Sunday October 1

Matt Costa

The California skateboarder turned singer-songwriter returns for another night of songs culled from debut album Songs We Sing, variously flirting with folk psychedelia (Sweet Thursday, Behind The Moon), country (Sweet Rose, Ballad of Miss Kate), Beatles ragtime pop (Oh Dear), surf noir, and classical pop, even calling to mind Paul Simon on Yellow Taxi.

An unfussy but beguiling affair, it evokes the halcyon days of 60s folk troubadours who could capture your ear with their warm, scuffed voices, your heart with their simple melodies and your mind with the things they had to say. Well worth a listen.

 8pm. £11. Barfly

Sunday October 1

Kate Doubleday

It’s a couple of years now since the Birmingham singer-songwriter released her debut album, Renewal, so there’s been a reasonable piling up of new material that will see the light of day later this year on Belonging. She’ll be showcasing a fair few of them here in what’s become something of a rare live appearance these days. There will, of course, also be nuggets from the first album’s collection of jazz and world tinted rootsy folk and songs of loss and renewal, hopefully including the loving Child of Gold, the South African influenced Footsteps and the summery musical colours of Rise and Fall.

7.30pm. £4.50. mac

Sunday October 1

Babyshambles

Assuming appointments with judges, solicitors or dealers don’t get in the way, celebrity junkie Pete Doherty and whatever shape the band’s in should be along to celebrate finding a label willing to risk giving them a new deal by rattling through a selection of ditties from the inconsistent Down In Albion with its wanderings between the cloakrooms of Morrissey, Ray Davies and Joe Strummer. Indeed, it seems decidedly ironic that the new single happens to be a pub rock cover of Janie Jones (B-Unique) which, you’ll recall was originally done by The Clash.

Sharing stage delights will be The Holloways, their fiddle friendly, guitar jogging Cockerney ska pop recently exhibiting its joie de vivre across the Two Left Feet that came complete with a cover of old swingtime standard Hallelujah I Love Her So. They arrive now with debut album So This Is Great Britain (TVT), a rabble rousing bunch of good time tunes stitched with a social and politcal concience on tracks like the Caribbean calyspo bouncing new single Generator, Dancefloor, Malconented One, Happiness and Penniless, Nothing For The Kids and, as you might expect, the title track.

Clearly you’ll spot the Madness, Sham 69 and Clash influences, but listen carefully and you might suspect they’re also fans of Chas n Dave.

 7pm. £17. Carling Academy

Monday October 2

James Hunter

A white boy from Colchester perhaps, but he sounds just like Sam Cooke on the title track of his aptly titled debut album, People Gonna Talk (Rounder) while the funkier r&b numbers call to mind such names as Lee Dorsey, James Brown and Wilson Pickett.

Guitars strutting, organ burping and horns parping, he leads a fine hip sliding groove through the likes of No Smoke Without Fire, a chicken scratching Kick it Around and a roustabout Talking ‘Bout My Love while his mellower side’s shown to equally glowing effect on the casual sways of All Through Cryin’, It’s Easy To Say and Mollena. Unlike many who dip into America’s musical past for inspiration, Hunter shows an authentic love of his influences that ripples through his music like the real thing, indeed, if they only had vinyl hiss these could sound like forgotten gems from the vaults of Atlantic and Stax. One not to miss.

7.30pm. £12.50. Bar Academy

Monday October 2

Electric Soft Parade

Having parted company with major label land following sophomore album The American Adventure, between also playing as part of The Brakes Brighton brothers Alex and Tom White have retrenched and gone back to the self-help ethos. Last year saw the release of The Human Body EP, tracks like the Beatles meet Brian Wilson jamming with The Strokes Cold World and the seven minute Everybody Wants proof that whatever may have seen them fall from favour it wasn’t the strength of the songwriting.

Since when they’ve been busy putting together as yet untitled album number three, due for release next year. A twelve track set sporting titles like If That’s The Case, Then I Don’t Know, Life In The Back-Seat, Have You Ever Felt Like It’s Too Late? and No Need To Be Down-Hearted it would seem to be a bit of knocked down got up again affair, and with Misunderstanding apparently something of a pop classic in waiting, it seems their time in the sun may yet be in store.

Opening up are Dundee outfit The Hazey Janes. Named after a Nick Drake song they comprise siblings Matthew and Alice Marra (dad being Scottish songwriting legend Michael Marra), Liam Brennan and Andrew Mitchell and, to judge by debut album Hotel Radio, are clearly deeply in love with the folk-rock sound of The Byrds.

Roger McGuinn's influence shines through from the jangling opening track, Always There and while Toulouse may take time out for a flurry of punky pop tinged with the Beatles, the countrified harmonies and shimmering guitars of Moanin' Face summon the ghost of Gram Parsons while Step Into The Country leans in the direction of Dave Crosby's CS&N years.

Gary Louris of the Jayhawks provides backing vocals to big swaying ballad Baby Tell Me and his band provides a suitable reference point for several of the tracks, though with Alice taking over vocal duties for the la la la-ing Don't Look Away you might suspect that the family's got some early Debbie Harry and 60s West Coast pop in the CD collection too. They’re lifting Fire In The Sky as a download single to coincide with the tour, and apparently promising a Fairport cover as a bonus to show they’re not just 60s West Coast obsessives.

If they’re half as good live as on disc, this should be a pretty rousing night, especially if the set includes powerpop gem Your Enemy, a blur of ringing guitar effervescence to rival the classic new wave flurries of Plastic Bertrand's Ca Plane Pour Moi or The Undertones and make you feel simply glad to be alive.

Tuesday October 3

Pink

"I don’t wanna be a stupid girl", she sings on the opening ‘be yourself don’t ape pop princesses’ track of current album I’m Not Dead (Zomba). Well clearly Philadelphia’s very own Alicia Moore is anything but. Her previous multi-million selling albums were pretty much stunners (well, ok, maybe not Try This), and, bursting with attitude, her fourth tops even those amping up the fusion of rock and dance that’s had her somewhat inaccurately tagged as the new Madonna. She’s much more of a grown up Avril rock chick than Madge, and while she may not still be co-writing with Linda Perry the album’s still packed with guitars erect, lungs filled stadium anthems like Long Way To Be Happy, Nobody Knows, U & Ur Hand, the sweary rolling pop rock Leave Me Alone (I’m Lonely) and the title track that will have those who remember the classic days of Pat Benatar weeping with joy.

It’s not all maxed out ballsy gusto though. Dear Mr President is a stripped back folksy open letter to Bush, Conversations With My 13 Year Old Self is teen angst ensconced in moody goth rock drama as she gets back in touch with her inner child, The One That Got Away is an acoustic bluesy folk number invested with the spirit of Janis Joplin while the melancholia haunted I Got Money Now suggests what might have happened had Janis Ian been born into the era of scuffed hip hop r&b beats.

Interestingly Cuz I Can is a don’t mess with me 80s stomper that owes a considerable debt to both Slade and Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, an electropop influence that also surfaces on her ode to self-pleasuring Fingers, while hidden bonus acoustic track, I Have Seen The Rain, a duet with her dad who wrote it (presumably in answer to the Creedence hit) while serving in Vietnam, suggests that if she ever fancies it there’s a career waiting out there in coffee bar folk land too.

Not tonight though, this is one to get the adrenaline pumped and your rock fists punching the air, for a powerhouse I’m not dead reckoning.

Support comes from Mudbone, known to his folks as Gary Cooper, once part of Bootsy Collins's funk conglomerations (he co-founded Rubber Band) and with a CV that includes work with Prince, Herbie Hancock and Mtume as well as a solo hit under the name of Sly Fox.

He’s spent the last 10 years living in France, experimenting with a mix of r&b, soul, dance and rock. Four years ago he met up with Dave Stewart and got turned on to the blues, the result being Stewart produced/co-written album Fresh Mud (Influx Music) which brings together Cooper's old and new found musical influences, and throws in a nip of gospel and hip hop for good measure.

Things head out in blistering form with Make The Devil Mad, a funky voodoo blues groove that calls to mind a swampy amalgam of Dr John, Marsha Hunt and War given a coat of distorted guitar noise, and from thereon he barely puts a foot or note wrong.

