Welcome to HowdenLive

With regard to purchasing Howden Live tickets for events at the box office at Touchwood, please note that we do not have provision for buying tickets by debit/credit card. The only way you can do that is to buy them online. If you have the correct money for the the tickets you buy at Touchwood ready that would be greatly appreciated. Should you have issue about any HL events please get in touch via the contact facility here on the website, or, if you subscribe to our newsletter, via the e mail address there, thank you.  Doors for all shows are 7.30 for 8pm unless otherwise stated.

THE AUTUMN SEASON!

THE BEAUTIFUL COUCH

SOLD OUT…SOLD OUT… 

Please note: we will refund tickets solely on the basis that we are able to re sell them. There is a returns list at Touchwood, thank you.

Saturday 30th September     £15

If you have seen this band before they need little introduction, the reason we keep asking them back? Simples, they provide yet another cast iron guarantee of a rip roarin’ night out that is not to be missed…..Emulating the sound of two of Hull’s finest, and most popular exports, The Beautiful South and The Housemartins. The Beautiful Couch first formed in 2002, playing all over the country. ‘The Couch’ built up a loyal following and a huge reputation in the tribute band world. Playing venues such as Liverpool’s The Cavern and the Matthew Street Festival, the KC Stadium in Hull, and they’ve also supported Deacon Blue and The Commitments.After taking a few years off, the Couch returned for a one off gig at Hull City Hall in May 2012. Such was the demand for the band to return, they decided to grab their instruments and return to the stage, and the fans flocked to see them.

Now they’re back and raring to go, if you missed them first time around, don’t make the same mistake again! The Beautiful Couch are: Ed Faulkner, Jan Brumby, Johny Kramer, Adam Parrish, Antoine Robinson, and Pete Bartley. 

WILD WILLY BARRETT & THE FRENCH CONNECTION

& Martyn Barker

Saturday October 14th     £12

You won’t find another band like Wild Willy Barrett’s French Connection. From a Parisian café via a Dublin hooley to a New Orleans party with rip-roaring fiddle & banjo.
Imagine stumbling across a smoky back street bar, late night jam: Django Reinhardt & The Pogues; Robert Johnson accompanies Edith Piaf; Bob Marley’s jammin’ with Stéphane Grappelli; Tom Waits joins in. This is French Connection.

As the versatile and heartrending vocals of French singer Aurora Colson take centre stage, the quartet perform stunning original compositions and arrangements on guitar, cello, harmonium, whistle, fiddle, banjo and Irish pipes.
Enjoy a wonderful evening of unique musical entertainment overlaid with a large dose of dry humour, very different from anything else you will experience in the UK at the moment.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS    

STEPHEN DALE PETIT

& Dogfinger Steve

Saturday October 28th    £12.50

In the age of the TV talent show and the corporate pop cabal, Stephen Dale Petit is leading the resistance. He’s a man on a mission, sworn to establish the blues as the dominant force in popular culture. He’s a riot-starter and rabble-rouser, blowing out speakers with the “thrusting hooligan anthems” (Mojo) of his acclaimed studio work and igniting a new venue each night with his “raw, fresh energy” (The Times). He’s a genre spokesman and bluesman savant, whose BLUnivErSity lectures reboot the old masters for the modern age, while rallying new recruits to the cause. No wonder that Guitar & Bass cited Petit as “proof positive that the blues can move forward in the 21st century”.  

All the best bluesmen come with a backstory, and at 46, Petit has walked a winding path to the head of the modern scene. If his 1969 birth in California’s Joshua Tree desert was prescient – he was delivered by a passing doctor with a passion for the blues – then the acquisition of a Gibson SG at the age of twelve confirmed his calling. “The reason I’m on the planet is to play blues guitar,” Petit told BBC News. “I’m on a mission to spread the word about the blues and about the guitar – especially to young music lovers.”

Petit’s own epiphany hit hard. Rewind to his adolescence in the early-’80s and his formative influences were growing daily, taking in the vintage US heavyweights (Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Son House) and the British upstarts (Cream, Zeppelin, Yardbirds). Soon, he began his own precocious march on the Californian club circuit, playing five nights a week, cutting heads with senior players, jamming with titans including B.B. and Albert King, and immersing himself in the genre’s ethos. “The blues is a beautiful thing out of the cesspool of human nastiness,” Petit told Classic Rock. “This music was forged in horrific conditions. It was really the wail of a soul of a subculture of society in America. As a teenager, I was scared by it – but I couldn’t escape the pull.”

