Wednesday 24th June 2026

Manchester Academy, Manchester, England

It is very hot in Manchester right now. At 7pm, as the doors of the Manchester Academy open, the sky remains a brilliant cloudless blue as though it were still noon. Only a dimly visible moon, surreal in the bright summer sky, reminds us of the evening. The heat is close and confining and there is no breeze. It has been like this for days without respite and those of us who have queued in the shade make our way inside, where the heat will be even harder on us.

I begin with the heat because there are only a few things that could compel me to pack myself into a sweaty crowd of more than two thousand people under such circumstances. Sierra Ferrell is one of them.

It’s almost four years to the day since I first decided to write one of these concert reviews. That was also for Sierra Ferrell, singing for a few hundred people at the Future Yard in Birkenhead, and it was so special a night it kicked off a thirst for experiencing more of my favourite artists live. I’ve had more than fifty such special nights since.

But after tonight I have no more concerts on the horizon until Halloween, the clear calendar an unprecedented experience for me in the last few years. Some things I will be happy to take a break from, mostly the long waits before doors and before openers and after openers, and particularly in the poor crowd behaviours I find increasingly irritating, but there is also much in a night of music that is like a drug you return to, and Sierra Ferrell’s concert tonight demonstrates much of it. Not least there’s the energy and the thrill as a band moves through the gears, as is the case tonight when Sierra is roared onto the stage by a delirious audience and she and her five-piece band launch straight into a sprawling, stop-start ‘Rosemary’, followed by the poppy ‘Dollar Bill Bar’ and a stirring ‘Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down’.

There’s also the opportunity a night of live music presents, if the artist is kind, to hear new, unreleased songs. I first heard ‘Kickin’ Up Dust’ in December at the Co-Op Live here in Manchester, when Sierra and her band opened for Mumford and Sons, and it already had the uncanny feel then of a dyed-in-the-wool classic country song. Tonight, the singing from some elements of the crowd suggests I’m not the only one who’s familiar with it, and ‘Kickin’ Up Dust’ rolls easy with that sort of innocent, rambling mid-tempo only classic country seems able to muster.

It’s not the only unreleased treat Sierra gives us, for it’s followed by a “gambling song” that neatly links dice and other games of chance with the decisions we all must make in life (“let me roll,” Sierra sings in the song’s anthem-like refrain). If that were not enough, later in the night Sierra also breaks out an accordion to perform a straight and plaintive love song, ‘Without You’, that might be too cute if not for the charming eccentricity the accordion brings to it. Sierra also grips the microphone tightly with both hands to showcase her powerful vocals in ‘Tryin’ to Love You’, a new song that seems tailor-made for such a display. In a sign of things coming full circle for me, ‘Lighthouse’, which I heard in the Future Yard in 2022 when it was yet to be released, now reappears on tonight’s setlist as an established track from the Trail of Flowers album.

Trail of Flowers understandably contributes the majority of tonight’s setlist, although Sierra still manages to make room for ‘In Dreams’, played acoustically with Oliver Bates Craven on guitar while the rest of the band takes a breather, the popular singalong cover of ‘Years’, and, for a resounding encore, the evergreen signature song ‘Jeremiah’, characterised by Mike Robinson’s distinctive bended Dobro notes.

But ‘In Dreams’ and ‘Jeremiah’ are not the only representatives from the Long Time Coming album. Part of the thrill in experiencing a night of music is when an artist plays a song you know well, but gives it extra dimensions you did not expect and changes forever how you will hear it. And tonight, the best performance of a song is ‘Far Away Across the Sea’, which starts with a lengthy, Latin mambo-like shuffle from Matty Meyer’s drums. From there, the band stretch and pull the music with the dexterity of tango or a jazz ensemble; Joshua Rilko’s mandolin solo sounds almost like a Spanish guitar, a vibe reinforced by Geoff Saunders’ follow-up double-bass solo and Oliver’s swarthy electric guitar solo. The five men of the band might all be wearing starch-white shirts and white cowboy hats, looking every inch a quintessential 50s country band, but here they embrace a Latin swing. In the stifling heat of the Academy it is perfect music.

“Water? Water?” Sierra asks throughout the night, inbetween songs, pointing to people in the heaving mass whom the stewards can pass cups of water to. It’s endearing to see her concern, eyes searching the crowd like a mother hen. “Water? Oh my god, I’ve never felt responsible for this many people.”

The warm atmosphere is also remarked upon by tonight’s openers, the Brudi Brothers, with George Brudi comparing it to the American dancehalls which first hosted rock-‘n’-roll in the Fifties, for they too had a tragic lack of air conditioning. It’s one of the other fine things a night of live music provides when you are turned on to an opening act that proves much better than you assumed they would be. The Brudi Brothers – biological brothers, George clarifies – deliver a wonderful opening set, characterised by their throwback three-part harmonies and winsome stage banter. Between their sound and their healthy, all-American look (as George puts it, “these two [Conrad and Johannes] look like Mormons, and I’m the guy they’re trying to convert”), they appear almost stepped out of time.

There’s substance too behind their style; their catchy viral song ‘Me More Cowboy Than You’ might get the excited cheers from the audience tonight, but for my part it’s the clever songwriting of ‘Chasing Paper’ and ‘Motherland’ which convince the most. The trio open with the Tom Waits-ian blues of ‘Moon Over Montana’ and end with Conrad’s fast harmonica shuffle of ‘Rock Island Line’, drawing deserved cheers from the crowd with each and every song. As fine as it is, their version of ‘Matty Groves’ pales compared to the souped-up version I heard Kassi Valazza sing last year (again, almost to the day), but their cover of the Mills Brothers’ ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’ is bursting with old-timey charm.

