Month: July 2025

Tuesday 8th July 2025

The Attic, Leeds, England

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Thursday 10th July 2025

Night & Day Café, Manchester, England

It’s been just under three years since Nick Shoulders last brought his unique brand of catchy country-folk whistling, warbling and yodelling to the UK. Back then, after an excellent set in a packed-out pub in Bolton, supported only by his bass player Grant D’Aubin, I remarked that I hoped the next time he came to these shores he’d have become big enough to justify bringing the whole band. If the crowd isn’t twice as large next time round, I wrote, then there’s no justice in the world.

Fast-forward a few years and the crowd is indeed bigger, if not by an order of magnitude. I attend both the Leeds and Manchester gigs on Nick’s new ‘Pond Hopper’ tour – in my mind, a Barbenheimer-type event I dub ‘Two Shoulders’ – and both sell out. Both teem with Shoulderheads like myself, fans who sing along to ‘Rather Low’, yodel to ‘Too Old to Dream’ and ‘Snakes and Waterfalls’, and shout back during ‘After Hours’.

The band, however, has broken up. Nick announced the dissolution of the Okay Crawdad earlier this year, and it means that when he takes the stage in the North of England it’s not with his distinctive rhythm section of Grant D’Aubin and drummer Cheech Moosekian, but alone. In Leeds he comes out to cheers and immediately retreats back into the green room. “It’s not because I was scared,” he explains later, three songs into his set. “At least, not only because I was scared,” he laughs. “It’s because I have some tea here and I don’t have a cup. So I’m using this candle-holder.”

The show must go on: cup or no cup, band or no band. And remarkably, Nick Shoulders solo sounds bigger than ever. In November 2022, when I heard him in that pub in Bolton, I noted how he could get a goodly sound out of his acoustic guitar, his powerful strumming almost a signature sound. This singing, whistling, yodelling man was and is a singular force of nature. And now, in July 2025, the de facto one-man-band has become a de jure one. When he takes the stage he sits on a stool in a white vest and Crocs, behind two kick-drums. He switches between a Harmony Atomic electric guitar and a banjo, depending on the song. Along with his charming stage patter – “I am an obnoxious yapper,” he tells Leeds – he yodels and whistles and sings. When he opens with ‘Booger County Blues’ on both nights, moving straight into ‘Blue Endless Highway’, it’s a rocking full-band sound, an impressive display of musicianship from the solo Arkansan.

But while there are a great many similarities between the two nights, there are also a number of differences. The Leeds gig is pretty much perfect, with The Attic one of the best small venues I have attended. It’s endearingly rudimentary, converted from a disused commercial garage – its entrance, a wicket door cut into the side of a large roller shutter and marked by a ‘Mind Your Step’ warning sign, betrays these origins. With the stage along one bare brick wall, a bar in one corner and merch in the other, it gives the aura of a rustic barn-dance in the bright evening’s July heat. The only thing needed to complete the effect would be if hay were strewn across the bare concrete floor where tonight’s Shoulderheads will congregate.

The contrast to Manchester’s Night and Day Café is, unfortunately, night and day. If the Leeds venue had a warning sign at its entrance, Manchester almost deserved one. The venue itself is mostly fine; long and thin like a shotgun house, you enter to the bar and make your way to the far end where the stage is set. It’s my first visit to the venue and I’m unprepared for how narrow the all-standing area is. The only Shoulders seen by many tonight – including myself – will be those of the people stood in front of them, and I imagine only the first couple of rows of people have a good view. Due to his one-man-band kick-drum setup, Nick is seated for the entirety of his set on this tour, which exacerbates the issue, but it only seems a problem in the narrow confines of Manchester, not in Leeds.