By the early-’90s, the bluesman’s love of the British boomers had lured him to the epicentre – London – for a period whose dazzling highs were offset by desperate lows. Collaboration and friendship with musicians including Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Mick Jones and David Gilmour should have been his springboard, yet as the drugs flowed, Petit floundered, losing his momentum to addiction and dangling his talent by a thread. “It got to basically living on the street,” he recalled. “It was the blues that saved me. There was a moment when the choice was pretty clear: ‘Am I just going to be a drug addict and is my passion going to be washed down the toilet…?’”

Following that moment of clarity, Petit clawed himself back from the brink, regaining his confidence as a performer by busking in the bearpit of the London Underground, and attracting both a grass-roots fanbase and a media profile. “People started asking if they could buy the music they were hearing, and I didn’t have anything,” he says. “So I set about recording Guitararama.”

Guitararama proved to be the line in the sand. Originally self-financed and released in a limited pressing of 5,000 units, the buzz prompted a reissue in 2008 (with distribution from Universal) and pricked up the ears of media tastemakers. Suddenly, this former best-kept-secret was a regular guest on BBC Radio 2 (try 2011’s The BBC Sessions for a collection of his appearances) and a fixture in the music press, who declared Petit’s incendiary Firebird fretwork to “occupy a stunning middle-ground between the fire of Freddie King, the instinct of Jimmy Page and the soul of Clapton” (Classic Rock).

By 2010, The Crave upped the ante (included by Classic Rock in the Top 50 Albums Of The Year), while in 2013, the man in the hat raised the bar with Cracking The Code. Patently Petit’s most ambitious release to date, the album was home to his most ferocious originals, from Get You Off to Riot City, bolstered by A-list guests including Dr John, Mick Taylor and Hubert Sumlin. Tracking his solos mere days before his death, Howlin’ Wolf’s iconic guitarist gave Petit a glowing endorsement, “If a lot of people could play like you, shit, I’d sit back and smile”, and the wider reaction was just as receptive, with Cracking The Code deemed “rampant perfection” by The Blues.

Somehow, throughout this dizzying rise, Petit stuck resolutely to his guns. In 2007, the bandleader began spreading the word though his famous BLUnivErSity lecture tours, speaking at the UK’s universities and reeling uninitiated students into the genre with his charisma and insight. In 2010, he pulled together a crack squad of high-profile musicians, including Chris Barber, Ronnie Wood and Mick Taylor, in a successful bid to protect the iconic 100 Club (a venue that Petit dubs his “spiritual home”, having played there on more than twenty occasions).

That same year, Petit hit the High Voltage Festival in London for a decibel-limit-defying set that was bottled by the legendary Ronnie Lane Mobile Recording Unit. The resulting album – Live At High Voltage – was initially issued in 2012 in a vinyl-only, limited-edition run, before its near-mythical status sparked the 2014 digital reissue. “This is hands down the greatest live record you’ll ever hear,” raved The Blues in a 10/10 review. “Even The Who didn’t quite reach the intensity of Petit and friends.”

True to his word, this is a man on a mission. And in 2016, with Petit returning from double-headlining with blues-rock titan Walter Trout, there’s no mistaking a man who means every line, every lick, every fleck of spittle and drop of sweat. “I want to see the blues become mainstream,” he says. “I want to see it become common currency in the discourse of modern popular culture. I want to see it become blues city.” 

 

BUY TICKETS HERE…….

 

THE TIM KLIPHUIS TRIO

10th Anniversary Concert

Saturday November 11th    £14

Regular Shire Hall performers The Tim Kliphuis Trio return to celebrate highlights from their 10-year career: jaw-dropping Django-gypsy jazz, beautiful traditional melodies and mesmerizing improvisations from their ground-breaking Vivaldi CD “Reflecting the Seasons”.

The Tim Kliphuis Trio met in Glasgow in 2006 and embarked on their first UK tour that same year. Their electrifying performances soon found them at the Richard Strauss Festival, Celtic Connections and the Amsterdam Canal Concert, to an audience of 10.000. Recent successes include concerts with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and Tallin Chamber Orchestra, and a 3-record deal with SONY Classical.

Tim Kliphuis – violin
Nigel Clark – guitar
Roy Percy – double bass

Award-winning Dutch violinist Tim Kliphuis breathes new life into existing styles with a high-energy blend of classical, gypsy jazz and folk music. His improvised sound is totally new and has popular appeal.

