Jesca Hoop

Event information

“Jesca Hoop's music is like a four sided coin. She is an old soul, like a black pearl, a good witch or red moon. Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night.” - Tom Waits

“By turns soulful and contemplative, spirited and witty, Hoop effortlessly shifts emotional gear, a striking ability to meld the traditional and the contemporary and her forceful, crystalline voice
the constants” - Time Out

“Genuinely gorgeous… the likes of which come along all too rarely” - Music Week

Californian-born, Manchester-dwelling Jesca Hoop returns for a series of live shows in the New Year. The past year has seen BBC 6Music favourite Jesca support Eels on their summer run, duet & tour with Peter Gabriel, and do the rounds of the European festival circuit, as well as recording & releasing her stripped down Snowglobe EP to much acclaim. She is now busy in Zeitgeist Studio in Los Angeles, putting the finishing touches to her next full-length studio album, as yet untitled, which will come to light in 2012.

“The Lady Gaga of freak folk” (The Independent), Jesca's adventurous songwriting and idiosyncratic vocals have earned favorable comparisons to such cutting-edge forbears as Björk, Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell. “Those women inspired a generation, and I'm of that generation,” Hoop acknowledges. “I'm trying to get to what's innately mine. My heroes set this example for me. My only aim is to be just like myself.”

With a back-story as varied and colorful as Hoop's, she certainly faces no shortage of material to draw from in that quest. Indeed, Jesca's songs are a series of indelible tales from a life less ordinary.

www.soundcloud.com/stephenhudson

Stephen Hudson is a singer living in Lancaster who writes songs about Heat magazine, dog-walking and teenage boy's murderous fantasies over their parents. Whether solo or backed by his country-garage band the Fiat Pandas, his sets veer from fragile, funny and fierce.

His first single 'Tallulah?' came in a handmade case shaped like a red piano, and quickly sold out after being played on Steve Lamacq's BBC Radio 2 show.
He has played all over the UK (one tour exclusively playing venues where haggis or black pudding was available), and shared bills with bands such as the Guillemots, Badly Drawn Boy, and Hot Club de Paris.

"A genuinely gifted talent" Songs From Under the Floorboards

"Beautiful, melodically exquisite indie-pop" Rough Trade