Listen in and you'll hear his love of old school soul bubbling up on several numbers. Boy From Baltimore harks to Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man days but with a dash of Barry White to the spoken female vocals, the organ driven gospel of Freedom's Coming (where he shares vocals with Stewart) conjures thoughts of Curtis Mayfield, Karma's a jazz n rap visit to Chambers Brothers days with Hendrix guitar, Come Together Now's tale of a hard life saved by God (featuring the London Community Choir and Jools Holland) evokes both Gaye and The Temptations while Where The Wind Lives nods in the direction of The Isleys. In fact the harmonica splayed slow boogie Stranded For Life is the only track that actually gets down and dirty with the delta blues.

Temptation and tough times inform the lyrics, but spirituality and hope generally win out, providing the poppiest track with Pray, a radio friendly number that sounds like a cross between prince and the Lighthouse Family, and, arguably the album's finest moment with the closing Home. A spare, rousingly anthemic and melodically infectious gospel number that finds Cooper in darkly sonorous voice, it also features a rather special and very rare guest appearance by a certain Mr Dylan, who also shares songwriting credits. It's a remarkable album, and likely to prove every bit as much so live.

7.30pm. £26.50. NIA

Tuesday October 3

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly

Otherwise known as Sam Duckworth, a 20 year old Southend multi-instrumentalist deconstructivist singer-songwriter who, in tandem with cornet player Mike Glenister, has just released debut album The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager (Atlantic).

Slotting, for convenience’s sake, into the current folktronica movement, it takes a critical and at times jaundiced view of contemporary Britain through the eyes of a confused kid dealing with mixed feelings for a dead end home town, racism, getting drunk, dealing with relationships and looking for their place in the world.

Once More With Feeling and Lighthouse Keeper are the sort of classic rippling 60s acoustic picked folk also being rediscovered by the likes of Conor Oberst, but the bulk of the album is washed with electronics (live, his guitar and Glenister’s trumpet are the only instruments), skipping cheerily through Call Me Ishmael’s hymn to individuality, synthesised vibes driving along the jazzy An Oak Tree, bringing a clatter to the brass warmed glow of If I Had A Pound For Every Song Title I’d Be 30 Short Of Getting Out Of This Mess or throwing a fuzz of distortion into the middle of Whitewash Is Brainwash.

Lyrically astute and bristling with intelligent and insightful observations (‘don't let people make you think just because you're young, you're useless,’ he sings in Once More With Feeling), his social commentary calls to mind the early Billy Bragg, quieter but no less angry and passionate about the injustices around him. Up up and away, then.

Joining the tour is Iain Archer, the former Snow Patrol guitarist responsible for co-writing the Novello winning Run. Not one to sit around twiddling thumbs, last year he released third solo album Flood The Tanks and he’s back on the road now with follow-up Magnetic North (Pias).

Like its predecessor it’s a mix of simple introspective acoustic numbers like the softly sung ticking rhythmed stunner that is Canal Song (End of Sentence), the druggy Lifeboat and Everything I’ve Got’s slow chiming stargazing, complemented by the noisier My Bloody Valentine/Yo La Tengo side of things represented by a clattering guitar pop Minus Ten, the surging staccato When It Kick’s In and a frosty rimmed Long Jump.

Drenched in melancholy but (as per Collect Yourself) also far more uplifting than his past offerings, it’s not hard to imagine several of the songs, especially Soleil with its loose limbed bass and the haunting windswept piano ballad Arriero, fitting cosily into his former band’s current album.

As a solo performer, Archer may not ever find himself on quite the same arena filling level, but if he keeps producing quality material like this then the trophy cabinet will probably need some extra shelves.

7.30pm. £6. Carling Academy 2

Tuesday October 3

Johnny Panic

It’s frequently a sign of career desperation when, after a string of self-penned flops, an artist resorts to doing a cover version. Case in point here with the socially conscious London pop punk outfit who, having reassembled the line up and dusted down the record label, have had a stab at the old Turtles nugget, Happy Together. They don’t add anything new, they don’t improve it, they don’t even seem interested in singing it. Doubtless, the rest of the world will share their enthusiasm.

Local outfit support’s provided by Templeton Pek, a fairly run of the mill alt-rock/punk outfit far too in thrall to their better America role models to make much of an impression.

7.30pm. £6. Bar Academy

Tuesday October 3


Liam Frost & The Slowdown Family

Another sensitive acoustic folksy singer-songwriter with a band, Frost comes from Prestwich (and sings with accent intact) and has, not unreasonably, been compared to a shake up of Springsteen, The Waterboys, Shane McGowan and Badly Drawn Boy. Certainly, Show Me How The Spectres Dance (Lavolta) is an impressive debut veined with songs of loss and hope, a confessional self-examining journey through regret to find the light at the end of the tunnel. Indeed, poignant piano ballad The Mourners of St Paul (where the lyrics reference Louis Armstrong’s It’s A Wonderful World) takes a funeral as its subject but, unsentimentally coloured by children’s voices and rising to majestic climax invests it with a celebration of a life and survival rather than mourning.

While the fur-throated Frost may lean towards introspection and identify the world’s darker shades it doesn’t mean he dwells on the musically lugubrious. City At A Standstill bounds along with rising piano crescendos and rattling guitars (a touch of Lloyd Cole to go with the Springsteen perhaps) even She Painted Pictures (where he laments the vicious world) and the Brubeck influenced Paperboats skip along fleet of foot with an upbeat spring while even the bitter This Is Love finds the charity to ‘raise a glass to that bastard’.

If you want to curl up in the bedsit, he handles that too, going foetal for If Tonight We Could Only Sleep and Road Signs And Red Lights where his delivery leads you to thoughts of Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes.

With a keen ear for fleshing out the familiar colours of the genre (listen to the steel guitar adding a country flavour to Try, Try, Try), Frost is clearly not content to simply ride the rails when he’s so evidently capable of steering his own direction.

 7.30pm. £8. Glee Club

Tuesday October 3

Imogen Heap

Three years on from her collaboration as half of Frou Frou, breathy voiced Brit Heap returns to the fray for Speak For Yourself, an album of twinkling coffee table electropop that blends sunkissed sweetness easy listening with classy sophistication.

Things open with new single Headlock, a machine beat conjuring up images of robotic dancers but still pumping with heart. Likewise the pulsating beats of Goodnight and Go with its Jeff Beck guitar or Loose Ends, a number that evokes almost nostalgic thoughts of 80s Howard Jones. You’ll likely be familiar with Hide and Seek, a song featured on The OC , which, with its treated vocals sounds not a million miles away from Laurie Anderson, but much warmer.

It's not all soft and gentle. Comparatively speaking, Daylight Robbery is a virtual roar of noise while Walk and Just For Now ably demonstrate the sort of range and experimentation she's embraced. Heap's speaking clearly, you really should listen to what she has to say.

7.30pm. £15. Warwick Arts Centre (+ Thu Oct 12, 7.30pm. £12.50. Carling Academy)

Tuesday October 3


Papa Roach

Looking to find a new radio friendly pop edge to the old worn out nu-metal formula, the four piece have loaded up their The Paramour Sessions (Geffen) album with big hooks and choruses. The vocals are still raspy, the guitars and drums still heavy and I Devise My Own Devise does the old battering ram pistons at dawn bit, but songs like Crash, The World Around You, Time Is Running out (where they actually have a who oh oh chorus) and What Do You Do? are so desperate to take Bon Jovi’s audience by the hand it’s almost embarrassing. And, be warned, they’ve roped in a stray orchestra for the bombastic chest-swelling closer Roses On My Grave.

Not that these aren’t perfectly listenable stadium contenders or that they won’t provide a suitably hammering live show, but if you took the band’s name off the label you’d have a hard time making a positive i.d.

7.30pm. £15. Wulfrun Hall

Tuesday October 3


Sparks

It's almost 22 years since Ron and Russell Mael released their breakthrough album, Kimono My House and while it's been some time since they last enjoyed chart favour, their influence has become increasingly evident among bands such as Maximo Park.

