With Greg Kane
October
Matilda Mann
Sunday 11th October, 7pm
Òran Mór
oran-mor.co.uk
Matilda Mann is a young English indie folk/pop musician from West London. She is blessed with a voice that’s as close to the beauty of Karen Carpenter’s as I’ve heard.
In 2024 she started to garner a fan base after one of her songs was featured in the popular video game Life Is Strange, hence her audiences can be quite gamey geeky. She acknowledges this by playing match-making games at her gigs called ‘Meet Cutes’.
Willing audience participants fill in a questionnaire about themselves and Matilda and her band sift through them to find suitable match-ups and bring them on stage to meet. She admits though that their success rate is not that high.
Her 2nd album Kismet is released on the 4th September and she’s out on tour around the UK in October.
Choice Track: ‘Inventing’
Duran Duran
Thursday 15th October, 6.30pm
OVO Hydro
ovohydro.com
It doesn’t get more 80s iconic than Birmingham-born Duran Duran. The name comes from a character in the 1968 sci-fi movie Barbarella, starring 60s icon Jane Fonda.
I had a friend called Frankie who DJ’d in my local pub in the 80s. Every time I would walk in he would play a Duran track… knowing it’d wind me up as I wasn’t their biggest fan at the time. But after a few years of Frankie’s persistence, I slowly came round.
Frankie was right. Duran Duran were the good guys, making glamorous power pop that was a dominant part of the soundtrack to our mono-cultured lives back then.
I miss DJ Frankie (he emigrated to America) and I miss my local pub (now a posh restaurant), but at least Duran Duran have stood the test of time and are still here.
Choice Track: ‘Skin Trade’
James Blake
Wednesday 21st October, 7pm
Galvanizers Yard, SWG3
SWG3.tv
James Blake Litherland is a 30-something, multi-award-winning English singer-songwriter and record producer. Known for his emotive, soulful light head voice and use of falsetto, he first gained recognition around 2010.
His most recent and seventh studio album, Trying Times, is one of my picks for album of the year. It’s so beautiful and yet so threatening.
To me, his voice has more soul in it than ever before. But the music and arrangements are as avant-garde and complex as ever. It can be quite intimidating for the audience going to see him; he does not make a spectacle, but instead draws you into his world, which can often be multifarious and tangled.
Hence I was surprised to find him headlining the New Music Stage at the BBC Radio One Big Weekend live event earlier this year, but it has to be one of the most compelling live performances I’ve ever watched.
Choice Track: ‘Just A Little Higher’
