Anyone who knows me (Oliver) will appreciate how much this show means to me! The singer of my all-time favourite band and, in my opinion, the best singer The Hollies have ever had.
Peter Howarth has been the lead singer of the Hollies for 21 years. This solo performance (two sets) features Hollies hits, songs from Peter’s West End period in Only The Lonely, the Roy Orbison Story and also some of his own compositions. All in all a rare experience in a small cottage in the Hampshire countryside!
A festive visit from one of our most treasured performers.
SOLO SHOW plus support from Hibbett And Christopher (Chris T-T)
Lee Bains is a songwriter from Birmingham, Alabama, who, since 2012, has
released four studio albums of what Rolling Stone once called “Southern gospel
punk.” His music has received acclaim from the likes of The New York Times, NPR,
Mojo, Uncut, Sonic Magazine, and the Guardian. His most recent album, Old-Time
Folks, was released by Don Giovanni Records in 2022, and explored stories of
People’s movements in the Deep South. He will release a live solo album on Don
Giovanni in 2026. He has collaborated in live performance and on recordings with
artists including Lonnie Holley, Moor Mother, Pussy Riot, and Algiers. After first
having his poems published by The New Yorker in 2021, Lee will see his debut
poetry collection, WORK LUNCH, published by Hub City Press in October 2026. In
addition to touring around the U.S. and Europe, Lee has lent his music to support
striking coal miners, immigrants’ rights groups, abortion funds, and anti-racism
organizations. He has performed and read at Emory University, the University of
Mississippi, Tulane University, Auburn University, and The Royal Institute of
Technology (Stockholm, Sweden).
www.wegottickets.com/sc4m
IN ASSOCIATION WITH …
As I thought I’d be out of action all summer, I have booked no shows.
However …
But we have a show “In association with …”.
LAURA VEIRS at Papillon, Southampton, 17 September
https://papillon.seetickets.com/…/laur…/papillon/3615200
Git yer tickets now!
ON SALE MAY 8 at www.wegottickets.com/sc4m
“There’s a line in the E.E. Cummings poem ‘Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond’ which goes ‘No one, not even the rain, has such small hands’ which I paraphrased to ‘Nothing can wash this away, not even the rain’ –– I’ve always loved that imagery and intrigue… I’ve never been a realist, the magic and
mystery is where my heart lies and where my mind wonders…” John Bramwell –– 2026
As the singer in I Am Kloot from 1999 to 2014, John Bramwell achieved a Mercury Prize nomination for 2010’s The Sky At Night, a Top 10 chart position for 2013’s Let It All In, numerous UK and European tours and a triumphant farewell at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with an orchestra in 2014.
Now, as a solo artist, Bramwell travels a very different path, a path that criss-crosses the length and breadth of the UK with a humble agenda of taking his heartwarming songs to the stage and enjoying another moment in time with his devoted fans.
The stunning 2023 sophomore solo album, The Light Fantastic was an almost complete u-turn from the I Am Kloot outlook they were known for. Darker clouds banished and in replacement strings, four-part harmonies [a warming development, since Kloot never had any backing vocals] and a dozen gloriously exhilarating, beautifully crafted and observed songs about life, humanity, the universe and everything. As John put it, “It’s been great to find the joy of making music once again. These are the most uplifting songs of my career.”
The album received unanimous praise from the UK press but it is the all-encapsulating live show where Bramwell conjures up his true magic as songwriter and performer. Bramwell has been on a never-ending rolling adventure since his workings away from Kloot and in the last three years has visited almost every parish in England, Scotland and Wales to be met with halls, theatres, arts centres, churches, festival tents and folk clubs full with his eager fans waiting to see which direction Bramwell will take the mood of the night – the enriched, wildly playful inter-song banter is so good, a stand up comedy tour has been contemplated.
Bramwell’s razor sharp wit, on the line and refreshingly true [and often hilarious] observations and instantly recognisable haunting vocal channelled through some of the most honest and direct songwriting of our times has seen Bramwell championed in rave reviews, time after time. Most recently, God Is In The TV celebrated John’s 2025 Beautiful Days performance as the highlight of the weekend.
As Bramwell looks on to another year the 2026 road extends further and wider than before – a much anticipated tour of Ireland awaits as too many of the UK’s finest venues where John’s cultivated audiences will be treated to an unforgettable evening and experience.
Praise for The Light Fantastic
‘The regular harmonising with his cast of supporting musicians is especially beautiful’ CLASH
‘Wonderfully grown-up pop music delivered by an adept songwriter’ – 4* MOJO
‘This is hazy music, with purpose, and very pretty with it.’ – 4* The Times
‘A splendid solo set of sumptuous vocal harmonies’ – UNCUT
Previous Acclaim
‘A unique voice both literally and metaphorically’ – Lauren Laverne
‘Bramwell’s new songs are spellbinding’ – The Guardian
‘My favourite songwriter of all time’ – Cate Blanchett
‘The UK’s finest export’ – New York Times
Chuck Prophet and Stephanie Finch tour in stripped down format as a quartet.
Tickets from www.sc4m.co.uk/sc4m
A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A mechanic lies among the spare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he can afford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a wandering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strange and richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s eleventh album, The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, he teases
vivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica—but sound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as young songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell cite him as a formative influence.