Following a tentative comeback with 2003's Lil' Beethoven, the brothers now return in vintage form with Hello Young Lovers (Gut), their best album in two decades. It's distinctively Sparks, full of quasi-operatic camp bombast, complex time signatures, smart hooks, wittily sardonic and often barking lyrics and a wonderful sense of deadpan. The opening Bohemian Rhapsodic six epic minutes of the BBC banned single Dick Around announces the album's musical agenda in grand style with a chorus line of 'all I do now is dick around' before sliding into the fingersnapping feline prowl of Perfume, a love song that recounts a list of women and their designer scents and declares devotion to the one with just natural olfactory attractions.

Then its over to Weimar cabaret territory for the semi-spoken The Very Next Flight and the pizzicato stringed pop of the brilliantly lyrically double edged (Baby Baby) Can I Invade Your Country, a love song for our times.

Their way with a skewed image is in fine form with the pulsing military stepping beats of Metaphor as they how observe that 'chicks dig metaphors' and advise 'use them wisely and you'll never know the hell of loneliness'.

There's more lyrical genius on Waterproof, a jabbery slice of arpeggio break up song pop as Russell resists being moved by a lover's tears and declares that 'barometric pressure has no relevance to me'.

Elsewhere they waltz in twirly paranoia through There's No Such Thing As Aliens, a song almost totally comprised of the title line, revisit operatic baroque with Rock Rock Rock and go nervy doo wop on Here Kitty before wrapping up with When I Sit Down To Play The Organ Ar The Notre Dame Cathedral, a seven minute track that's mixes a celebration of the Divine with a secular more earthly devotion, partly musically evocative of This Town Ain't Big Enough, partly an expansive cinerama visitation of Bach and Handel complete with a Hallelujah chorus. Now isn't it nice to have some real romance back in the world.

They’ll be featuring the entire album in the first half of the show, which, as anyone who’s ever seen them live will now, promises to be a highly individual affair with back projections and cod theatrical dramatics, before giving over the second to such greatest hits as Something For The Girl With Everything, Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth and, naturally, This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us.

7.30pm. £25. W’hampton Civic Hall

Tuesday October 3


Hazel O’Connor

It’s a long time since Coventry born O’Connor and the music charts were briefly on speaking terms, but while she may not have had a highly visible profile she’s been consistently turning out solid, folk infused albums and slowly metamorphosing into the West Midlands answer to Marianne Faithful.

She’s touring here on the back of her most recent release, Hidden Heart (Invisible Hands), an album that finds her exploring earthy Celtic folk territory, a style well suited to her smoky rasp of a voice. But her feet aren’t just planted on Irish soil. The opening track, Acoustically Yours, is a marvellous slow marching air with Cumbrian pipes and didgeridoo that is underpinned with an Eastern atmosphere while I’ll See You Again maintains the musical cross-fertilisation with conga drums pattering behind the harp (courtesy of the famed Cormac de Barra), flute and recorder with their dawn mist on the hills textures and the burning urgency of Perfect Days adds rainstick and Morrocan flute to the cultural melting pot

She’s in soulful mood with Loveable’s organ and sax, a track that hints at a loamy version of Lighthouse Family while Time After Time brings Latin rhythms and the haunting End of My Days marries Gaelic bodhran with Indian colours. And, on the carpe diem learn to love yourself anthem, Fear of Flying, there’s even a children’s choir.

Produced (and orchestrated) by Martin Rushent and featuring such stalwart names as harpist Cormac De Barra, violinist Maire Breatnach and, on the eco-mystical slow carnival tempo Hidden, a spooked duet with Moya Brennan, as you’ll have guessed, it’s a heady musical brew. But lyrically too it has weight, addressing such themes as one’s place in the cosmos, death, loss, the commonality of mankind, passing time and, naturally, relationships. It strikes particularly lingering notes on Who Will Care?’s story of the death of a lonely addict at the end of her hope, and the refusal to succumb to despair that is If Only, a dramatic duet on with Tony Dangerfield from The Subterraneans (two of whom also provide the guitars) that sounds as if it were written as the defiant closing song in some theatre piece.

There’s little chance anything here will return her to the spotlight she once fleetingly enjoyed with things like Breaking Glass and Will You, but it’s a richly seasoned, organically crafted and emotionally resonant album of which she can be justly proud and which a lot more people should really make an effort to discover.

 8.30pm. £12.50. The Robin 2, Bilston

Wednesday October 4

Bugz in the Attic

One for the dedicated clubbers, this is something of an intimate excursion for the Bugz collective in the wake of their Back In The Dog House (V2) album. Sweet soul house is the order of the day as they spin through the old school funky Move Aside, get dirty in a Rick James stylee for I’m Gonna Letcha, sashay the handclap sway disco boogie on Consequences, work out the bass grooves to No More and head back to the 70s with its spangles, strobes and wannabe dance dogs for an electro jerked version of Yarbrough & Peoples hit Don’t Stop The Music.

Quite how many of the crew will be doing the live thang, and just quite how live that will actually be, you’ll only find out by queuing early to get a space near the knob twiddling decks and the crowded dance floor.

9pm. £10. Jam House, Jewellery Quarter

Thursday October 5

Maximo Park

Still flushed with the success of debut album A Certain Trigger with its cocktail of Sparks, Roxy, Buzzocks and The Who, the Newcastle lads don’t have anything new to flog around this set of dates. They are, however, gearing up to start recording the next album so along with current art pop staples such as Graffiti and The Coast Is Always Changing, chances are they might just slip in a couple of try outs to test the water.

7.30pm. £12.50. Carling Academy

Paul Rodgers

Thursday October 5

Having had a quick nap after fronting last year’s Queen link-up tour, the former Free/Bad Company frontman now steps back out to compile a set list of the other hits from his past life that he couldn’t wedge in alongside Bohemian Rhapsody.

Back in the day, Rodgers was one of the great British blues rock vocalists, electrifying such classics as All Right Now, Wishing Well, Fire and Water, Feel Like Makin’ Love, Can't Get Enough and Good Lovin' Gone Bad with his muscular, soulful gutsy wail. But, after Bad Co folded, things never really seemed to find the same spark, descending into the eminently forgettable stodge released with The Firm and The Law, neither of whom managed to trouble the UK album charts, despite the fact the former was a collaboration with Jimmy Page.

Then there are the solo albums, patchily decent but workmanlike at best with material that never matched the calibre of his voice, although Rodgers did find a return to form when he got back to his roots covering the music of Muddy Waters.

Doubtless there’ll be few in the audience screaming out to hear things like Radioactive or Find A Way, so prospects look good for a set packed with those earlier nuggets that made his name and, I daresay, a fair few blues standards into the bargain.

7.30pm. £25. Symphony Hall

Friday October 6

Disturbed

Born out of the nu-metal scene back in the late 90s, the Michigan crew are now in their third album, Ten Thousand Fists (Reprise) sticking pretty much to what they know with loud hard riffing guitars, crunching rhythms, melodic choruses, growling urgent vocals and songs about rising above oppression, being true to yourself, solidarity and the usual metal subjects.

Things like I’m Alive, Just Stop and the Iron Maiden-like title track all highlight their fondness for anthemics while the guttural Sons of Plunder, Decadence and Sacred Lie keep the flame alive for pummelling hard hat metal.

Although Overburdened takes the tempo down and comes with an acoustic guitar intro, they don’t do anything quite as sissy as slipping in a ballad to show their tender side, but they do own up to having at some stage listened to Phil Collins era Genesis with an unexpected hard but not entirely unfaithful cover of Land of Confusion. Metalheads will keep fingers crossed they don’t decide to throw in In The Air Tonight as a special treat encore.
 

Manchester feral hardcore punk metal rockers Zico Chain warm up proceedings, gargling through choice cuts from their self-titled mini album (Hassle) where Chris Glithero does his best to shred his throat and the rest of the band throw themselves into the pursuit of juggernaut thundering riffs in search of a stray Motorhead album. Their punk library gets a turning over with Rollover and the snarly, sweary The Lonely Ones and Social Suicide surely comes from spending too many hours locked up with Stooges albums, but in the end, while fast, raw and energetic, they really aren’t making anything more memorable than noise.