Classically trained and widely regarded as Stéphane Grappelli’s heir, regularly on tour with the fiery European gypsy guitarists, Kliphuis is a highly personal and inspiring performer, composer and educator.

He has shared the stage with legends Frankie Gavin, Richard Galliano and Les Paul and has been lauded for his musical genius by Nigel Kennedy. He was awarded the Scottish Jazz Award (International), has collaborated with the Richard Strauss Festival and Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and is the curator of the Fifty Fiddles Festival, in Rotterdam’s De Doelen concert hall.

“Winningly playful and technically brilliant” – The Scotsman

“One of the world’s finest fiddlers” – County Times

“Prodigiously talented, fearsomely fast and fun” – Time Out

An in-demand educator, Kliphuis is the author of best-selling Mel Bay books ‘Stéphane Grappelli Gypsy Jazz Violin’ and ‘Grappelli Licks’, the ‘Hot Jazz Violin’ DVDs and Jazz Etudes on video. His workshops and masterclasses have been featured at festivals, conservatoires and summer courses in the USA, Canada, UK, South Africa, Japan and Europe. Tim teaches improvisation at the Amsterdam and Tilburg conservatoires and hosts the annual sell-out Grappelli-Django Camp back home in Holland every August.

BUY TICKETS HERE……

CARL PALMERS ELP Legacy Tour 2017.

A tribute to Keith Emmerson, Greg Lake and John Wetton.

Saturday November 25th   £22.50

 

“The up and coming tour in November  is a celebration of the music I have made over the years with Keith and Greg  and also John Wetton who has died  this year. 

These are  three very important people in my life .And all three died within a ten month period of each other it was a great loss to us all 

 I look forward to playing  some of the music I personally made with all of them over the years on my November tour.” Carl Palmer.

Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy has been thrilling audiences with its innovative new versions of classic Emerson Lake & Palmer songs and rocked-out power-trio versions of classical music hits. Palmer, named by ROLLING STONE magazine as one of the 10 greatest drummers of all time, is a dynamic showman and has been performing for nearly four decades with some of musicʼs most memorable bands including Atomic Rooster, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Asia and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 

Palmer will present bold, new arrangements of the best-loved instrumental music of ELP, and other composers. A multi-media experience combining music and video projection, the show promises to be among the most musically compelling tours of the year. Carl Palmer ELP Legacy is a red-hot power trio that features Palmer on drums and percussion; guitarist Paul Bielatowicz and bassist Simon Fitzpatrick. “Since 2001, I have been playing with my own power trio, replacing the keyboards with electric guitar,” says Palmer. “I felt that was the only honest way to approach the music of ELP. I didn’t want to have a singer trying to sound like Greg Lake. ELP did so much instrumental music, this format made sense to me. The idea was to re-invent the music; there will be several new classic ELP tunes this time around.” Palmer also recently launched his official ELP website: www.emersonlakeandpalmerworldwide.com Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy will play nearly two hours and drum enthusiasts can expect an evening of compelling percussive skills, from the man who brought the drum set to the forefront of rock n roll music.

                      Click here for a nifty promo vid……..                                                                           BUY TICKETS HERE….

THE REVOLUTIONAIRES!

& The Juke Joint Kings

Saturday December 2nd       £12.50

So good we booked them twice! Without doubt one of the very best bands ever to have appeared on the Shire Hall stage and they are in some illustrious company believe me…

Established within the ‘hotbed’ of the North East music scene in the UK, they power out jumpin’ hot rhythm & blues in their own indomitable hard hitting style.

Primarily, they are influenced by 1940’s and 1950’s R&B. In particular, Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Roy Brown but have adopted a harder and more aggressive approach, synonymous with modern blues artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Duke Robillard, Jools Holland and Mike Henderson which helps create their own high energy sound.

Over the last decade, The Revolutionaires have established themselves on the UK and European Rockin’ circuit, as well as the Blues scene.

They have toured extensively both in the UK and abroad, performing at festivals in Ireland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Malta and Dubai.

Highlights include performing at festivals with artistes such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Sting, Tom Jones, Hugh Laurie, Jimmie Vaughan, Robert Cray, Walter Trout, Eric Bibb, Albert Lee, Snake Davis and Dave Edmunds.

Now also touring with their Big Band project which consists of extra horns and pianist, The Revs are hitting the Festival circuit with this power house line up and big sound.

They have recorded five CDs to date containing a collection of Hot Rockin’ R&B tracks. Each CD captures the ‘rawness’ and sheer energy of the band, who like to give their performances a ‘hard-edged’ vibe!

 

 

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS…..