If we are to use Please Please You’s forthcoming gig schedule as our barometer then we are going to be in for a very long hot summer indeed. Following hard on the back of its awesome Spring campaign – one that included some really cracking performances from the likes of Promised Land Sound, Big Thief, Happyness, and Angel Olsen – the York-based independent live music promoter is once more right on the money as it lines up yet another beautiful batch of some of the very best indie, folk and alternative music that is around today.
Here are just a few of God Is In The TV’s selected highlights from these upcoming shows:
June will only be a matter of a few days old when the former Coral guitarist Bill Ryder–Jones plays at The Crescent in York in what will be just one of eight dates on his ‘Intimate Venue Acoustic Tour’. If it is anywhere near half as good as the last time he was here (in February 2016) then we should be in for another absolute treat.
The following week at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds and making their first appearances in Europe since 2012, it is the turn of New Zealand’s legends of original indie-pop, The Bats to enthral us. Together now for 35 years and still performing with their original line-up, this is a very rare opportunity to catch one of the most unsung, yet highly influential bands of the age in live action.
The following month, another old Please Please You favourite making the most welcome of returns to these Northern shores is Justin Townes Earle. Hailing from Nashville, Tennessee the man with the famous heritage will be here to promote his latest album, Kids On The Street. Here is a taste of what we can expect at The Crescent from this most noble of country music outsiders:
The following week it is all back to the Brudenell for Detroit garage rock outfit, The Gories. An important influence on The White Stripes, Jack White was suitably moved to describe the super scuzzed-out trio as “the best garage band in America since the ’60s. Very primitive…they made people with Les Pauls and Marshall amps look like idiots.”
And come the end of July it is over the Pennines to Manchester’s Night & Day Cafe to catch Sam Outlaw, the man who has played such a big part in reinvigorating Southern California’s reputation for producing a distinctive homegown country sound. Having spent much of last year out on tour with Margo Price, Outlaw will this time be here with his full band. Expect to hear plenty of songs from his recently released album Tenderheart and what Outlaw himself calls his “soCal country” music.
August promises us Hurray For The Riff Raff at The Crescent. If you missed them when they were last in the UK in March – and even if you did catch them then – do yourselves a huge favour by going to see them this time round. They are really quite brilliant. Led by Alynda Segarro, the New Orleans’ outfit distil the disparate elements of folk, punk, country and various other Hispanic-American influences into one huge, spectacular musical force of nature.
And then on consecutive nights – once more at The Crescent – we will be royally entertained by first the DIY hero from Anacortes, Washington, Karl Blau and his fellow-American singer-songwriter Laura Gibson in what is now a co-headline show on the 19th of August, and then the very next evening the Scots indie-band indie band that Kurt Cobain famously wanted to join, BMX Bandits.
It really is going to be a great summer. For the full list of all of Please Please You’s forthcoming shows, and how to buy tickets for them, go HERE