7.30pm. £15. Carling Academy

Saturday October 7

Seth Lakeman

Currently young Britfolk’s big hope to forge a crossover to the mainstream and a bit of a pin-up into the bargain, the fiddle and guitar playing Devonian found himself landing a major label deal with EMI offshoot Relentless (KT Tunstall’s label) in the wake of his cottage kitchen recorded album Freedom Fields. So taking advantage of having a few bob to spare, he went back and tweaked it with some re-recordings, polishing up the sound quality in general and giving a whole new coat of paint to the banjo dappled The White Hare’s sexual allegory that’s being lifted as the next single.

Melding a rock sensibility with the folk tradition, the album’s actually a collection of songs about war and conflict in relation to the West Country, turning up tales of the Civil War on King & Country and the title track and the oppression of tin and copper miners (The Colliers) alongside the more usual staples of love and sex. It’d be nice to think of office workers humming Lady of the Sea’s tale about local Naval traditions as they bustled off to their desks, but somehow, for all of Lakeman’s charms and musical talent, it’s hard to see that happening. Which, quite frankly, is their loss not his.

7.30pm. £10. Wulfrun Hall

Saturday October 7

The Deadstring Brothers

Had plans not gone awry with a fatal overdose, country rock pioneer Gram Parsons might well have joined the Rolling Stones back in the early 70s. Anyone wondering what combination might have sounded like should make an appointment with these Detroit boys. They’re back giving another hand to Starving Winter Report, an album with its feet firmly planted on Exile On Main Street’s cobble stones and singer Kurt Marschke wearing a Jagger drawl. They even have a song called All Over Now.

From the opening Stonesys country rolling strutter Sacred Heart through to the thumping Motown beat meets blues country Lonely Days, there’s not a duff moment. Given the influence of The Band to be heard on Lights Go Out and the gutsy Til The Bleeding Stops it’s no surprise they also turn in a cracking cover of their rootsy swaggering Get Up Jake while Talking’ Born Blues nods the hat to The Band’s old boss circa Highway 61 Revisited.

Fiddles akimbo, Moonlight Only Knows is more straight ahead mountain music country, picking up the earlier Wild Horses soulful ballad notes of Lights Go Out and giving them a bluegrass colouring with the assured unbridled confidence of a band that knows exactly where they’ve come from and where they’re going. They may not be carving out any new highways, but the old roads they travel have rarely been in such good repair.

7.30pm. £9. Little Civic

Sunday October 8

IV Thieves

And here’s a dash more lollopping pop, albeit this time travelling in from Texas with The Day Is A Downer (One Little Indian) EP, the quartet bemoaning the tedium of urban life, lonely nights and unfulfilled relationships on the chorus hooking title track, a loping Catastrophe and the slow soaring Chase Me Off/Out with its nods to Spector’s big pop sound.

Formerly Nic Armstrong and the Thieves, whose The Greatest White Liar album earned them support slots with Oasis and Paul Weller, they’ve moved on, shortening the name but expanding the musical prowess, refining the former raw retro into a more focused fist of emotional power. A new album’s on the cards for early next year, so this should be a useful taster of what’s in store.

7.30pm. £6. Jug of Ale, Moseley

Sunday October 8


Susanna and the Magical Orchestra

Promoted by Birmingham Jazz, this promises to be a bit of special and somewhat different musical evening out, one where dropped pins may as well be steel girders. Fronted by Norway’s Susanna Wallumred with keyboard player Morten Qvenild providing the Magical Orchestra part of the equation when not working with his own jazz piano trio, they’ll be showcasing new album Melody Mountain (Rune Grammofon). A hushed collection of minimalist cover versions that calls to mind the work of fellow Scandinavian Stina Nordenstam in its glacial fragility, the choices are nothing if not eclectic, the interpretations scintillating. Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was never exactly rock n roll, but their version is so hauntingly slow it makes a funeral dirge seem like a house party anthem, and then they bring much the same frozen pace to AC/DC’s It’s A Long Way To The Top, Kiss classic Crazy, Crazy Nights, Depeche Mode’s Enjoy The Silence and, apparently de rigeur for such projects now, a skeletal reading of Joy Division evergreen Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Elsewhere, you’ll find reinterprations of Prince (Condition of the Heart), Dylan (Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, pretty much the album’s dance number) and Sandy Denny (a lovely drone reading of Fotheringay), but perhaps the number that’s most at home is Scott Walker’s It’s Raining Today, given a bare boned torch treatment that would fit right in with his own current musical inclinations.

Live there’s a very good chance, they’ll also drop in their cover of Jolene, an utterly distraught contrast to that of the White Stripes and, like everything else here, likely to send shivers as big as icebergs down your spine.

8pm. £10. Glee Club

Sunday October 8


The Ordinary Boys

Continuing their quest to be the new Madness, here’s another skank through current album Brassbound, blending the Jam flavours of Thanks To The Girl and Life Will Be The Death Of Me with the jerky ska beats of Boys Will Be Boys, On An Island, and the nightboat to Cairo that sails through Don’t Live Too Fast. Just in case you missed the point, they even throw in a cover of the old Locomotive hit Rudi’s In Love. It’s hardly bursting with original ideas, but it’s also an infectiously breezy jogalong that dares you to resist its sheer exuberance.

7.30pm. £15. W’hampton Civic Hall

Monday October 9

Orson

They've been called the missing link between the Stones and the Scissor Sisters while influences also include Hall & Oates, Steely Dan, Memphis soul, Led Zep and ELO. Having built a strong word of mouth via MySpace without even having a US deal, they made a strong first impression here with lurching pop No 1 No Tomorrow, but subsequent singles Bright Idea and Happiness have all peaked progressively lower down the charts. Certainly the Bright Idea (Mercury) album shows they played their strongest cards from the off, the rest of the material undeniably sunny, hooks laden melodic power pop but lacking the necessary magic touch.

That said the crooning do wop intro to Save The World is a delight while the Lennonesque piano ballad Look Around, the Billy Joel sounding double header Downtown and So Ahead of Me and the Stones meet George Michael dance swagger Last Night are all a few notches above filler material. They don’t, as The Okay Song demonstrates, sound too convincing when they pose as snotty punk pop boys, and you get the feeling they may well have exhausted all their ideas in one fell swoop, but for now at least their 15 minutes of fame is still ticking.

7.30pm. £15. Carling Academy

Monday October 9

Cerys Matthews

Catatonia having imploded not least in part to Matthews's well documented excessive love of the party life, she moved to Texas, dried out, got married and made a country album Cockahoop, indulging a love of Dolly Parton, cruising the honky tonk tunes, slipping in a Handsome Family cover to seal her credibility and a Welsh hymn to affirm her roots.

A couple of years and more tales of being rescued from tipping over the edge of the abyss later, she returns with Never Said Goodbye (Rough Trade), shedding almost all of the Nashville trappings in the process, the only remnant being the brief boozy barroom drunken sway of What Kind Of Man.

So, it’s back to indie pop then, laced with the sort of electronica embodied in the shuffling beats and drum rolls of Streets of New York, a song that talks of leaving Wales for the USA and which sets the scene for the subsequent search for home and self. Like the previous album, it yearns for the simpler life and, maybe because she’s Welsh, is also drenched in references to rain, actual and metaphorical. Indeed, there’s even a track called This Endless Rain.

It’s not as immediate an album as Cockahoop, and yet, perversely, you don’t have to work so hard resisting irritation at her warbling tones. The distinctive coy little vixen touches are still in evidence, but there’s also more muscle flexing, gutsily soaring on Oxygen where, pushed upwards by a lurching beat and brass, she sounds a bit like Melanie when she gets to the belting bits.

There’s a couple of stumbles, not least the clumsy Bird In The Hand and the messily clattering cacophony of electronica that is Ruby, but Open Roads and Morning Sunshine pleasingly show she’s still capable of recapturing Catatonia’s simple love of pop while Seeds finds her exploring 70s AOR with her own added witchy playfulness. And yet, as with Cockahoop, it’s the final track, the lullabying Elan, written by and duetted in Welsh with Gruff Rhys from the Super Furries that’s the real gem. You should definitely keep a welcome for her in your hillsides.