The other main difference is, regrettably, the crowd. The Leeds gig draws pretty much a perfect audience: engaged, attentive, and locked in from the very start; quiet and respectful when needed and hollering loudly when Nick’s songs take you there. There’s one drunk who, even early on in the night, is already three sheets to the wind and putting on extra sail, but while he briefly accosts me and a few others, he’s an anomaly that’s easy to shrug off. The Manchester crowd, in contrast, has a sizeable minority of people who are stood around talking loudly into one another’s faces, barely engaging with Nick’s music throughout. Bafflingly, some disengage entirely and retreat to the bar, where they generate a loud and obnoxious pub laughter and chatter that drowns out much of the rare and special music we’ve paid to hear.

I’ve written before about the shame and contempt I feel when I’m in a crowd that contains rude and selfish people like this, particularly in my hometown, and I’ll never be able to fathom how some people decide to show up at a gig just to shout their own conversations loudly over the music, let alone how they feel no apparent shame at ruining it for others. It would frustrate me even more if I hadn’t been to the fantastic Leeds gig first, if this jibber-jabber in Manchester was my only experience of Nick Shoulders live after almost three years of waiting. No doubt there’s many in the Night & Day Café who are there to enjoy themselves and enjoy the music, who find it spoiled by a minority of others. Who knows how long they’ll have to wait before they get another opportunity?

This disparity between the two crowds can be seen in microcosm by how the opening set by Gravedancer is received. The artist known on his passport and to his creditors as Baker McKinney knows how to work a crowd; he works his magic on both nights, but only the denizens of Leeds really engage with his humour and stagecraft. They listen to his anecdotes – including a doozey about accidentally playing a woman’s wake in Sheffield under the band name of, uh, Gravedancer – and laugh quickly and readily. Manchester, in contrast, laughs belatedly and only at the most obvious points of humour; that is, when Baker’s speech isn’t being drowned out completely by the chatter. When he gets serious, singing in ‘The Strongest Stuff’ about needing drink to sleep since coming back from the war, the Manchester crowd is yammering away about God knows what and the Devil cares less.

Despite this, both crowds respond well to the fun of ‘Edolph Twittler’ and ‘Pyramid of Titties’, although the Leeds crowd notch a bonus point on the scoreboard by virtue of the one woman who enthusiastically shouts a request to play the latter – and cheers its bouncing arrival. While Manchester gets three extra songs from Gravedancer, and an interesting anecdote about Nick Shoulders, who “I’d never seen mad”, beating up a man who punched his girlfriend (an anecdote Nick cheerily confirms later), Leeds gets the prize of a warmer and smoother-flowing set.

And speaking of scoreboards, my Two Shoulders adventure means I’m in a position to compare Gravedancer’s playful tally on ‘Tall Tails’. “Shoulders taught me how to pick like this,” Baker says as he pulls the song together on his acoustic guitar. “And after two years, I’ve almost got it.” He makes a game of counting his mistakes when playing it, asserting that if it’s less than ten, he’s doing alright. He reaches five mistakes in Leeds, wobbling almost into a sixth, but has got it down to two by the time he plays it in Manchester. I won’t be able to attend their London gig the following night, but presumably the capital finds itself hosting a hillbilly Hendrix.

“Shoulders makes it look really easy,” Baker says after surviving through the song’s picking style. And he sure does: after the one-man-band tears through ‘Booger County Blues’ and ‘Blue Endless Highway’, he’s tripped up not by playing multiple instruments at once, but by something more mundane. In Leeds, Nick has to stop ‘Hank’s Checkout Line’, the third song, just as he approaches his first whistling solo of the night. “I was given a lozenge earlier and just now realised I can’t whistle with it there,” he laughs.

Three songs into each set and Nick Shoulders is already in full flow, bringing his unique “honkabilly rock-and-roll” sound to a cover of Elvis Presley’s ‘Black Star’ and his original ‘All Bad’. That vivid rockabilly sound brought forth by Nick’s electric guitar is further demonstrated on the crowd-pleasing ‘Ding Dong Daddy’, surpassed only by his more idiosyncratic sounds. Playing the song’s solo with his mouth, our Arkansas yodelissimo begins to mewl like a cat. What genre a miaow solo fits into will hopefully be something musicologists debate long into the night. The crowds love it.