As varied as they are, these new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his family’s past: a stray sketch, an old poem by a family friend, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time,” he says, “but usually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer will do, McMurtry collects little ideas and hangs on to them for years, sometimes even decades. “South Texas Lawman” grew out of a line from a poem by a friend of the McMurtry clan, T.D. Hobart. Driven by gravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section, it’s a careful study of a man whose feelings of obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final verse. “Dwight’d stay at our house way back in the ‘70s, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit he wrote this poem about his father’s attitude toward South Texas. He wrote it down on cardboard, and I came across it recently. There was a line about hunting quail on horseback, and that was the seed of the song. I’ve lost the poem since then.”
The rumbling title track, a kind of squirrelly blues, features two mysterious figures who appear only to those slipping from reality, yet it’s never grim nor especially despairing. Instead, McMurtry namechecks a “Weird Al” deep cut and depicts a tortured soul who doesn’t have to work a nine-to-five. He finds a defiant humor in the situation at odds with the gravity of the source material. “The title of the album and that song comes from my stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked me if he ever talked to me about his hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died, but hadn’t mentioned to me anything about seeing things. She told me his favorite hallucinations were the black dog and the wandering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictional character.”
Soon McMurtry had enough of these songs for a new record. “It happened like all my records happened. It’d been too long since I’d had a record that the press could write about and get people to come out to my shows. It was time.” What was different this time was the presence of his old friend Don Dixon, who produced McMurtry’s third album, Where You’d Hide the Body?, back in 1995. “A couple of years ago I quit producing myself. I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. I needed to go back to producer school, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complicated Game, and then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. It seemed natural to revisit Mr. Dixon’s homeroom. I wanted to learn some of what he’s learned over the last thirty years.” During sessions at Wire Recording in Austin, McMurtry observed firsthand Dixon’s grasp of digital recording technology as well as his instinctual approach to tracking. “What Don’s really good at is being able to sense when it’s happening. He can hear when it’s going down. If I’m producing myself and I don’t have him, I have to do three takes and then go in and listen to them. Listening to those three takes can take about 15 minutes. So Dixon’s ability to know when it’s happening is crucial, because it can cut 15 minutes out of the day. That can really save a session, because you only have so many hours in the day and only so much energy.
Working with McMurtry’s trusted backing band—Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on guitar, Daren Hess on drums, BettySoo on backing vocals—they worked to create something that sounds spontaneous, as though he’s writing the songs as you hear them. They were open to odd experiments, weird whims, and happy accidents, such as the cover of Jon Dee Graham’s “Laredo” that opens the album. It’s an opioid blues: testimony from a part-time junkie losing a weekend to dope. “We were playing a benefit for Jon Dee at the Hole in the Wall there in Austin, and we thought it’d be good if we played one of his songs. We rehearsed the song in the studio, and it sounded good. The drums were ready. We’d already got the sounds up. Might as well record it.”
“Laredo” is one of a pair of covers that bookend The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy, the other being Kris Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song.” “I did that one a few weeks after our initial sessions. It was just me and BettySoo, then we added drums and bass later on. Kris had just passed not too long before we recorded it. I guess that’s why I was thinking about him.” Like Hobart’s poem, it’s a bit of inspiration excavated from deep within his own life. “Kris was one of my major influences as a child. He was the first person that I recognized as a songwriter. I hadn’t really thought about where songs came from, but I started listening to Kristofferson as a songwriter and thinking, How do you do this? He was actually the second concert I saw. I was nine. He and the band were having such a good time, and that really solidified for me that this was what I wanted to do with my life.”
Once the album was mixed, mastered, and sequenced, McMurtry recalled a rough pencil sketch he had found a few years earlier in his father’s effects. It seemed like it might make a good cover. “I knew it was of me, but I didn’t realize who drew it. I asked my mom and my stepdad, and finally I asked my stepmom, Faye, who said it looked like Ken Kesey’s work back in the ‘60s. She was married to Ken for forty years.” The Merry Prankster’s—Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators—stopped by often to
visit Larry McMurtry and his family. “I don’t remember their first visit, the one documented in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I was too young, but I do remember a couple of Ken’s visits. I guess he drew it on one of those later stops. I remembered it and thought it would be the perfect art, but I had to go back through the storage locker. It’s a miracle that I found it again.”
It’s a fitting image for an album that scavenges personal history for inspiration. Even the songwriter himself doesn’t always know what will happen or where the songs will take him. “You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song. A song can come from anywhere, but the main inspiration is fear. Specifically, fear of irrelevance. If you don’t have songs, you don’t have a record. If you don’t have a record, you don’t have a tour. You gotta keep putting out work.”
Hitchcock remains a truly one-of-a-kind artist –surrealist rock ‘n’ roller, iconic troubadour, guitarist, poet, painter, and performer. An unparalleled, deeply individualistic songwriter and stylist, Hitchcock has traversed many genres with humour, intelligence and originality over 30 albums and seemingly infinite live performances.From The Soft Boys’ proto-psych-punk and The Egyptians’ Dadaist pop to solo masterpieces like 1984’s milestone I Often Dream of Trainsand 1990’s Eye, Hitchcock has crafted a strikingly original oeuvre rife with sagacious observation, astringent wit, recurring marine life, mechanised rail services, cheese, Clint Eastwood, and innumerable finely drawn characters, real and imagined.
A full-colour, 32 page magazine detailing the history of the Railway Inn as it celebrates forty years of presenting live music. Available to pre-order now here: https://sc4m.co.uk/order-loco-motion/
It’s the perfect gift for anyone interested in music, travel and Americana. Available from Amazon, or any bookshop, or direct from me.
Part travelogue, part guide book, part music memoir but mainly observational nonsense – Banjo On My Knee shows you how to survive a three-week journey through the music of America’s South and avoid some of the pitfalls of US travel.