 8pm. £10. Glee Club

Tuesday October 10

Handsome Family

Over the years they’ve been musical partners Brett and Rennie Sparks have built a reputation as one of the world’s finest purveyors of melancholy Americana, their music conjuring images of dust hung desert nights and Appalachian mountains silhouetted against the evening sky as they sit round the camp fire singing songs of loss, death and damnation.

So, a surprise then that current album Last Days of Wonder is a relatively more upbeat affair, noting a world waltzing towards self-destruction but celebrating the infinite moments of wonder that nature provides to soothe the soul’s fears.

Using such instruments as mellotron and wine glasses and drawing on the sepia tinted worlds of hillbilly, tin pan alley, cowboy country, western slow waltzers and, on Beautiful William, even medieval tunes, Brett crafts the careworn honky tonk melodies upon which songs like Somewhere Else To Be, Bowling Alley Blues (very George Jones) and Your Great Journey are built.

Meanwhile, unfolding in airport lounges (the throaty Neil Young-like All The Time In Airports), bowling alleys (Bowling Alley Bar) and graveyards (White Lights), Rennie tells stories of hunters shooting prey that transform into their true love (Hunter Green), of shoes hung over telephone wires (These Golden Jewels) and post apocalypse life (After We Shot The Grizzly), striking emotional chords from such images as a black glove on the cliffs, broken cheap sunglasses, and ‘a small bag of onion rings’.

Existential, metaphysical, whatever, the Sparks dig beneath the dry clay and turn dulled stones into diamonds. A thing of wonder indeed, and if your luck’s in, they might even slip in their splendid cover of Famous Blue Raincoat featured on the soundtrack for Leonard Cohen documentary I’m Your Man.

Warming up proceedings will be Angie Palmer, the bluesy-roots singer-songwriter who’s been called a Brit Lucinda Williams. She’ll be spotlighting Tales of Light and Darkness (Akrasia) the more musically diverse follow up to the critically lauded Road, vignettes of love, loss and redemption sitting alongside more epic panoramas of life’s darker sides, co-penned with European philosophy lecturer Paul Mason.

Literature proves a touchstone, drawing on Steinbeck’s Depression stories (Rose of Sharon), Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic romance (Ravens) and the work of Mikhail Bulgakov (the train rhythm rolling Fool’s Gold), but so too do the closer to home experiences of a friend’s death on the poignant acoustic Columbus For A Day.

At present, she remains something of a largely undiscovered talent, but with albums like these it can only be a matter of time before the word starts getting around.

 8pm. £11. Glee Club

Tuesday October 10

Hot Chip

The casio popsters return to serve reminder of reminder of current album, The Warning, and flag up burbling glam stomp new single Over And Over. Rather over praised in some quarters and certainly unworthy of its Mercury Music Prize nomination, it’s pleasant summery stuff with all the frothy technopop bells and whistles and krautrock lite 80s electro you might expect. Tracks like the strobed Arrest Yourself, the Human League-like No Fit State, cool Isleys soul Look After Me and the beats clinking Just Like We are probably ideal for the less energetic dancefloors. But it’s all rather limply insipid. "Hot Chip will break your leg", they sing on The Warning. More like tread on your toe and apologise for hours afterwards.

8pm. £10. Irish Centre

Tuesday October 10

Nightingales

Fronted by Robert Lloyd, they were Birmingham’s answer to The Fall back in the 80s, second only to Mark E Smith’s band in the number of Peel sessions they recorded. They split towards the end of the decade, but after intermittent reunions Lloyd finally put together a new line-up a couple of years back.

Now fully active, they’ve come up with a new album, Out of True (Iron Man), a rather splendid beast that serves as reminder of Lloyd’s sharp, socially conscious songwriting skills and underline just how well his voice has matured over the years

As musically eclectic as ever, it cheerfully ranges from the Captain Beefheart meets Talking Heads of the steam train rhythmed spoken Born In Birmingham, shades of Bryan Ferry on The Chorus Is The Title, to the mutant rockabilly of Carry On Up The Ante and Bob Luman’s 50s hit Let’s Think About Living, and the feedback distortion noise of Workshy Wonderland.

Add to that the contrast between the Johnny Cash slow rumble of Black Country and a marvellous dark brown Leonard Cohen style version of Ray Davies’s There’s A New World Just Opening For Me, with the clattering Beefheart art punk blues of the delightfully titled UK Randy Mom Epidemic and Kevin Coyne’s Good Boy, and it’s hard to imagine this not cropping up on several year end best of lists.

As a live proposition, they’re likely to be a lot more ramshackle, but then what was always part of the ‘gales charm and unpredictability and just one more incentive to get hot and sweaty crushed at the front of the stage.

8pm. £5. Jug of Ale

Tuesday October 10

Bullets & Octane

Throaty, rasping guitars, throbbing bass and pounding drums provide the staple diet for this South California punk-influenced hard rock quartet, their name aptly summing up their aggressive, punching approach and the sound of frontman Gene Louis (named, trivia fans, for jazz drummers Gene Krupa and Louis Belson).

Intense, driving, urgent but melody based rock n roll, I Ain’t Your Savior may summon thoughts of Motorhead at full tilt but you’ll also hear elements of Nirvana and blues country in there too while several tracks may put older ears in mind of the Dead Kennedys.

Bathroom Floor briefly pulls the pace down to a marching military beat with a soaring stadium friendly chorus, but otherwise their In The Mouth Of The Young (RCA) album is a constant battering ram of concrete crushing riffs, cuts such as Cancer California, Queen Mirage, Signed In Alcohol, Going Blind and My Disease sprayed with references to booze drugs, rebellion and a general two fingers to the rest of the world. As yet they’re an unknown quantity over here, but anyone still moping over the cancellation of the Avenged Sevenfold tour should find their sorrows admirably drowned.

7.30pm. £8. Bar Academy

Tuesday October 10

Paramore

Signed to Fueled By Ramen, label home to Panic At The Disco and The Academy Is, the teenage Tennessee five piece fronted by Hayley Williams have been making a few waves with punky emo flavoured debut album All We Know Is Falling. After pulling out of Reading because of her voice problems, they finally make it over here for their debut UK tour with new single, the high octane pop charge of Emergency, but really it’s difficult to see what the fuss is about.

7.30pm. £8. Carling Academy 2

Tuesday October 10

The Klaxons

New invaders of the indie-acid dancefloor, the London trio mash up guitars and synths for a nu rave techno fusion, spacing out limbs with doomy slouching new single Magick where Bowie has it large with Krautpunk and PiL disco. Expect to go seriously bleep.

Wednesday October 11

The Kooks

One of the year’s finer and more welcome successes, the Brighton indie popsters head back on the road for a continued reminder of debut album Inside In/Inside Out with its sharply written songs of youthful frustration and screwed up relationships. A throwback to the 60s and 70s with comparisons to everyone from The Jam and The Kinks to Dexys and The Strokes, it’s not actually offering anything new but when they sharpen their pop razor on something like the simple acoustic Seaside, the rollocking goodtime summery strum She Moves In Her Own Way and You Don’t Love Me’s big beat 60s r&b pop staccato jitters they are very good indeed.

Tagged as part of the so-called Thamesbeat movement, Larrikin Love are a chirpy bunch with a fondness for bouncy gypsy rock, ska n soul that, on things like Edwould and Meet Me By The Getaway Car come across like a cross between Dexys and The Specials. Which may well explain the line ‘everything that I adore came well before 1984’ on the state of the nation disillusionment of Downing Street Kindling.

They’re out and about in the cause of The Freedom Spark (Transgressive), a loosely conceptual debut album that falls into three parts, Hate, Fairytale and Freedom, generally studded with less than sunny references to their hometown, country, recent single Happy As Annie being an ironically chirpy tale of rape and murder.

A little strapped for a stable musical identity as they leapfrog between different sounds and comparison points, but Ed Larrikin has an appealing vocal catch and with the likes of the fiddle fleshed Celtic village dance clumper At The Feet Of Rae, the poppy Well, Love Does Furnish A Life and the boundingly Bluebirds-like joyous Forever Untitled, they seem set to shift a fair few albums until, if he puts his passport where his mouth is, the band sell up and move to the outer Hebrides.

