Tom Hingley

Event information

Carpet Burns is Tom Hingley’s account of his life as lead singer of Inspiral Carpets, one of the big three bands of the Manchester movement who, along with The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, changed music for a generation. Tom’s own words provide an account of what it felt like to be in the eye of a pop hurricane and what happens when the hits end and the arguments kick in.

Tom’s journey starts in rural Oxfordshire before moving to Manchester and being thrust into the limelight as the new singer with a rapidly climbing pop group. With popular anthems like ‘This Is How It Feels’ and ‘She Comes In The Fall’, several appearances on Top of the Pops and headline gigs at festivals, Inspiral Carpets soon rose to be one of the most popular bands in the country.

This is not your usual music memoir, Tom is from a radically different background to his contemporaries – his father translated the complete works of Chekhov for Oxford University Press – and thus brings a new perspective to this cultural era. All the key characters from the Manchester scene are featured, plus there is fresh insight into a youthful Noel Gallagher who learned his trade as a crew member with Inspiral Carpets before joining his brother to form Oasis.

Carpet Burns tells the story typical of any band signed to a five album deal and their battles to keep the hits coming. Tom takes us through the band’s original split, the forging of solo careers, and a series of reformations until a Tweet he sends brings his time with the band to an end.

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Tom Hingley was born in 1965 in Abingdon, Oxford, the seventh and youngest child of an Oxford Don. He rose to fame in the early 90s as lead-singer with Inspiral Carpets, he is a visiting lecturer at Salford University and tours constantly as a solo artist and with his band The Lovers.