tim burgess Tour and Music News

Tim Burgess keeps his band ticking over with new solo release.

For reasons initially beyond his control, Tim Burgess has had quite the year.

By now, you’ll surely be aware of his Twitter Listening Parties which, it’s fair to say, have taken on a life of their own. As well as giving other artists good exposure, on the official website one can now purchase art prints with links to recommended record stores.

In addition, all year Burgess has been vocal and pro-active in his support of music venues, and even aided in securing bailout packages for the Gorilla and Deaf Institute in his (near) hometown of Manchester.

As if all that wasn’t enough, he’s also released a (solo) career best album, I Love The New Sky, and is closing out the year with this Ascent Of The Ascended EP. It consists of two new tracks and recordings from a session at Paste Studios in New York, just before the pandemic took its vice-like grip on 2020.

Tim Burgess has shared his video for The Ascent Of The Ascended with the EP of the same name set to follow this year’s I Love The New Sky album on November 27th.

Like everyone else, organisers of Sheffield’s brand new festival Get Together are, ‘looking forward to a time when music fans are once again able to share the joy of being in the same space and sharing the excitement of live music’ after announcing the start of their inaugural line-up today.

Tim Burgess will release a new EP in November, fulfilling his wish to keep his solo set-up working in the process.

The 25th anniversary of the Manchester Arena will be marked with a the pre-recorded streamed event later this week.

Focus Wales has added Richard Hawley, Gruff Rhys, The Joy Formidable and Tim Burgess to its next line-up after being rescheduled from this year to October 2021.

Since their usual summer of collaborations and festival appearances won’t be happening this year, those at Greenpeace have announced their own online events will be taking place between Thursday June 18th-Saturday June 20th.

There have been suggestions that Tim Burgess should receive some form of accolade for bringing music fans together during lockdown, ideas posited including Godlike Genius at next year’s NME Awards.

There’s no doubt his Twitter Listening Parties are a wonderful initiative, encompassing a huge range of album choices, some of which have acted as moving tributes to Little Richard and Florian Schneider, and others that have given newer artists the opportunity to showcase their music to a wider audience.

Owing to the organic and amateur nature of the venture, ideas are allowed to blossom; the Listening Party website directs viewers to independent record stores, and there’s a full festival on the way. However, there’s a strong argument for Burgess to be the recipient of some form of accolade even without these listening parties.

Now on his fourth decade in the business – with thirteen Charlatans albums and this, his fifth solo album, under his belt – Burgess is clearly driven by a passion for music, equally demonstrated by his forays into running labels and writing. His solo albums have been notable by their eclecticism: I Believe was quasi-Americana; Same Language, Different Worlds was pulsing electronica; Oh No I Love You featured slow-tempo indie. Now, Burgess has taken things up a notch by recording an album that offers huge sonic variation from its first track onwards.

Some people are gluttons for punishment.

Whilst a great number of us have been making the most of this free time, the world still turns in our absence, and musicians still have work to present. Tim Burgess is one such soul, and while his Twitter Listening Parties are taking up most of his time (more on those later, inevitably), his fifth solo album I Love The New Sky is released at the end of the month too.

It’s ostensibly a follow-up to 2018’s As I Was Now, but the two records couldn’t be more different. For one thing, their gestations had completely different lifespans; Burgess sat on the previous album for the best part of a decade, whereas the new one was recorded in just a year. “As I Was Now only took about five days and I released it unmixed,” Burgess tells Live4ever in an exclusive interview. “And some of it was unfinished, but I just felt it was a really nice release. It was a good story and a nice archival release for Record Store Day.”

Tim is talking to us after a couple of false starts; “I was going to speak with Live4ever at South By Southwest. That was the first thing that disappeared. It’s amazing though, we would have been talking about completely different things.”

Tim Burgess has been at the epicentre of music’s online osmosis since lockdown, and so there’s no-one better placed to be named ambassador for next month’s Love Record Stores Day.