7.30pm. £13. Carling Academy

Wednesday October 11

James Dean Bradfield

With the Manics on an extended break, the individual members have taken the time to try out the solo experience. Nicky Wire’s just released his album but Bradfield was first out of the tracks with The Great Western (Columbia) and now becomes the first to rediscover what life’s like on the small venue circuit rather than stadiums.

The break from band pressures has clearly done him good, dusting off the cobwebs that clogged up the last two Manics album and emerging reinvigorated with a bunch of punchy guitar driven and summery sounding songs packed with an energy long missing. There’s even handclaps and a 50s sha la la on the opening That’s No Way To Tell A Lie, arguably the closest in sound to the earlier Manics material.

On the uptempo front, the chorus swooping pop and lazy verse melodies of Bad Boys And Painkillers is easily the stand out though both Run Romeo Run with its Supertramp keyboards and the vaguely ELO colours of Say Hello To The Pope are no slouches, while The Wrong Beginning is in a league of its own with the slow loping melody and an African tribal percussion beat and background choral croons.

But its arguably the more reflective numbers that really give the work its distinction, the tribute to their late manager Philip Hall on An English Gentleman, the slow building anthemic Still A Long Way To Go, acoustic folksy ballad To See A Friend in Tears and, introed with a touch of Laurie Anderson’s O Superman electronic pulses, the closing, Which Way To Kyffin.

If he’s as revitalised performing live as he was in the studio (and it’s not an unreasonable assumption that there might be a few born again Manics numbers in the set) then, like the train on the album sleeve, he can feel well chuffed.

The job of warming things up goes to labelmates Vega4, an Anglo-Irish-Canuck-Kiwi quartet who should be looking forward to breaking out the champagne and celebrating their debut Top 40 hit with the ridiculously catchy chest-beating single Traffic Jam.

It’s a taster of next month’s album, You And Others, an equally infectious collection of emotionally uplifting, variously soaringly melodic and affectingly fragile, ringing guitar songs that should bring a tear to the eye of any Snow Patrol devotee. Indeed Life Is Beautiful could be Chasing Car’s twin brother.

They’ll be showcasing tonight, and in the light of such heart-wringing songs as Tearing Me Apart, Let Go, Bullets and the slow swellingly anthemic Boomerang, you’d be advised to catch them now before you’re queuing outside arenas this time next year.

7.30pm. £12.50. Barfly

Wednesday October 11

Sparklehorse

It’s 11 years now since Mark Linkous formed his band and released their much admired debut album, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. Since then two more have followed, sporting the more manageable titles of Good Morning Spider and It’s A Wonderful Life. However, five years and a battle with drug addiction on he’s resumed his linguistically expansive habits for the fourth, the snappily titled Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain (Capitol). Recorded in fits and starts, with Linkous playing everything, it’s good to report too that the band have maintained and improved upon his brand of melancholic art rock Americana and fuzzed guitar storms.

Those who favour the latter should be lending ears to Ghost in The Sky and It’s No So Hard, a pair of especially noisy distortion rockers, while devotees of their more fragile persona should be prepared to curl up in a corner, fetal-like, and let such numbers as the treated vocal slow pulse Getting It Ready, a ruminative See The Light , the quietly plangent Brian Wilson on acid Knives of Summertime or the dreamy waves of Shade And Honey wash over their bruised souls.

Given his experiences of addiction and depression, it’s not too surprising that the album should be pondering matters of life and death, loss and survival, or that there’s times when the spooked arrangements have the pallor of living ghosts.

It’s decidedly not his most accessible album, and the reworked version of Morning Hollow and the barely there ten minute ethereal and electronic instrumental title track that closes it take some work if you’re not already in an altered state, but for those prepared to free their minds and ears and embrace Linkous’s world, both on record and in the mesmerising live shows, the rewards are infinite.

8pm. £13.50. Glee Club

Wednesday October 11

Give Back Project

A new talent showcase for local bands and singer-songwriters to get their original music out to the public, this mixes up all manner of musical genres with a line up that features such Midlands hopefuls as the Lights, Silent Trigger, Karl Bailey, Mowglee and Bright Size Gypsies. The show will also feature dance routines choreographed by a team from Strictly Dance Fever. A second showcase will take place at the NIA on Nov 20 and music samples of the artists taking part in the project can be checked out at www.givebackproject.co.uk

7.30 pm. £15. Alexandra Theatre

Thursday October 12

James Yorkston & the Athletes

Joining forces with former TalkTalk member Paul Webb (aka Beth Orton collaborator Rustin Man), the Scottish singer-singwriter returns with his third album, The Year Of The Leopard (Domino), a more than worthy companion piece to Moving Up Country and Beyond The River but also a far more optimistic one.

As ever, it’s a spare, hushed early morning (there’s a spoken track actually called 5 a.m.) folksy affair with gently rustic arrangements embracing clarinets and concertinas, the vocals often first takes, the songs generally meditations and reflections on love in all its shades, from first delirium of desire to shattered heartbreak.

One of the song titles, Woozy With Cider (a spoken number where he talks of the dehumanising nature of the city and recalls trying to impress a barmaid with his modest chart success) ably captures the ambience of the album and the intoxicating charms of songs like the lilting I Awoke, the dolorous Don’t Let Me Down and, conjuring images of sun dappled streams, the lazily lovely Us Late Travellers with its image of a cat sleeping on his chest ‘like a seabird riding a wave’.

Warm, romantic and brushed with dew and cobwebs, it’s a beguiling unassuming affair from the man with the jumper and receding hairline, one you’ll want to lie back, close your eyes and soak up as it washes over you with its world-weary magic.

8pm. £8. Glee Club

******CANCELLED Thursday October 12 CANCELLED******

James Morrison

7.30pm. £9. Wulfrun Hall

Thursday October 12

Eleanor McEvoy

Back with an album even more stripped down that Early Hours, and on which she’s taken charge of the arrangements and plays pretty much everything you hear, Out There (Moscodisc) finds the South Wexford singer-songwriter variously mediating on ecology, economics and, in songs about relationships ended, lacking and desired, female strengths and vulnerabilities.

Opening in k.d.lang mood, the smokey lounge ambience, brushed percussion and vibes of Non Smoking Single Female offers a witty plea for romance written in small ads style but with a sub-text about consumerism. In more serious moods, the album moves on embrace the bitter hurt of To Sweep Away A Fool, masculine commitment phobia on Quote I Love You Unquote (co-penned with Dave Rothery of The Beautiful South), the wounded heart sarcasm of the mandolin and fiddled based Suffer So Well, the marimba tinged So Much Trouble’s tale of a woman discovering her husband’s infidelity and, by way of a mirror image, the temptation resisted in the Gaelic infused folk of Wrong So Wrong.

At least Little Luck looks on the brighter side of holding fast to a relationship in the face of everything.

Elsewhere, Vigeland’s Dream uses the Norwegian sculptor as a springboard for a meditation on the connections and emotions art can unlock within us while, embracing wider malaise Fields of Dublin 4 addresses the loss of the city’s soul that’s accompanied its tiger economy and eco concerns come to the fore on a haunting version of Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me, slowed down and sung with just acoustic guitar backing.

It’s one of two covers on the album, the second being her equally bare boned reinterpretation of Little Feat’s Roll Um Easy.

It doesn’t always work, the use of programmed drums and synths at odds with the more organic nature elsewhere, but, again drawing on a musical cocktail of jazz, folk and blues, and never compromising her accent in the phrasing, for the most it’s another quiet triumph for one of Ireland’s most golden yet far to unappreciated talents.

7.30pm. £10. Little Civic

Friday October 13

AFI

Probably not a name that means much to the public at large, but the mascara laden San Francisco quartet have been around since the 90s, churning out a solid welter of no punches pulled metal, singer Davey Havok living up to his name with some throaty yowling, but filtered through an 80s rock sensibility that keeps pop hooks uppermost in the mind. They’re over here in support of new album Decemberunderground (Interscope), a breakout release that debuted at the top of Billboard charts and features Miss Murder, a swaggeringly catchy single that defies you not to let your limbs go swinging across it lollopping, semi-glam stomp. And while things like Kill Caustic may take a brillo pad to the back of the throat, it’s the more melodic, radio tempting valentines that dominate. Tracks such as the acoustic guitar trembling The Interview complete with church organ, punky pop surging The Killing Lights, big stadium friendly offerings Love Like Winter and The Missing Frame, riff monster Summer Shudder and the swellingly anthemic Kiss and Control.