“It’s like Arkansas weather here,” Nick says from the sweltering stage, telling Leeds he’d been expecting drizzle. In Manchester, he turns into a weather nerd, talking about how the cold air-conditioned breeze at his back and the hot breath of the audience is creating an odd – and, it must be said, gross – weather system around him. Despite this convection current of the proletariat, Nick determinedly remains a man of the people. As mentioned earlier, my review from a few years ago noted that there’s no justice in the world if Nick’s crowds aren’t twice as big the next time round. But Nick himself is concerned with much bigger injustices.

He introduces a new song written about the Peasant Revolt of 1381 – his “nerdy song about British history,” he tells Leeds – by talking about his interest in radical takes on history. He notes that we’re all related to ancestors who did “terrible, fucked-up things” to people in the past, a point of view that I’ve personally always slightly bristled at. In no small part because, among other things, it condemns us all by guilt of association for no real benefit.

But, commendably, Nick goes on to say that while we’re related to those people, he’s increasingly trying to embrace the fact that we’re also related to the people who were revolutionary, to those who “fought kings, fought dictators, fought people who imposed oppression on others”. This is a wonderful antidote to political cynicism; to remember that we can look to the best examples of our past and not just feel shamed or intimidated by our worst.

I’ve written recently about my perspective on artists who ‘go political’, something I’m wary of regardless of whether I agree with the politics in question. But Nick Shoulders is an example of it done well, and honestly. There’s no doubting his sincerity or his erudition, and he clearly reads up on what he chooses to speak about, rather than blindly reciting self-satisfying agitprop. And he remains, underneath it all, fun. His new untitled Peasant Revolt song, that he’s only been playing so far on this Pond Hopper Tour, is one he tells Leeds is inspired by ‘England Swings’ by Roger Miller. It’s a charming bop about having “a lot of fun in 1381”.

At this point, the setlists of the two nights diverge for a spell. Appropriately enough, it’s a river where the Two Shoulders fork: Manchester receives a rendition of ‘Miss’ippi’ while Leeds is treated to an exciting glimpse of a new song that Nick calls ‘Tatum Spring’. He says the special guest he’s going to invite on stage later – Jude Brothers, his label-mate at Gar Hole Records – “says I don’t write enough love songs. And I agree. But this is one.” It’s a strong and surprisingly affecting song that references a falling star, and how the wandering singer is going to “put a root down where you are”. Nick says it’s going to be released on a new album on Hallowe’en, and I find myself retroactively agreeing with Gravedancer’s set, where from his Pyramid of Titties he proclaimed that Hallowe’en was a bigger deal than Christmas.

From there, the two nights converge again, with Nick dedicating an exuberant ‘Too Old to Dream’ to the grandma who taught him to sing. He slows it down towards the end to show his vocal prowess – and also bark like a dog. There follows a fine and upbeat rendition of ‘Appreciate’cha’.

Then, another fork: serendipity has meant the afore-mentioned Jude Brothers is in Leeds for a wedding – “among other things,” she qualifies, cryptically – and she joins Nick on stage at The Attic for a duet of the classic folk standard ‘Goodnight Irene’. Her clarion voice harmonises well with Nick’s, and when she takes a verse alone, lustily singing “jump in the river and drown”, it draws roars from the crowd and some emphatic punctuation from Nick’s kick-drum.

“I can only hope my songs last as long,” Nick says after finishing the Leadbelly classic in Leeds. Emphasising the staying power of the old songs, Gravedancer is invited back on stage to harmonise with Nick and Jude on the Ola Belle Reed song ‘I’ve Endured’, while Nick strums his banjo. In Manchester, Nick plays alone.

The next fork in the river is one signposted by the man on stage. Granting the Leeds audience a choice, Nick says “you can choose either a song not meant to be played on banjo, played on banjo, or –”  – there are mass cheers – “hang on, I believe in democracy. Or – I could play an old-timey song”. In the roaring plebiscite that follows, we have an answer.

