Shows

Liz Green, Ben Wetherill, Tom Brosseau - Brighton Mon 29th September 2008 At the Komedia Studio Theatre, Brighton



Liz Green (Live):
‘Mid-Term Report No 1 Best New Act’ June 08 Mojo
 “Her delicate songs are a perfect knot of grassroots jazz, muddy blues and homespun folk, and recall the kiss of a needle on a brittle 78… you sense that once the world gets wind of her elegant, spooky songs there will be nowhere for Green to hide.” Observer Music Monthly
“Lilting folk, spiked with venom and stalked by sadness” Sunday Times
“Hauntingly beautiful” The Sun
“Astonishing raw blues” Time Out
“Part Joanna Newsom, part thirties-starlet” Esquire
“Green could quite literally charm the birds off the trees… beautiful.” DJ Magazine
“Beautifully spectral” Fact
“An enthralling other-worldly combination of Billie Holiday and Judy Garland” Flux

Liz Green has come a long way in just one year considering she has only released one single, the acclaimed ‘Bad Medicine’. She has hit everyone’s ‘one to watch’ radars from the Observer Music Monthly to Zane Lowe on Radio One. Added to this, after gracing the Mojo BBQ at this year’s SXSW, Liz impressed so much that the magazine listed her number one in their top ten acts to watch this year and invited her to support Rachel Unthank.

Green’s introduction to music was an education in pop, via her Dad’s mix tapes. Ranging from the Stones and Chuck Berry to Jackson 5 and Elton John, they inspired Green to pick up a guitar, although it took her another seven years to learn four chords! It wasn’t until she discovered finger picking that she began playing ‘properly’ and writing her own songs. The style she has developed also goes some way to explaining her love affair with country and bluegrass. It was well worth the wait.


Ben Wetherill (Live)
Wetherill mixes traditional songs with haunting originals and veers between straight-up gritty folk and ethereal psychedelia. His voice possesses a fragile quality, somehow not of this era but also fresh sounding. Though acoustic folk is hardly a new concept, it is very difficult to think of any particular artist he is imitating. Sandman.
"Bonkers, totally individual..." Artrocker
"A genuinely enchanting performer" Nude Magazine
"Leaves you wondering why all music can't be this good" Tasty Fanzine
"Simply stunning...Spellbinding" Whisperin' & Hollerin'
Signed to New Yorks Badabing label along with Manchester's Red Deer Club. Album just out, recorded with A Hawk and a Hacksaw in Hungary.

Recorded in a disused 19th-century palace on the outskirts of Budapest, Benjamin Wetherill's first album captures the intimacy of a delicate folk idiom along with the innovation of original technique and approach. Wetherill, a Leeds native who has been making his own music for almost a decade, plays intricate fingerpicked guitar passages, and sings with a lilting style unlike anybody recording today.

Jeremy Barnes, A Hawk and a Hacksaw's inventive songwriter, offered to produce his debut album. Barnes enlisted his Hun Hangar Ensemble of Hungarian musicians for the recording, expanding Wetherill's songs to include a feather orchestra of light touches and subtle accents.The effect is startling.

Tom Brosseau (Live)
There are some singers, a rare few, whom it's hard to believe are really from this time, such is the otherworldly pull of their voice. Dakota songman Tom Brosseau is one of these strange birds. Were his great height, shock of hay-gold hair and old-fashioned demeanour not clue enough, his music conjures a long-gone world of dusty romance and sweetness. There's the voice, for starters: a high, wavering thing that weaves itself to soft guitar plucks with lace-like delicacy (how fitting that he was taught to play guitar by his grandmother). And then of course, the subject matter. Brosseau uses language with a straightforward grace that recalls the writing of John Steinbeck, and in the tradition of all great rustic music (blues, folk, bluegrass), frilly valentine moments sit side-by-side with menace and darkness, with nail-vanished fingers loading up revolvers, and hastily dug meadow graves- Sophie Harris - Time Out

Tom Brosseau is one of our utmost favourite artists. How nice then that we get him to replace the otherwise engaged Essie for the Brighton leg of the tour. Tom, Ben and Liz is something of a dream team here. This is one show and a half.