With lyrics that tend to revolve around murder, suicide and death and pain in general, it’s clearly going to find favour with the devil’s fingers brigade, but there’s a real danger the band might find themselves being taken up by a fair few stray Green Day fans as well.

7.30pm. £13.50. Carling Academy

Friday October 13

Jet

You won’t have forgotten that the Australian four piece were responsible for the raw, garage rock urgent brilliance of Are You Gonna Be My Girl, the powerhouse dynamo around which the electrifying Get Born album was formed. So, anticipation for the follow up is understandably high. Sighs of relief then that, while they’ve polished up the image somewhat, Shine On (Atlantic) effortlessly lives up to hopes simply by not messing around with a good thing. Which, basically means, a balance of 70s heads down rock boogie along the lines of Rip It Up, Holiday, That’s All Lies and Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, and tracks that ape Oasis in their fervent Beatles worship.

Indeed, Bring It Back, Come On Come On, piano ballad Shine On and the arms swaying All You Have To Do are haunted by the ghost of John Lennon while Shiny Magazine and even Everlys homage Eleanor, are veined with McCartneyisms.

It’s not all so single-minded in the influences, Skin And Bones sounds like early barroom brawling Faces, complete with burring Ronnie Lane guitar, while there’s times when Stones rock n roll swagger pokes its head through the curtains.

To be honest, nothing here has quite the same stature as their seminal hit, and you have to wonder at times quite why they want to sound like they come from Manchester, but with hooks, wit and sheer energy to spare they’re a good time that’s hard to say no to.

For this intimate prelude to a bigger bash at the Academy next month, they’re supported by Dundee scallywags The View, chasing up debut single Wasted Little DJs with another flurry of barricade storming guitars punky power pop in the shape of Superstar Tradesman (625), a rousing crowd bouncing stormer that calls to mind the days of Scot-punks The Skids.

The View

Also along for the ride are Dublin based mischief makers the 747s, their well received debut album Zampano (Ark) which reveals a fondness for 60s American teen-beat on things like Rain Kiss, Night & Day and Leave Your Job Today, and on Missed That Sun, Nature’s Alibi and the samba hints of Death Of A Star, an enduring love of that very English 60s rock emblemised by The Kinks.

Mixing it up even more, Miles Away is out and out music hall pop with a pub piano while Green & Blue puts on folsky smocks, Goodbye For A While is all Roy Orbison and Into The Shadow is Surfer Girl era Brian Wilson.

Buoyant and wistful in equal measure, as capable of being spiky as they are tender, they probably need to exercise a little more editorial control (at 14 tracks the album outstays its welcome), but if they put on the sort of varied life set the album promises, they can hopefully look forward to avoiding the new Zutons tag.

7.30pm. £10. Barfly

Saturday October 14

The Rifles

The Walthamstow boys continue to flog debut album No Love Lost, looking to show that, whatever early singles When I’m Alone and Local Boy may have suggested, there’s more to them than being Jam soundalikes. While still firmly in the Mod mood, they do throw in some curveballs such as the Clash colours to She’s Got Standards and thoughts of Madness with One Night Stand.

Mostly a flurry of stomping guitar riffs, racing rhythms and beats in the service of slice of life narratives that add talk of Arctic Monkeys to a comparison stew that also stirs in the Editors, Strokes and Franz Ferdinand, listen without prejudice and you’ll find a rather good collection of angsty suburban love songs that, on Narrow Minded Social Club and the jaunty Robin Hood, reveal as much a love for Ray Davies, Squeeze and Billy Bragg as they do Paul Weller.

Sunday October 15

Tina Dico

Formerly the voice of Zero 7, the Danish songbird’s rapidly making a name for herself with In The Red (Finest Gramophone). Written after she relocated to London and suffused with songs about love, loneliness and embracing what life throws at you, it’s a heat-infused torchy set that’s been compared to Joni Mitchell with shades of Elliott Smith, though opening track Losing sounds incredibly like Kiki’s Dee’s Amoreuse, a mood that sustains most of the album where you’re likely to find yourself also thinking Sophie B Hawkins, Judie Tzuke and Julia Fordham.

Lushly but never over orchestrated and making effective use of acoustic arrangements, despite never ranging too far from a basic melodic blueprint songs like Head Shop, Warm Sand, In The Red and new single Give In (which surely borrows from Morissette’s Ironic) slowly insinuate themselves in your head and blood stream until you wonder how you ever got through the day without listening to at least one of them.Support’s provided by Dico’s fellow former Zero 7 singer, Sophie Barker and Australian brother and sister Angus and Julia Stone. They’re over on these shores to promote their debut EP Chocolates & Cigarettes (Independiente), a rather fine collection of shuffling (Paper Aeroplane, Mangio Tree) or dreamy (All Of Me, the wistful piano backed title track) acoustic folk blues that sees them alternating vocal duties, she husky and prowling with Portishead colours (notably on the bluesy Private Lawns), he more akin to Paul Simon.

8pm. £7.50. Glee Club

Sunday October 15

Cord

I’m sure the Leeds quartet never planned it that way, but debut album Other People’s Lives Are Not As Perfect as They Seem (Island) just sounds like a poor man’s Coldplay; you know, yearning vocals with an occasional falsetto, introspective lyrics, tastefully soaring melodies, and radio friendly choruses. Just listen to Sea of Trouble, Winter or Best Days.

Of course, it’s not all Coldplay soundalikes. Sometimes they fancy themselves as a watered down Muse (Already Lost, The Greater Part), Echo & The Bunnymen (Stay With Me Now), and even Queens of the Stone Age (Go Either Way). Sometimes they’re a bit rocky and sometimes they’re a bit mopey, but while listenable enough in the background they’re never sufficiently interesting to make you want to turn up the volume to hear better.

7.30pm. £5. Little Civic

Monday October 16

Guillemots

Things have exploded for the Birmingham/Scottish/Brazilian/Canadian four piece named for a burrowing, crab-eating sea bird. Having released a handful of critically acclaimed singles and built a glowing live reputation, in short succession they scored their first hit with Made Up Love Song # 43 and saw debut album Through The Window Pane lodge itself in the Top 20 and earn a deserved Mercury Music Prize nomination.

One of the most eclectic and exciting acts to have emerged in the past year, the album's testament to their colourful tapestry of sound, one moment sounding like ELO with recent reissued hit single Trains To Brazil the next all lushly ambient with the synth washes of come down chill out folk ballad goes Brill Building Little Bear. Then they dive into the magnificent 11 minute epic Sao Paulo with its ambitious kaleidoscope of musical textures (Elton Johnisms included) sweeping away into a vast widescreen kitchen sink presentation before a Latin American fiesta section and an 1812 crescendo (and music box fade out) that bears testament to frontman/keyboard player/songsmith Fyfe Dangerfield's classical training.

And that's not just bombastic pretension. As a 20 year old he wrote a choral piece, O Emmanuel, that was included on a collection of Christmas music alongside work by Britten and Tavener.

The album is a wonderful musical panorama, at once organic and electronic as it pursues its running motif of travel through the carnivalesque Through The Window Pane's world music flavours, the swooping celebratory electropop Annie, Let's Not Wait with its Latin American beats and the gorgeous pastures of romance on Redwings.

Aside from a tenderly fragile yet joyous voice that sounds though he's been possessed by the soul of Jeff Buckley, Dangerfield (and to no lesser extent fellow members Greig Stewart, MC Lord Magrao and Aristazabel Hawkes) has an expansive musical vision that touches upon genius and madness, producing tracks like A Samba In The Snowy Rain and the six minutes of dreamy, ethereal melancholy that is If The World Ends which are etched with an impossible beauty rarely heard since the vintage days of Scott Walker, Bacharach, Brel and Jimmy Webb.

With the classic timeless orchestral pop notes to be found on We're Here and Through The Window Pane, they've created an album that casts a light of such exuberant optimism as to illuminate the darkest corners of the modern world. You owe it you yourself to surrender to their charms.

