Name: Vinyl Sessions: The The - Soul Mining
Start: 2026-03-08T12:00:00+00:00
Location: Church St, CO1 1NF Colchester, United Kingdom

Tickets £4
Doors open 12pm, show starts at 12:30pm
This show is for a seated audience.
The bar will be open throughout.
The The / Soul Mining
Most of us will muddle through the emotional intensity of late adolescence before moving on with the rest of our lives – but if you’re Matt Johnson, you shut yourself away in the bedroom above the Stratford pub your parents run, and channel all that self-doubt and sense of isolation into what will eventually become the deeply introspective lyrics of your debut album. ‘The The’ was essentially a loose collective of mates and session musicians with Johnson at the centre calling the creative shots, and it was an approach that paid dividends on Soul Mining. Operating at a place where post-punk meets synthpop and landing somewhere neatly in the middle, Johnson’s sometimes despondent words (‘Another year over and what have I done? / My aspirations have shrivelled in the sun’) are brought to vivid life here, with walloping drums, sparkling guitar figures and even a piano solo from a certain Jools Holland at one point. You won’t find many albums that could accommodate the wistful, big-hearted warmth of a song like ‘This Is the Day’ AND the full-throttle, beat-driven closing track ‘Giant’ – but this one did, and went on to become an 80s cult classic that demands to be heard loud.
The album playback will be followed by a Q&A session.
After a short break, we'll follow the album with our usual ‘Dead Wax’ session. Bring along a vinyl disc of your choice and hear a track from it played through the Arts Centre PA. This can be anything you like, for any reason – the more ‘out there’ the better.