16. Magnificent (She Says) (Little Fictions); 17. Sober (new, Audio Vertigo Echo elbow EP); 18. Grounds For Divorce (The Seldom Seen Kid). Encores: 19. My Sad Captains (The Take Off And Landing Of Everything); 20. One Day like This (The Seldom Seen Kid).

No songs from 2001’s Asleep In The Dark, 2003’s Cast Of Thousands or 2019 chart topper Giants Of All Sizes.

Night and Day: One Day Like This turns into ‘one night like this a year would see me right’ in the finale to Elbow’s concert at York Museum Gardens. Picture: Andy Hughes