Ballagroove is thrilled to announce that one of the UK’s finest songwriters is coming to the Island to play on the 19th November at the Old Friends’ Association, Finch Road, Douglas, IoM.
- Chris T-T (UK)
- Timothy Victor (UK)
- Stinging With Bigness
- Rhysical Pheck
(all are acoustic sets)
Tickets are £6 and available from Black & Blue, Douglas; the Rovers Return, Douglas; the Bay Hotel, Port Erin.
Chris T-T, based in London, has attracted a great deal of interest for his songwriting and performance talents and has received rave reviews across the music and news press over the last few years. He’ll be supported by Timothy Victor — also from the UK — who is the fifth member of the Broken Family Band; familiar faces on the festival circuit.
Local support will be from Stinging with Bigness and Rhysical Pheck: both playing acoustic sets.
Press Quotes for Chris T-T
Sunday Times (Top 5 Album of the Year 2003) –
“Fantastically intricate masterpieces… utterly indispensable… genius… a modern-day Blake.”
The Guardian (4 Stars) –
“The genius of Chris T-T’s songwriting is his ability to humanise even the most outlandish conceits. They seem instead like brilliant ideas that no-one else could’ve come up with.”
[See extended entry for some more press quotes.]
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Some Further Press Quotes
NME (8/10) – “A capital-centric folk wonder, he specialises in finding romance in the tiniest details of urban living, crystallising them in string-powered urban folk. Funny, touching and smart.”
Time Out: London (Critics’ Choice, 2003) – “The joy of Flaming Lips and the humanity of Ray Davies. A heartening, hopeful, sad record.”
The Independent (Gig of the Week) – “A national gem of a songwriter.”
Q Magazine – “T-T has a knack for making the mundane seem joyous. A combination of Badly Drawn Boy’s ramshackle charm and the observational wit of Jarvis Cocker.”
MOJO – “Surreal tales and a friendly but firm political clout. Check out this singular talent.”
RollingStone.com – “Very, very brilliant…”
London Evening Standard – “Lyrics of rare sensitivity and wit, kitchen sink songwriting with a killer line in black humour. An unseemly talent.”
The Big Issue (4 Stars) – “A 21st Century take on The Kinks, covering many musical bases. Yet the resulting collection remains encouragingly coherent. Chris T-T should be heartily saluted.”
The Morning Star – “An ambitious meditation on life, love, war and personal responsibility. The wittiest, wisest
and downright strangest record I’ve heard in years.”
MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS (4 STARS) – “Chris T-T’s fourth album is a revelation. A storytelling sojourn through the big city set to queasy pop themes. How often do you listen with rapt attention to the lyrics of a pop song?”
The Independent (‘Single of the Week’ twice) – “Highly memorable, hilariously vitriolic. A real joy.”
NME – “A wry smile, a white knuckle ride, Chris T-T mixes a damned compulsive rock cocktail.”
I HELD HER IN MY ARMS – “Genius! More powerful than amyl nitrate, more enjoyable than being Lucky Pierre.”
Sunday Times (Top 5 Album of the Year 2001) – “The finest (and maddest) British pop album of the year. Music so liberatingly, off-centredly, life-affirmingly free, it never had moorings to slip. Outstanding. Buy this record.”
Time Out: London (Critics’ Choice 2001) – “Thank God for the ‘The 253’! This is such a close and intimate record you can smell the toast and bus fumes. Its sincerity is so sharp, it feels like the watery sting in your eyes as a tube rushes past. Satirical, brittle and brutally intelligent lo-fi guitar pop. A work of wit and understated wisdom.”
PopMatters.com – “Rising English singer T-T continues to win plaudits from the quality press and his appearance at CMJ in New York confirms his ascent. Four albums in and a wholesale band change – trio to quintet – broadens the options, while the production values of this collection raise the stakes. But it is the songs, rather than technology or virtuosity, that win the day. T-T’s quirky Anglo drawl tells tales about the Thames, a motif that curls through this adventure, but also lends its emotional weight to anti-war epic ‘Cull’ and a re-telling of the Frankenstein myth, ‘7 Hearts’. As pure a slice of pop as you’ll hear in 2003. Frail, humane and life-size, this is a CD to treasure.”
KultureFlash.net – “Chris T-T is a national treasure. A man whose lyrics deal with the sublime in the mundane and whose tunes are made up of fizzing melodies and instantly rocking rhythms. He deserves to be huge but his underdog position allows him to write songs like new single ‘Eminem Is Gay’.”
DrownedInSound.com – “‘The ‘253’ is a low budget high vocabulary masterpiece. Split between daydreaming fantasy and cynical realism, this is a charming, rough’n’ready journey into the indifferent insincerity of the English psyche.”
YORKSHIRE EVENING NEWS – “This Boswellian diarist of the day-to-day is a skewed observer of city life and love’s revolving doors. A DIY Pulp, a more together Syd Barrett, T-T writes of a London bus route, one hedgehog’s lucky escape, Tony Robinson’s Time Team and of being ‘defeated’ by Daily Mail readers. Truly terrific, T-T should be the Ray Davies of new millennium London.”
TNT – “Genius voice of London, T-T can be Belle & Sebastian sweet or Queens Of The Stone Age menacing. Overflowing with intricate stories, lost souls, black humour, social conscience and child-like imagination run wild.”
LOGO MAGAZINE – “The honesty and generosity of Chris T-T shines out of every moment of this fourth album; each more lovely than the one before. Clever, funny, individual, poetic and very, very poignant. The album benefits from sublime orchestral arrangements, Chris’s uniquely oblique approach to songwriting and his charming refusal to strike a single rock vocal pose. Every single track is a joy and the conclusion to final track ‘Oil’ is as thrilling a coda as you’ll hear on any album this, or any year.”
ADHOC – “Chris T-T re-ignited the working class romance in me and I’m grateful to him for it. He oozes a confidence and passionately means every strikingly honest line. Imagine if Billy Bragg has been sent to singing lessons instead of socialist worker meetings and you’re getting the idea. This is songwriting at its British best with lines that hit home with startling regularity. Add to this a comic touch that fidgets playfully alongside the serious stuff and you have a winning combination. The boy’s a bit special.”
The Guardian – “Chris T-T creates fragmented songs that verge on the cool side of lo-fi without losing a love for pop. He’s the Phil Redmond of the DIY music scene, sweet on the outside, bitter at the centre. Simple, often humourous gems with twisted lyrics. His voice is Billy Bragg without the affectation but has power when he chooses to unleash it. And he can rock when he wants to, as guitars screech and build to a blistering climax.”