** PLEASE NOTE: This show will take place at our alternative home for the evening: THE LEXINGTON, 96-98 Pentonville Road, London, N1 9JB. Doors open 7.30pm. Music starts 8.15pm. **

Explaining MARTY O’REILLY’s music is like describing a dream. It feels familiar, but at the same time unchartered. His songs sound bluesy but not blues, folk but not folk, soulful but not soul. Marty’s voice is beautiful and unique, his lyrics stark yet lush over gritty electrified guitar, melding beautifully into genre-defying music within the vast definitions of Americana. One can hear an urgency and complexity in the songs, expressing something elemental and perhaps contradictory: love and anger, joy and pain, real and imagined.

The live performance is at the core of Marty’s projects. On stage, whether accompanied by a band, or alone, he enters a trance and the music is born again as something new every night. It’s what his followers call “magic”. He goes from raw gospel blues to cinematic epics, from heavy driving grooves to delicately arranged folk songs. Marty leaves the stage out of breath and sweaty, his audience in awe. It’s hard to describe, impossible to categorize. Yet people who know the music will try to explain it to you, just as you might struggle to explain a dream in the morning. The details might slip away as you recount them, but the feeling remains.

 

 

Support…

From the wilds of the mud-ridden East coast of the UK comes a wry and seemingly unlikely take on the alt-country and blues sounds of the United States, in the form of the engaging talent of TOM PARKES.

With a stage persona that is in equal parts imposing and self-deprecating, Tom has nailed songwriting early. That such an authentic Americana voice can spring from the Essex clay rather than the red dirt of Texas is a wholly welcome development and such is the wit, dexterity and excellence of the songs that the dissonance you might reasonably expect never appears.

The listener effortlessly believes in his characters – the outlaws, the unwelcome interlopers, the drunkards and the lost souls that frequent a fictional but believable bar loosely based on a real licensed premises (in Colchester rather than Fort Worth).

Tom started to make inroads into the broader music community a handful of years back with his old band ‘The Ghost Train Porters’, acquiring a fan list that included no less than the BBC’s Steve Lamacq. Despite critical acclaim the band fizzled out as quickly as they had sprung up and Tom retired to lick his wounds and plan his next move.

A slow return via highly-appreciated Maverick Festival performances and a smattering of local shows ensued and the debut solo album ‘Stranger In Town’ is due for release in June 2018.