Keep Me Going (All Night) is the debut single from Manchester four-piece Hates Talking. Fronted by Sam Carson, formerly of Lunar, the band have spent lockdown honing their sound for an assault on the Manchester scene and further afield and announce their presence with this earworm of a first public reveal.
Day two of Bolton's new Right To Roam festival saw an outdoor stage in the town centre as well as at the Octagon, Alma and Vaults. We caught the last two local bands outside - Pageant Mum and Clouds And Errors - before heading to the Octagon for local boy James Holt and Granfalloon revealing tracks from his forthcoming Positive Songs album.
Right To Roam is a new two-day festival around a number of venues in Bolton town centre, part of an ambition plan of local music lovers and venues to inject some life into scene that gets dwarfed by the bright lights of Manchester down the road. We visited the main stage in the town's newly refurbished and impressive Octagon Theatre to catch Ist Ist, Gravediggers Union and locals Clouds And Errors.
John Bramwell concluded his Hebden Bridge Trades Club residency with the third sold-out night of the run of socially-distanced shows accompanied and supported by Harriet Bradshaw on cello. He delighted a rapt audience with a set of I Am Kloot classics stripped down and reinvented as well as tracks from his forthcoming Full Harmonic Band record The Light Fantastic.
A sunny Manchester mid-afternoon felt like a perfect introduction to Julia Bardo's forthcoming Bauhaus L'Appartamento album as she played a seven-song set of tracks taken from the album with her five-piece band on the main stage in Manchester International Festival's Cathedral Square hub.
One of the highlights of the Manchester International Festival for us is the free series of live performances that take place across the city. Moved across from the Town Hall due to the ongoing works there, Cathedral Square is home to this year's hub and on a wet Monday night, Dave Haslam has curated two of the North West's most talked-about young bands in The Lounge Society and Blanketman.
It’s easy to lose yourself in the songs of Dublin four piece Odd Morris. New track The Once Was Enough, a taster from their forthcoming EP Cityscape The Ballet due later this year, follows in the same vein. It’s dreamy and haunting with brooding sonic landscapes full of intent and sentiment that tug at the heartstrings.
The Seahorses, Dodgy and The Bluetones were three of the more recognisable names in the mid 1990s Britpop explosion and these days their front men are out on the solo tour circuit, delivering a dose of old favourites whilst writing new materials. Having struck up friendships, this socially distanced show not only has all three of them performing on their own but one of their first ever live performances of their new MCH (Morriss, Clark, Helme) super-group in the picturesque Bowdon Rooms in Altrincham.
Whilst festivals are being cancelled around our ears, Manchester's After All Festival continued in a socially distanced format on Thursday night - a sold-out event at Manchester's Tribeca combining a range of different styles of music and urban poetry to an appreciative crowd that had been starved of live music for sixteen months.
