COVENTRY Music Museum Curator Pete Chambers BEM writes for the Observer.
AS reported here last week COVtember returned to The Tin for its fourth year, bigger than before, over three days (September 16, 17 and 18).
This time the event was in support of Warwickshire and Northampton Air Ambulance Service which flies across the counties of Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland, covering 3,850sq miles.
Visit theairambulanceservice.org.uk for more on the charity.
This year’s line-up looked like this – Lies, YNES, Mugshot, Luna Kiss, The Pristines, The Loaded, The Astras, Celestial, Idle Noise, Danny Ansell, Caitlin McCarthy, Shanghai Hostage, Matt Cattell, The Pigeons, Kharma, Septic and the Tanks, The Session, Man Made Moon and The Gasoline Supremes.
It’s testament to Coventry and Warwickshire that we have such a range of top class musicians making amazing all this superb music.
I went along on Saturday to immerse myself into some of the local sounds – The Pristines never disappoint, Shanghai Hostage I love, Caitlin McCarthy is already a star in the making and Idle Noise and Luna Kiss rocked it.
One of the artists I was keen to check out was YNES (pronounced yin-es). She has huge amounts of star quality, everything I had seen about her (websites, videos, photos) are on another level, all very professional and playing Glastonbury having been personally asked by Billy Bragg gives a strong indication of the talent this artist has.
She also reminds me a lot of slightly anarchic Kate Nash, a wonderful artist that I had the pleasure to meet many years ago.
YNES tells me she has been performing for around three years now. She is about to embark on a mini tour in January (Birmingham, London, Manchester) to celebrate the launch of her upcoming debut EP. So things are looking very exciting for this unique local artist.
So off I went to see how she was live at the new look Tin (love the new stage position).
Well there were so many great artists but YNES was my highlight – dynamic, emotive and powerful.
There was also lots of fun in her stage presence too, but that pretty much subsided as she exited the stag and threw herself on the floor as she reached some kind of artistic critical mass, it was breathtaking stuff.
There was a tangible buzz about her in the venue – this is no ordinary artist, in a fair and just world she will be the next big thing to emerge from our musical city.
I asked her how much she looks forward to playing Coventry gigs. She said: “Yeah I do, it’s rare that I get to play Cov as I’m usually elsewhere, but it’s always nice to play a hometown gig and have the support of friends and family.”
I’m so glad she made it tonight, a huge thank you to all the artists taking part and a huge thanks to the legends Paul Quinn for organising this weekend and to Carl Richard Aylott for MCing it all.
