Winter Sprinter 2019: Suggested Friends, Peaness and Whoa Melodic

We kick off the Winter Sprinter on Tuesday 8th January at The Lexington, in London, with Suggested Friends, Peaness and Whoa Melodic.

Advance tickets are on sale now from wegottickets.com/fikarecordings for £7.50.

Suggested Friends Bandcamp tells us they make “bittersweet dad rock for you and your mates”, which is hilarious but, obviously, the London quartet are a lot more than that. They make effervescent and melancholic pop rock songs, with catchy-as-anything hooks and frenetic choruses. Faith from the band probably puts it best: “We are a jangle punk-ish pop group based in London, singing songs about regret, aspiration, and microaggressions. We’re all about the catchy choruses and OTT guitar solos.”

They also have a song with perhaps the best title ever, “I Can’t Roll My Eyes That Far Back”, a tongue in cheek critique of elitist music scenes. They’ve been gigging all over the UK in the illustrious company of the likes of UK DIY bands including KEEL HER, Trust Fund and Spook School. Their self-titled debut album is brilliant and their second LP is in the works for 2019.

Formed in Chester, England in late 2014, three piece indie-pop band Peaness are the kind of instantly likeable, warm and creative people that can get away with having radio DJ’s blush like a peach every time they have to say the band’s name on the airwaves. Lucky really, as it’s a phenomenon that’s becoming increasingly more common with spins racking up at BBC Radio One, BBC6 Music, Radio X and more as this burgeoning bunch of friends grow quickly into the big shoes that the early press-hype has set out for them to fill.

Whoa Melodic is Michael Wood, whom usually shares his multi-instrumentalist talents with various bands including Singing Adams/Steven Adams & The French Drops and The Hayman Kupa Band (with Darren Hayman of Hefner and Emma Kupa of Standard Fare/Mammoth Penguins).

With an unnatural obsession with Paul McCartney, Whoa Melodic also has echoes of Teenage Fanclub, Squeeze, World Party and Elliott Smith. Melody is key yet his lyrics tend reflect what is going on in his life. Nostalgic, tune drenched and reassuring.

Flowers play Winter Sprinter 2019

We’re delighted to announce our Wednesday headliner for The 2019 Winter Sprinter as Flowers! It’s their first headline show in far too long; they’ll be joining Haiku Salut (Thursday) and Withered Hand (Friday) as our other announced headliners. Details of Tuesday’s show to be unveiled shortly….

“This is our one and only headline show in a long time, so we're planning a suitably long (and hopefully quite good) set of our all-time favourite songs right from our very first demos to some brand new ones!” Rachel, Flowers

There’s something great about a three-piece—think The Cocteau Twins, The Clean, Galaxie 500—and the way that irreducible nucleus takes its strength from its limitations, making a virtue of its purity. Singer Rachel Kenedy's ethereal vocals and Sam Ayres textured guitar is backed by the powerful, metronomic beat of drummer Jordan Hockley.

Effortlessly blending pop songs with noise while leaving space for more stripped back elements, the recordings strike a perfect balance between the sweetness of Kenedy’s voice and Ayres’ abrasive guitar stylings. Their musical inspiration from shoegaze, C86 and New Zealand’s Flying Nun label is now evident.

Advance 4 day passes and individual day tickets are now available from wegottickets.com/fikarecordings.

The Winter Sprinter runs from the 8th - 11th January 2019 at The Lexington, London.

Winter Sprinter 2019

Fika Recordings, Wiaiwya and Gare du Nord proudly present the return of annual Winter Sprinter!

Four nights, three labels, twelve bands, DJs… the perfect antidote to the post-Christmas blues in the intimate surroundings of The Lexington, from January 8th-11th.

Our first two headliners are Haiku Salut and Withered Hand, playing Thursday 10th and Friday 11th respectively.

Haiku Salut are an instrumental dream-pop-post-folk-neo-everything trio from the Derbyshire Dales. The group consists of multi-instrumentalists Gemma Barkerwood, Sophie Barkerwood, and Louise Croft. Between them, Haiku Salut play accordion, piano, glockenspiel, trumpet, guitar, ukulele, drums, and melodica. Their music also features electronic elements, which they refer to as “loopery and laptopery”.

Withered Hand is the songwriting output of Dan Willson. A cult figure in the Scottish music scene since 2009, Dan has released two widely acclaimed albums, New Gods (2014) and Good News (2009) and several lo-fi EPs. Currently working towards his third full length album, Withered Hand continues to tour and play one-off dates in venues from concert halls to living rooms.