“Fuck me running, you chose the old-timey option,” Nick laughs. Before heading into his version of ‘Hand Me Down My Walking Cane’, he tunes his banjo and says we in the audience must follow the ‘library rule’ when listening to the sensitive instrument. “Thank you for being so calm and studious and, well, English,” he tells Leeds. Judging by the continued chatter, many in Manchester haven’t heard of the library rule, and regardless a decision there has already been made. “Someone on Facebook asked that I play this,” Nick says to Manchester, before entering a charming banjo-pluckin’ version of ‘Rise When the Rooster Crows’.

It’s the final fork in the road. From here on out, the setlists in the two cities re-align. Nick remarks how he still gets a kick out of how many people respond to, and sing back to him, the political lyrics of ‘Bound and Determined’, his next song. He prefaces the song with a political introduction: Manchester, the ‘Cottonopolis’ of the Industrial Revolution, is reminded of its historical interdependence with the Southern trades of the American empire, while Leeds is told that until 1828 only white property-owners in America were allowed to vote, and so all their laws and precedents stem from that time. When he says he hopes there is movement politically to unpick historic injustices, it is this already-established cartel of laws and precedents which he wishes to go.

Startlingly, Nick then tells Leeds that he hopes to “live in a world after America”. Perhaps influenced by recent events in American politics, it is nevertheless a disappointing claim. Nick praises England and the countries he has visited in Europe on tour for being so well put together, but it’s worth noting that while he has said 1828 was the year the vote was extended to males without property in America, in Britain the year was 1918 – the end of the First World War – when the same right was extended, with residual restrictions removed by 1928. One hundred years after America. Some of the songs Nick has sung tonight are older than universal suffrage in England. And while he may be tired of a land of “fucking F-150s” – “that’s a truck,” he clarifies – it shows there are some ways in which America has genuinely led, or at least shone a light, and for all its faults we should be reluctant to let it pass from this world.

I much preferred Bruce Springsteen’s stance on America and its ideals when he played Manchester a couple of months ago, and while this is not meant as a criticism of Nick’s own perspective, it is an observation on how an artist can rightly respond to political disillusionment with greater art. Nick Shoulders is an admirable artist, and it would be a shame to see this friendly and hopeful soul on a path to political nihilism, however benign. Punk rebellion is all well and good, but it often falls into the trap of seeing rebellion, or a rejection of societal norms, as good in and of itself, or even as the end goal. But to paraphrase what another remarkable songwriter, Leonard Cohen, once wrote, those who provide the bonfire should also provide the piss. A serious rebel must provide a real alternative. And a punk worldview that rejects the centuries-long American experiment because of its latest political anomalies might provide catharsis but also encourages complacency. People who can’t pay attention to one of Nick’s songs for more than thirty seconds before blurting drunken talk into the face of the person next to them are unlikely to change the world, let alone for the better, while concertgoers who can’t keep their own vapid conversations low in a room of live music are unlikely to be truly altruistic socialists at heart. A stance and worldview that welcomes such people so long as they whoop and holler when Trump is invited to go fuck himself is not likely to be one that ends up providing remedy to any of the world’s problems. Songs like these, as Nick Shoulders has shown in both Leeds and Manchester, can well catch fire and resonate with people. But this is why the note of caution needs to be struck. An artist needs to continually reflect on their worldview to ensure they are on the right path, that the resonance they provide remains a valuable one.

As though in rebuttal of the criticisms I now pen, the Manchester audience manages to sort itself out for the final stretch of songs, shouting back as lustily as Leeds does for the rowdy crowd-participation song ‘After Hours’, and yodelling through ‘Snakes and Waterfalls’. Leeds still holds the crown, singing a whole verse of ‘Snakes and Waterfalls’ by itself. “That is sick,” Nick remarks, and he breaks out his array of bird whistles, from whippoorwill to cardinal.

