Name: JOHN BRAMWELL (solo)
Start: 2024-05-25T20:00:00+01:00
Location: 8 Horton Street, HX1 1PU Halifax, United Kingdom

Anyone who saw John as part of I Am Kloot's Minster gig or his 3 night residency at the old place will know what a treat this will be.
No support, John will be doing 2 sets.
Tickets on sale now via Seetickets & the bar. Members £22/full £22.50
‘A unique both literally and metaphorically’ – Lauren Laverne
‘My favourite songwriter of all time’ – Cate Blanchett [who chose Bramwell-penned ‘Proof’ as her Desert Island Disk on the BBC Radio 4 show]
‘The UK’s finest export’ New York Times
‘Bramwell’s new songs are spellbinding’ The Guardian

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, he’s travelling a very different path, his stunning new album The Light Fantastic is almost a complete U-turn from his Kloot-days. Darker clouds have been banished, there are strings and 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 puts it, “It’s been great to find the joy of making music once again. These are the most uplifting songs of my career.”
When Kloot ceased in 2014 - stopping playing together, rather than officially splitting up - he felt burned out, tired after years on the road. “I’d started to feel like an employee,” he says. “I just wasn’t functioning creatively. I was 50 and wanted other experiences.” Initially, this took the form of extensive
solo touring. Feeling reinvigorated and rejuvenated from the freedom of the industry, he played everywhere from an old German church run by hippies to villages nearby festivals he was playing too, travelling in an old Mercedes camper fan with his faithful dog Henry in the back. “The response was
often like, ‘I can’t believe you’re playing in my village. Shouldn’t you be at the [Manchester] Apollo or somewhere?’” However, after hundreds of such shows - which produced a live album, Live 2016 and self-released solo debut, 2017’s Leave The Empty Spaces - 2020 brought lockdown and John suddenly wasn’t playing any gigs at all. “I went into a sort of slump,” he admits now. “I realised I’d created a little world away from reality. So when that finished it hit me harder than I expected.” There
were harder, more personal blows too.. His parents having divorced when he was younger, by 2020, his father had been ill for 15 years and died just before the pandemic struck. Then when the singer’s mother had dementia and became terminally ill he wasn’t allowed to see her.
Feeling isolated and “financially and mentally under duress”, he poured everything into his music but far from the melancholy or dark album we might have expected, the guitars, drums, cello and lyrical and musical warmth are positively joyous.
The singer - the smallest child in an east Manchester comprehensive and growing up with a single mum - has always been one of life’s outsiders, and has never liked being pushed around. He’s also - as he has increasingly realised as he’s got older - one of life’s romantics.