We’ll be announcing the other two headliners and details of the rest of the line up shortly. In the meantime, you can buy super-early bird 4 day passes for the bargain price of £32, or individual tickets for Thursday or Friday for £11 each from wegottickets.com/fikarecordings.

Live May 16th: Steven Adams & The French Drops

On the 16th of May we're hosting Steven Adams & The French Drops, following the release of their new album Virtue Signals on Hudson Records.

Support comes from Mammoth Penguins. Advance tickets are available for £10 from wegottickets.com/fikarecordings.

Steven Adams & The French Drops on tour: Wed 2nd May - Castle Hotel, Manchester Fri 4th May - The Cluny 2, Newcastle Sat 5th May Fulford Arms, York Sun 6th May - The Shakespeare, Sheffield Wed 16th May - Boston Music Room, London

The Winter Sprinter 2018 - full line up!

Presented by Fika Recordings, WIAIWYA and Gare du Nord

Tues 2 January - Fri 5 January at The Lexington, London, N1

4 day early bird passes available for £34.50 and individual day tickets for £11 adv at www.wegottickets.com/fikarecordings

Tues 2 Jan: The Surfing Magazines Pete Astor Jessica’s Brother

Wed 3 Jan: Steven Adams & The French Drops Fever Dream Charmpit

Thurs 4 Jan: Laetitia Sadier The Leaf Library Enderby’s Room

Fri 5 Jan: Darren Hayman Ralegh Long Picturebox

Four nights, three labels, twelve bands, DJs… the perfect antidote to the post-Christmas blues in the intimate surroundings of The Lexington. Thanks to Track & Field and Fortuna POP!; without their previous stewardships of the Winter Sprinter, we'd all be sat at home feeling glum the first week of January.

The Surfing Magazines The Surfing Magazines are a new garage-rock group consisting of two thirds of The Wave Pictures and one half of Slow Club. Consisting of David Tattersall and Franic Rozycki of The Wave Pictures, Charles Watson of Slow Club and drummer Dominic Brider. Not content with their already ferocious work rate, with three album releases in 2016 alone and over twenty in total between them; members of The Wave Pictures and Slow Club’s 11-track debut as Surfing Magazines is an intriguing and exciting mishmash of musical styles – soundtrack surf, weird pop and Americana. Pulling in influence from all of the great surf music of the 60s and the band’s musical inspirations of Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, the band are professedly ‘at war’ with today’s pretentious prog-indie-rock millionaires and bongo pop demigods. They intend to ‘rock out and blow your mind, and then mellow out and soothe your mind, then rock out again’.

Pete Astor Pete has made records as part of The Loft, The Weather Prophets, The Wisdom of Harry and Ellis Island Sound on Creation, Matador, Heavenly and more. He released Spilt Milk on Fortuna Pop in 2016 and has now signed to Tapete Records, home of The Clientele, Lloyd Cole and The Monochrome Set. Pete has been recording a new album with with James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Proper Ornaments, Veronica Falls) on guitar and The Wave Pictures’ rhythm section of Franic Rozycki on bass and Jonny Helm on drums.

Jessica’s Brother Jessica’s Brother are singer songwriter Tom Charleston, bass player Charlie Higgs (formerly of The Ramshackle Union Band), and drummer Jonny 'Huddersfield' Helm (of The Wave Pictures). They make rock music with strong Americana influences, and a twist of English gothic darkness.

Steven Adams & The French Drops In the wake of critically acclaimed solo album, 2016's intimate 'Old Magick', and several years of one man shows, Steven Adams has a new band. He's joined by Daniel Fordham and David Stewart, rhythm section with psych-folk oddballs The Drink, guitarist Michael Wood (Singing Adams/The Leaf Library/Hayman Kupa Band) and a rotating cast of guest musicians. Steven Adams, aka, The Singing Adams, aka Steven James Adams, was in The Broken Family Band.

Fever Dream Fever Dream play dark, fuzzy, menacing music that blurs the line from noisy shoegaze to angular post-punk. Intense, melodic and expansive, they are a real treat live and have really good hair.

Charmpit Originally from California but now based out of South-East London, self-described ‘pop punk anarcuties’ Charmpit mash up sugary sweet melodies, lo-fi production and semi-serious subject matter to take a stab at society’s injustices whilst still keeping everything suitably fun. The band formed for the First Timers festival at DIY Space For London last year, a festival where every band on the line-up is playing their first show.