7.30pm. £10.50. Alexandra Theatre

Monday October 16

Vincent Vincent and the Villains

London pub rock with a hint of The Smiths and Dexys and a charismatic frontman, following two indie outings VV & the Vs have now signed to EMI, making their debut with the 50s feeling handclappy pop Johnny Two Bands and the equally autobiographical but more rockabilly Seven Inch Record. It’s hard to imagine anything like a lasting career, but they promise to be fun while it lasts.

 8.30pm. £6. Jug of Ale

Tuesday October 17

Jamie T

The lanky Wimbledon lad has taken an upbringing on The Clash, Specials, Rancid and drum n bass and filtered them into his songs about life in modern suburbia. Clearly channelling the spirit of both Billy Bragg and The Streets, he’s more fussed about the spit than the polish, so that he often sounds a bit, well, shambolic and amateur. Following the recent Betty And Her Selfish Sons EP, he returns now with new single If You Got The Money, so hopefully things will have picked up.

 7.30pm. £7.50. Carling Academy 2

Tuesday October 17

Ed Harcourt

Five albums in six years, you can’t say Harcourt’s not prolific. Fortunately, quantity and quality also go hand in hand. Following on from Strangers and its breezy pop hymns to loneliness and anguish, comes The Beautiful Lie (Heavenly), during which time the lad’s found love and got wed.

Thankfully it’s not mellowed his lyrical muse with dark veined songs that address friendship (You Only Call Me When You’re Drunk, Late Night Partner), the devastation of a small town and the lonely guy left behind (Whirlwind In D Minor), loss of childhood innocence and a world going down the sink (a Ben Folds like Visit From The Dead Dog), death (the spare, sad violin haunted The Last Cigarette), despair (the rainwashed autumn streets Shadowboxing), and plastic surgery (dusted folk blues The Pristine Claw).

Musically, there’s a fair few colours to the palette, Until Tomorrow Comes evoking thoughts of 40s dance bands and lonely waltzes, Revolution In The Heart all Thunder Road crashing anthemics, I Am The Drug calling to mind the clattering flamenco of Tom Waits.

All of it though resonates through your fibre, closing up with the minimal tender moods of Braille, where he duets on a love song with the missus, and the chapel hymn sounding anthem to hope and endurance that is Good Friends Are Hard To Find. You should certainly make Harcourt one of your musical best mates.

8pm. £13.50. Glee Club

Tuesday October 17

My Alamo

Formed in Moseley, the rising alt rock riff driving four piece take time out from laying down the debut album to pop corks and celebrate the release of debut single 1994 (7th Star). Foo Fighter thoughts bubble to the surface, even more so on the brief but nagging accompanying Doctor Doctor with its crowd friendly chorus. Expect to see them make major strides next year. Keeping things local, they share the bill with Stourbridge Verve meets U2 boys Midas.

7.30pm. £5. Barfly

Wednesday October 18

Embrace

Having exploded into the nation’s consciousness with No 1 album The Good Will Out, it looked as if they were going to fade away after the two follow ups had to struggle to get into the Top 10. Then came Out Of Nothing which put them back at the top and now they’re riding higher than ever with album number four, This New Day (Independiente).

Sporting anthemic shades of U2, its big music hits the spot with glowing upbeat optimism and soaring choruses invested in such numbers as No Use Crying, You Will Hit The Target Everytime and Celebrate. Even the emotional downers of I Can’t Come Down and end of relationship piano ballad Nature’s Law reach up to shake the heavens. Expect the earth to move too.

Support’s provided by Southampton outfit Delays who, fronted by tremulous voiced Greg Gilbert, will be digging into tracks from both debut album Faded Seaside Glamour and the You See Colours follow up.

With Gilbert sounding like a hybrid of Liz Fraser, Stevie Nicks and a pubescent Roger McGuinn, the band are still translating 60s nostalgia into swooning indie pop. Glistening chiming guitars and pop sensibilities remain to the fore, even incorporating a touch of T Rex on Lillian and electro dance with Out of Nowhere while other standout numbers include Calvary (You and Me), Given Time, an anthemic Hideaway and a nerve tingling Waste Of Space.

7.30pm. £20. Carling Academy.

Tuesday October 17

The Hedrons

Glasgow’s girl trio get back on the road to promote I Need You (Measured), follow up to debut single Be My Friend and another taster for upcoming album One More Won’t Kill Us. Like its predecessor its a riff pummelling slab of dirty rock n roll where PJ Harvey meets The Stooges. Nothing special but a sweaty, beer chugging noise all the same.

 8.30pm. £5. Jug of Ale

Thursday October 19

Fightstar

Having parted company with their record label, former Busted man Charlie’s been declaring that he’s not bothered whether the band have hits or not. Which is lucky since the Unification album’s workmanlike collection of emo-esque rock in thrall to the likes of Linkin Park was never likely to provide them. Still numbers like Lost Like Tears In The Rain and Sleep Well Tonight show he can actually sing while Alex Westaway clearly knows how to rip out a vicious guitar line. But at the end of the day, it’s more bluster than substance.

7.30pm. £12. Carling Academy

Thursday October 19


iLiKETRAiNS

The Leeds quintet pull back into the station for a second helping of current mini album Progress Reform. Featuring A Rook House For Bobby, a darkly melancholic song about the troubled life of grandmaster Bobby Fischer, it builds on their Sigur Ros like love of vast doomed symphonic landscapes with a further five tracks, among them No Military Parade, a sort of postscript to Terra Nova’s glacial account of Captain Scott’s doomed 1912 Antarctic expedition.

The band do like to get their teeth into a narrative. The Beeching Report is a scathing account of the 60s reforms that dismantled the country’s rural rail network sung by one of the axed rail workers while Stainless Steel is an eight minute murder ballad where the cuckolded narrator revenges themselves on their adulterous partner during a three minute sonic guitar and cornet storm.

With the swirling noise of Citizen evocative of the vintage days of Ride, they’re an intense bunch to be sure, and even when they pare things back, as on The Accident, their brand of minimalism still towers like icebergs floating over the heart.

Clad in old Victorian rail uniforms and with a stage set that deploys back projection films of trains, snow and the like, they’ve built a sterling reputation as quirky but far more than some eccentric fad. Worth getting a platform ticket.

Setting the atmosphere are new London three-piece The Early Years, unveiling their self-titled debut album (Beggars Banquet), a flurry of psychedelic guitar rock and fuzzed feedback that calls to mind such luminaries as the Velvets, Spiritualised and Spacemen 3 with, as evidenced on the opening All Ones And Zeros and the lengthy instrumental Musik Der Fruhen Jahre, an added vein of Krautrock.

They do wistful hymnal shoegazing (Things, Brown Hearts) as adeptly as they handle narcotic surging racealongs (The Simple Solution, the Monkees-like So Far Gone) while the lovely stoned clouds of Song For Elizabeth show they can do the nine minute opus without self-indulgence or sending audiences into a coma. If they can bring the same bliss and burning to the live set, then, climaxing with the guitar storm epic High Times & Low Lives, they promise to be very good indeed.

7.30pm. £6. Barfly

Thursday October 19

Boy Kill Boy

Having failed to struggle into the Top 40 with recent organ driven single Civil Sin, the Smiths copyists will be pinning hopes on Shoot Me Down, the latest track to be lifted from debut album Civilian. But even with a cover of Nelly Furtado’s Maneater, it’s hard to get too excited.

7.30pm. £112.50. Irish Centre

Thursday October 19


Eric Bibb

Now pushing his mid-50s, the New Yorker’s long since left behind those best newcomer days of his early 80s releases, but he’s lost none of the easy going acoustic blues brilliance that had the critics sitting up and paying attention. He’s over here promoting Diamond Days (Telearc), his third album in as many years, following on from Friends and A Ship Called Love, and very much a typical Bibb collection of 12 string guitar folk blues and reflective meditations on life’s highs and lows. Save for an excellent cover of Dylan’s Buckets Of Rain with Martin Simpson taking on finger-picking duties, it’s all self-penned material that sees Bibb at the top of his game with stand out numbers like the uplifting rambling blues of Tall Cotton, 30s flavoured doo wop Story Book Hero, harp blowing blues groove Destiny Blues, the spirit raising Shine On, a wistfully autobiographical Heading