The whippoorwill’s call is often said to signal impending death, and while nothing so extreme happens tonight, it does announce we are approaching the end of the set. Before we end, there’s a version of ‘Rather Low’ that on both nights shows Nick Shoulders at his best: catchy, energetic and fun, filled with whistle soloes and imitations of trumpets and matched by fine music, clever lyrics and a dancing crowd.

As Nick Shoulders stands for the first time tonight and gets up to leave, Leeds immediately roars for an encore. It fixes him in place and he stays on stage. “Thank you for not making me do the adult peekaboo,” he says.

An applauding Manchester roars for the same, and both crowds are treated to Nick’s a cappella single ‘Apocalypse Never’. To Manchester’s credit, it is as silently respectful as Leeds when Nick weaves his solitary spell. You can hear a pin drop in both cities, but Leeds inadvertently breaks its studiously adhered-to ‘library rule’ when a shutter near the bar comes crashing down, drawing a wry smile from Nick.

“Like the waters we will rise,” both crowds sing, but it sounds more special in Leeds because of what the crowd has given the artist in return. While there’s been plenty of avid Shoulderheads in Manchester, there’s also been a few bad apples who’ve tarnished our night. Leeds, the old Yorkshire enemy, has shown us how it’s to be done, how a fine and engaging crowd can make or break a night. In The Attic, ‘Apocalypse Never’ resounds as something truly great and hopeful and inspiring. You can believe the world will change. As he leaves the stage, Nick Shoulders grins and raises his candle-holder of tea, crowning a perfect set.

Setlist (Leeds):

(all songs written by Nick Shoulders, unless noted)

1. Booger County Blues (from Home on the Rage)
2. Blue Endless Highway (J.R. Cheatham) (from All Bad)
3. Hank’s Checkout Line (from Okay, Crawdad)
4. Black Star (Sid Wayne/Sherman Edwards) (from Lonely Like Me)
5. All Bad (from All Bad)
6. Ding Dong Daddy (Traditional) (from Okay, Crawdad)
7. Peasant Revolt (Lot of Fun in 1381)* (unreleased)
8. Tatum Spring* (unreleased)
9. Too Old to Dream (from Okay, Crawdad)
10. Appreciate’cha (from All Bad)
11. Goodnight Irene (Huddie Ledbetter) (unreleased)
12. I’ve Endured (Ola Belle Reed) (unreleased)
13. Hand Me Down My Walking Cane (James Bland) (unreleased)
14. Bound and Determined (from Okay, Crawdad)
15. After Hours (from Lonely Like Me)
16. Snakes and Waterfalls (from Lonely Like Me)
17. Rather Low (from Okay, Crawdad)
18. Encore: Apocalypse Never (single)

Setlist (Manchester):

(all songs written by Nick Shoulders, unless noted)

1. Booger County Blues (from Home on the Rage)
2. Blue Endless Highway (J.R. Cheatham) (from All Bad)
3. Hank’s Checkout Line (from Okay, Crawdad)
4. Black Star (Sid Wayne/Sherman Edwards) (from Lonely Like Me)
5. All Bad (from All Bad)
6. Ding Dong Daddy (Traditional) (from Okay, Crawdad)
7. Peasant Revolt (Lot of Fun in 1381)* (unreleased)
8. Miss’ippi (from Okay, Crawdad)
9. Too Old to Dream (from Okay, Crawdad)
10. Appreciate’cha (from All Bad)
11. I’ve Endured (Ola Belle Reed) (unreleased)
12. Rise When the Rooster Crows (from Home on the Rage)
13. Bound and Determined (from Okay, Crawdad)
14. After Hours (from Lonely Like Me)
15. Snakes and Waterfalls (from Lonely Like Me)
16. Rather Low (from Okay, Crawdad)
17. Encore: Apocalypse Never (single)

* track titles unconfirmed

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.