Music in Manchester and the North

Manchester’s music scene is on fine form as artists and audiences reconnect in ecstatic style. Here are our highlights from the city’s chock-a-block gig calendar, as we head towards winter.

BC Camplight’s story is pretty remarkable. In 2011, the singer-songwriter was homeless, self-destructive, and had burnt every bridge in his native Philadelphia. His decision to move 3000 miles away to a city called Manchester changed everything. Here, his bombastic and darkly hilarious music has earned him an ever-growing legion of devotees that see him as an anti-rockstar, an unfiltered talent. “I promise this will not be just another concert”, he says about his show at The Ritz on 8 December.

“Boundary pushing”, “cutting edge”, “future-leaning”… These kinds of phrases crop up in nearly every article you’ll read about Manchester Collective. And for good reason. The centrepiece of their next concert at The White Hotel is a piece by Ben Nobuto, whose music assimilates and responds to the dizzying array of digital media that Generation Z have lived with since birth. Distortion pedals, live electronics, amplified strings… This will be as far from your standard classical concert as you can imagine.

Berlin-based chanteuse Anika – a founding member of cult electro-psych outfit Exploded View – has just dropped her first solo album in over a decade. Changes is a second helping of avant-pop and skittering electronics that speaks decidedly to the present moment, bouncing between fraught intensity and guarded optimism. Catch her live at YES.

Read about all this and more below, and check out our Spotify playlist for artists – it’s filled with artists playing in Manchester in the coming weeks and months.

Here are our picks