Tonight is the three brothers’ “first real gig on this side of the pond”, and it’s fair to say it’s a triumphant debut. When they return to the stage halfway through Sierra’s set to harmonise on a cover of Jerry Reed’s ‘A Good Woman’s Love’, there’s an unforced raucous cheer at their return. One hopes the return will not be their last.

But even though the Brudi Brothers tower over Sierra on the stage, everyone knows who the true giant is in the room. Perhaps the best thing about a night of live music is the sense of incredibility at being so close to a genuine artistic talent in the flesh; an artist filling a vast room with her voice, meeting the challenge of entertaining thousands.

That Co-Op Live gig in December, opening for Mumford and Sons in front of more than 20,000 people, was a tantalising nine-song glimpse of what Sierra Ferrell can deliver, but tonight is proof once more that she belongs on the big stages. ‘I Could Drive You Crazy’, which plays after the Brudi Brothers leave the stage for a second time, is a startling marriage of Sierra’s pop sensibility and her Appalachian roots. Its fiddle stirs the soul; the song itself evokes something indefinable as it builds, something like honest ambition, as Sierra reaches out and claims what is hers.

Elsewhere, there’s the down-and-dirty blues of ‘Chittlin’ Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County’, the light, airy country of ‘Why Haven’t You Loved Me Yet?’ and the anthemic pop of ‘American Dreaming’, a song ideally suited to be played before a crowd of enthralled thousands. There is also, as part of the encore before ‘Jeremiah’ ends the night, a fillip to the Manchester audience. Oliver Bates Craven plays the distinctive acoustic guitar opening of ‘Wonderwall’, before Sierra leads the boozy native crowd in a singalong of the Oasis hit.

I must admit that I groan inwardly a bit, because this over-exposed mad-fer-it lads’ band are pretty much inescapable here in my hometown, and have become unspeakably synonymous with our ‘culture’. But if anyone can win me over to the song it’s Sierra. “I listened to this band all the time as a teenager,” she says with a smile, and to be fair she seems as delighted as the most pissed-up, bucket-hatted Manc to be singing what is, underneath it all, a catchy pop song. But, to paraphrase the lyrics of Sierra’s friend and one-time tourmate Nick Shoulders, I’ll die where I stand if I hear ‘Wonderwall’ again.

If there is a song that epitomises Sierra’s power on stage, it is the one that ended her regular set tonight, before that obliging encore. When I first heard ‘Fox Hunt’ at the Future Yard in 2022 it was an unreleased Appalachian folk song with duelling fiddles and a driving acoustic guitar. In the years since, it has evolved into Sierra’s explosive concert swansong.

It begins with Sierra banging away with a gong on an oversized bass drum, howling melodically in time with the beats. With the crowd already enrapt, Sierra begins to sing in that distinctive voice that has drawn astonished new listeners to her sound for years. The fiddles then join the party, taking up the now-established riff and raising it to fever pitch, as Sierra dances and twirls about the stage. The band pulls the song into a hoedown before – inconceivably, and as an impressive show of Sierra’s musical dexterity – changing the fiddle riff into a heavy-metal guitar riff that crunches and grinds the song to an exhilarating conclusion.

This is, as Sierra’s bass drumskin puts it, ‘Heavy Petal Music’. With flowers in her hair and a frilly white dress falling to her shoulders, the petite Sierra Ferrell is deceptively dainty in appearance. But those bare shoulders, bronzed and glistening in the heat, are capable of bearing a full band in a foreign town, doing justice to her natural talent and God-given voice with an energetic performance befitting the great names in music that we revere; those legends that we wish we could also have seen in their prime. There is great power here, bursting from that slight West Virginian vessel, and hers is a name that we will undoubtedly also come to revere.

As the encore comes to an end, the band restarts a coda of the just-played ‘Jeremiah’, while Sierra throws yellow flowers one by one into the crowd. One is caught by the woman next to me, and its presence breaks a spell, reminding me that this is a flesh-and-blood artist on the stage, not some intoxicating Siren-like myth. It makes her performance all the more remarkable. I don’t even consider that the flower could have landed in my hands; there are flowers for all when music like this is able to thrive in what’s left of our world.

Setlist:

(all songs from the album Trail of Flowers and written by Sierra Ferrell, unless noted)

  1. Rosemary
  2. Dollar Bill Bar (Ferrell/Melody Walker)
  3. Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down (Traditional) (from the deluxe version of Trail of Flowers)
  4. Kickin’ Up Dust (unreleased)
  5. Pair of Dice (unreleased)
  6. Lighthouse (Ferrell/Lindsay Lou)
  7. Chittlin’ Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County (Arthur Smith)
  8. Years (John Anderson/Dan Auerbach/David Ferguson/Patrick James McLaughlin) (from Something Borrowed, Something New: A Tribute to John Anderson)
  9. In Dreams (from Long Time Coming)
  10. Without You (unreleased)
  11. A Good Woman’s Love (Cy Coben) (unreleased)
  12. I Could Drive You Crazy
  13. Far Away Across the Sea (from Long Time Coming)
  14. Why Haven’t You Loved Me Yet?
  15. Tryin’ to Love You (unreleased)
  16. American Dreaming (Ferrell/Walker)
  17. Fox Hunt
  18. Encore: Wonderwall (Noel Gallagher) (unreleased)
  19. Encore: Jeremiah (from Long Time Coming)

My other concert reviews can be found here.

My fiction writing can be found here.