Laetitia Sadier Lætitia Sadier has arguably one of the most recognizable voices in music. Since arriving on the European indie scene back in 1991 with the first Stereolab EP, Super 45, Sadier’s vocal and lyrical approach has remained consistent: She applies her crystalline alto to lyrics that explore philosophy and political inequality through a Marxist lens. In Stereolab and as a solo artist, Sadier’s musical tastes have tended to skew nostalgic, mixing influences of 1960s pop from the U.S. and Brazil, easy listening, and German kosmische.

The Leaf Library The Leaf Library make droney, two-chord, pop that00!0!00s stuck halfway between the garage and the bedroom, all topped with lyrical love songs to buildings, stationery and the weather.

Enderby’s Room Enderby’s Room is fiddle player Dan Mayfield, once from rural Lincolnshire, but he has now found home living in London. His folk tinged songs reflect on his traditional folk upbringing. Mayfield has played violin for many artists including Daniel Johnston, Darren Hayman, The Wave Pictures, Allo Darlin’ and the Belles of London City morris dancers.

Darren Hayman Darren Hayman is a thoughtful, concise and detailed songwriter. He eschews the big, the bright and the loud for the small, twisted and lost. Hayman has taken a singular and erratic route through England’s tired and heartbroken underbelly. Formerly the singer-songwriter of Hefner, Darren Hayman has developed an increasingly idiosyncratic solo career. In recent years Darren has released four albums under his own name - Chants for Socialists where he set William Morris’ words to music; the sister remix album Dubs for Socialists; the album Florence, recorded in Italy; and an album for children called Folk Lullabies for Children and the Childless. As well as writing and recording as himself, Darren has also recorded an album with the band he’s formed with Emma Kupa of Mammoth Penguins (The Hayman Kupa Band), played drums for Papernut Cambridge, keyboards for The Great Electric, and released an EP with his experimental electronic duo Brute Love. Darren has also has been working on an ongoing, hugely ambitious folk project called Thankful Villages, visiting all fifty four 'Thankful Villages', a village in Britain where every soldier returned alive from World War One. Darren visited each of these and, focusing on village life, made a piece of music, a painting and a short film for every one. Some take the form of instrumentals inspired by the location, some are interviews with village residents set to music, others are new songs with lyrics or found local traditional songs.

Ralegh Long English Songwriter Ralegh Long released his recent album Upwards of Summer earlier this year, which won the Help Musician's UK / PledgeMusic Emerging Artist's Award. There is a marked change of pace from his previous records Hoverance and We Are in the Fields, with the jangle of chorus guitars, mandolins and anthemic hooks calling to mind bands such as R.E.M, The DB's, and the Go-Betweens. Written during a time of personal change, when Long was unsure if he was going to continue making music, Upwards of Summer is a revelation. He released his debut album Hoverance to critical acclaim in 2015. Leaving his adopted London, Long returned to his childhood home to write an album of singular grace and simplicity, steeped in natural imagery and "Spooky pastoralism" (MOJO). Hoverance and its follow-up E.P We Are in the Fields (2016) won praise from The Guardian for their “twilit ambience and demented beauty” and from Sky Arts as "calling to mind the atmosphere of Nick Drake".

Picturebox Melodic indie pop music from the cathedral city of Canterbury. Songs about girls, animals, football, anything, everything, nothing. They’ve released two albums on Gare Du Nord and are currently finishing off their third. Leader Robert Halcrow is also involved in the FXU2 project with Jack Hayter and Citizen Helene, and also plays bass for Papernut Cambridge and more recently Twink & The Bare Nodes.

Winter Sprinter 2018

The Winter Sprinter 2018

Fika Recordings, WIAIWYA and Gare du Nord proudly present the return of annual Winter Sprinter!

Four nights, three labels, twelve bands, DJs… the perfect antidote to the post-Christmas blues in the intimate surroundings of The Lexington.

Thanks to Track & Field and Fortuna Pop; without their previous stewardships of the Winter Sprinter, we'd all be sat at home feeling glum the first week of January.

A limited number of super early bird 4 day passes are available now for £32 from wegottickets.com/fikarecordings. Keep an eye on the website, our Twitter and Facebook pages to keep up to date on the line up announcements!

