MANCHESTER: Hey! Manchester @ Gullivers

Tuesday 3rd March, 2015

7:30pm

Event information

Following a spur-of-the-moment cross-country trip with a pair of fiery European girls, Vikesh Kapoor left school for a brief yet inspiring stint as a mason’s apprentice. The America he had previously known resided narrowly between his childhood home in rural Pennsylvania and the New England university he left home for. Alongside his parents’ own immigrant struggles, these experiences quickly witnessed Kapoor to the scope of the American dream.

A few years later, Kapoor performed at Howard Zinn’s memorial service in Boston, in front of Zinn’s family and colleagues (including Noam Chomsky). Roused by Zinn’s lifelong battle against class and race injustice, Kapoor spent the next two years in Portland, Oregon working on his full-length debut record. The Ballad Of Willy Robbins, a concept album loosely based on a newspaper article, chronicles the brutal but hopeful story of a working class man who slowly loses everything: ambitions, health, family and shelter. It’s a worker’s tale, less specific to the blue-collar life as it is about anyone struggling to make something of themselves.

The Ballad Of Willy Robbins, out last April on Loose Music, was co-produced by Adam Selzer (M. Ward) and features Nate Query (Decemberists, Black Prairie), Jeff Ratner (Langhorne Slim) and Birger Olsen (Denver).

‘A series of sharply etched portraits of struggling Americans that points back along a road of socially conscious songs. Woody Guthrie is standing at the head of that road’ – The New Yorker

‘Kapoor’s cameos of blue-collar life are poignant and universal: wrecked home towns, insecure employment, busted dreams. An impressive debut’ – The Observer, 4/5

Takk is an excellent Icelandic-inspired coffee house on the edge of the Northern Quarter.

109 Oldham Street
Manchester
M4 1LW

www.heymanchester.com