Ombudsmen/Patio Gas/Slow Knife - Pay on the door

OMBUDSMEN are Manchester’s finest (and indeed only) export blending the ancient arts of rock, electro, psychedelia and highly suspect financial advice.

Experts agree that the band’s trademark brand of genre-bending musical mischief is the most accurate window into what music will sound like a billion years from now. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might even feel a tingle of excitement in places you’d rather not.

Critics are praising Ombudsmen for their “upbeat, bouncy darkness”, while the NME have gone as far as to describe the band as “please stop contacting us”.

The debut EP Fizzy Milk is out now on all good streaming services as well as some rubbish ones. “The whole EP is fantastic!” according to North West Radio’s Ronnie Carnwath. Thanks Ronnie, your brown envelope is in the post.

So batten down the hatches, pour yourself a generous chalice of fizzy milk and let the bud times roll.

PATIO GAS have kindly stepped in to fill the breach left by Codex Serafini's dead tour bus

With a musical manifesto dedicated to ‘The Three E’s’ - eclecticism, experimentation and electronica - their songs seek to explore the trials and tribulations of modern, working-class life through the lens of their everyday experiences.

Their debut album Digging your own grave. was released 31/3/23.”

SLOW KNIFE:

A boiling pot of post-punk, free jazz and no-wave shot through a science fiction filter. The sound is evocative of a Hammer Horror or Lynchian soundtrack intended to be both enthralling and sinister. The drama of Slow Knife resides in the silence between the frantic, sparse, gloomy musical passages to a cacophony of jubilant song.

Imagine John Cooper Clarke and Tom Waits riding a bus to the 9th circle of hell, drinking bad wine and blasting the Marble Index on a shitty bluetooth speaker.

Support line-up subject to change