July 24th: The Hayman Kupa Band album launch show

Advance tickets from wegottickets.com/fikarecordings

THE HAYMAN KUPA BAND When Darren Hayman (Hefner) and Emma Kupa (Standard Fare/ Mammoth Penguins) decided to make a duets record, we knew the results would be great, but we didn’t expect them to be THIS great. Gathering together a rhythm section consisting of Michael Wood (Whoa Melodic/Singing Adams) on bass and Cat Loye (Fever Dream) on drums, The Hayman Kupa band create brash, bold and effortlessly melodic power pop. Sharing writing duties and sometimes singing each others words, lines are blurred and creativity explored in a wonderfully exuberant collection of songs. The album, recorded in three days at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate, is an exploration of relationships and, at its heart, it’s the sound of a friendship being made.

WOLF GIRL Wolf Girl are Becky, Chris, Carl and Christabel - a garage pop four-piece based in South London. Having met each other through being in awkward teenage bands in the South East, they eventually formed in September 2013. With admirable authenticity, they record and rehearse in an old garage called Bucket East that backs onto the river Wandle, staying faithful to their garage-rock tendencies. It’s been said that they both do and don’t sound like the Ramones, and have also been compared to both the Shop Assistants and Bratmobile. Wolf Girl have their own trademarks though, offering a spirited take on powerful, melodic and jagged indie pop that often recalls the noisier aspects of C86.

SCHANDE A London trio, Schande are known for writing discordantly catchy, melodic indie rock- that joyous blend of 90s indie at its best, mixed with a unique element of the unknown. Jen’s take on Schande’s sound is simple: “We’re not story tellers- the music is landscape where literal meaning is irrelevant. We’re inspired by memory, by experience and by those undefined tangents and planes linking the two. Those tensions between space and location- that’s what we soundtrack.”

June 21st: Enderby's Room at St Pancras Old Church

Advance tickets £10 from wegottickets.com/fikarecordings

Jun 21st: Enderby's Room with The Wave Pictures and Emma Kupa at St Pancras Old Church

We're putting on a very special gig in the beautiful confines of St Pancras Old Church to celebrate the release of the debut album from Enderby's Room. And we're delighted to be able to say both The Wave Pictures and Emma Kupa will be playing full sets in support of Enderby's Room.

ENDERBY'S ROOM

Enderby’s Room is fiddle player Dan Mayfield, once from rural Lincolnshire, but he has now found home living in London. His folk tinged songs reflect on his traditional folk upbringing. Mayfield has played violin for many artists including Daniel Johnston, Darren Hayman, The Wave Pictures, Allo Darlin’ and the Belles of London City morris dancers. Over the past ten years he has gently built up a collection of his own songs, which he performs with his band Enderby’s Room. The name comes from an Anthony Burgess character called Mr Enderby who composed his prose inside the toilet. The band’s make up has been constantly evolving; around 30 different individuals have been a part of Enderby’s Room over the last decade, before settling on the current 5 piece lineup. Enderby’s Room’s sound features a Victorian pedal harmonium, together with French horn, double bass, ukulele, guitar and percussion.

“Unfolding gently, the quiet grace of Enderby’s Room seems to draw on the folk tradition while taking brave chances of its own.” Clash Music" "At times they capture the sumptuous melancholia of Low; at others, they're finding new shapes for indie folk" How Does It Feel “their delicate harmonies, unusual instruments and vivid storytelling are intricately woven and desperately beautiful” Green Man Festival

THE WAVE PICTURES

The Wave Pictures are David Tattersall, Franic Rozycki and Jonny ‘Huddersfield’ Helm. Formed in 1998 when Franic and David lived in a village called Wymeswold, the band played with several drummers until Jonny became a permanent member in 2003 replacing Hugh J Noble. In the beginning the band learned to play together by covering Jonathan Richman songs but soon David was writing lots of original material. They have since released six studio albums to critical acclaim and played numerous sessions on BBC 6 Music, Radio 1 and Xfm. Interest generated from these recordings has enabled The Wave Pictures to play shows all over the world with artists including Jeffrey Lewis, Darren Hayman, Stanley Brinks, Freschard and Herman Düne.

EMMA KUPA

Emma stepped into the limelight as the lead singer, bass player and songwriter for much loved (and missed) indie heroes Standard Fare, and has since been a front woman in Without Feathers, Mammoth Penguins and The Hayman Kupa Band. What she lacks in quality band names she more than makes up for in intensely personal and irresistibly hummable pop tunes.

BELLES OF LONDON CITY

An innovative and unique blend of morris dancing, song, music and foolery with a modern edge, with Enderby's Room's Dan Mayfield on fiddle.

Advance tickets available from wegottickets.com/fikarecordings.