Saturday 27th January 2023
The Warehouse Café Space
54-57 Allison Street, Digbeth, Birmingham B5 5TH
£Pay What You Feel

Ben Calvert plays his first headline show in over a year, in collaboration with Artefact, who are keeping their arts program alive and kicking in borrowed spaces while their new venue is under construction.

It can be hard to be heard among the noise of the hundreds of thousands of person-and-guitar singer songwriters, though that’s what Ben’s been doing for around two decades. He’s spent his music life floating comfortably just below the radar, occasionally popping up as a blip when DJs like Janice Long give his records a spin, or when he’s booked to play a large festival like No Direction Home, or chosen by a cult figure like Jeffrey Lewis as a support.

And here he is still, but by the grace of God and the power of a wild and rejuvenating summer in Tarifa, Spain, having had a prolonged and intense anxiety attack in May and June that was so extreme that it almost killed him.

Expect songs from Ben’s latest EP Inside Outside, his next album The End of Everything, songs from his back catalogue and maybe a Girls Aloud cover.

Support from William William Rodgers and Kate Thompson.

What they said about Inside Outside:

“The Outsider feels like a gothic Nick Drake or a more coherent Syd Barrett, dark, brooding and dangerous. Without shifting too far from traditional and expected folk ways of doing things, with Inside Outside, Ben Calvert has crafted something that is both progressive and unexpected but never for the reasons you might think. It’s precisely what the folk world has been needing for a long time, even if the folk world didn’t realise it needed it in the first place.”
(The Big Takeover)

“A sort of male Vashti Bunyan, albeit filtered through echoes of early Morrissey and Nick Drake. For those inclined to uneasy listening in the eerie hours betwixt the shades of dusk and the faint gloom of dawn, Calvert continues to prove to be an intoxicating singular talent.”
(Folk Radio UK)