The Handsome Family’s Brett and Rennie Sparks: Returning to “the greatest small venue on Earth” in honour of The Band Room founder Nigel Burnham RIP
TO mark the December 1 2025 passing of The Band Room founder Nigel Burnham, a memorial concert will be held on Thursday with all proceeds going to The Compassionate Friends, the charity that supports bereaved parents.
“We are delighted that The Handsome Family, who have been regular performers at The Band Room and were well loved by Nigel, have offered to play at this special memorial gig,” says concert co-organiser Mark Ellis.
The Handsome Family’s Brett and Rennie Sparks once described The Band Room, on the North York Moors, as “the greatest small venue on Earth”, a quote still to be found on the venue website.
The songwriting and marriage partners are on a 13-date British and Irish tour, playing Leeds Brudenell Social Club on Tuesday and The Band Room two nights later, promoting their deluxe reissue of Singing Bones after 23 years.
The 2003 album, their sixth, re-emerges with a repackaged sleeve on limited-edition vinyl, remastered by Guy Davie at Electric, and double CD in a gatefold sleeve and comes with a bonus album, Invisible Bones, featuring outtakes, demos and live recordings.
Tim Burrows, left, Mark Ellis and Nigel Burnham RIP: The team behind the concert programming at The Band Room
Singing Bones was their first recording after moving away from the midwestern alternative country scene of Chicago, Illinois, in 2001 to the southwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where their songs became infused with the desert sun and crawling reptiles, Mariachi and Morricone.
Defining the dark end of Americana for more than 30 years, Brett writes the music and Rennie writes the words. Their work has been covered by many artists, including Jeff Tweedy, Andrew Bird and Phoebe Bridgers. Their song Far From Any Road was the opening theme for HBO’s True Detective (season one) and still receives thousands of Shazams every week from all over the world.
Asked to describe their music Brett says: “Western gothic”, inspired by the abandoned strip malls of desert America where thorny weeds slowly reclaim the land.
Handsome Family songs may be dark, but there is always laughter on stage, where Rennie sings as well as plays banjo and bass. She often introduces songs with seemingly unrelated stories. Brett, with his deep baritone and stentorian presence, holds centre stage. The two are joined regularly by multi-instrumentalists Alex McMahon (electric guitar and pedal steel) and Jason Toth (percussion and Omnichord).
The artwork for The Handsome Family’s 2026 reissue of Singing Bones
The Handsome Family’s last studio album, September 2023’s Hollow, began with a scream in the night on a record that delved into the natural world at the edges of the man-made and was lush with leaves, shadows and occult mystery.
“One night around 4 am, Rennie started screaming in her sleep,” recalls Brett. “She screamed, ‘Come into the circle Joseph! There’s no moon tonight’. Scary as it was, I thought, man, that’s a good chorus!”
Naming his proudest moments, Brett picks “the check [cheque] Richard Starkey [Ringo Starr] wrote to buy all our CDs and the words ‘The Handsome Family’ written in David Bowie’s last notebook. “There’s been a lot of smashed coffee cups in our house over the years, but we’re still unable to resist the urge to make music,” says Rennie.
When she is not writing lyrics, Rennie works on commissioned pet portraits. “I also do commissioned work of people, places and stories, but mostly I paint animals in animal heavens,” she says. All acrylic paintings are framed in wood with dried bean appliqués. “I also incorporate the subject’s name either on the frame or within the painting,” she adds.
The Handsome Family’s Rennie and Brett Sparks: Purveyors of “Western gothic”