CLICK HERE TO VIEW RUNNING ORDER

To an artist without the creative energy and laser-focused determination of Elles Bailey, it could all have been very different. But when you're the hardest-working woman in blues, rock and roots
music, not even the tumultuous world events of the past two years were going to stop you from writing several new chapters in a remarkable story.

The Bristol-based singer, songwriter and bandleader, who has powered her way to the forefront of the British blues and roots scene in recent years, is excited to unveil her eagerly-awaited third
album Shining in the Half Light. Crammed with vibrant originals brought to life with her A-list band, it's yet another significant step forward in a career already feted with awards and acclaim
generated by her two previous studio sets, 2017's Wildfire and 2019's Road I Call Home. Shining in the Half Light arrives on the heels of Bailey's typically extensive autumn tour of the UK
and such preview tracks as 'Cheats and Liars' and 'Sunshine City.' For anyone who loves their combination of thought-provoking bluesiness and sassy rock, there is so much more where they come from. These are ten new tracks by an artist who, as she sings in 'The Game,' always dances to the beat of her own blues. She co-wrote the entire album with a variety of collaborators and recorded it in Devon, with her band and producer Dan Weller. Tracking was completed just weeks before Elles gave birth to her first child and she sat in the hospital waiting room listening to mixes on the big day!

The height of the pandemic also gave rise to her series of cover version livestreams, Ain't Nothing But. The ensuing record was nominated as Blues Album of the Year at the UKBlues Awards 2021, where Elles was named UK Blues Artist of the Year for the 2nd year running. Let's also remember that Road I Call Home, recorded in Nashville, had been crowned Album of the Year at those awards, and its song 'Little Piece of Heaven' (written with American greats Bobby Wood and Dan Auerbach) was UK Song of the Year at the UK Americana Awards 2020.
For the new listeners that Elles attracts with every play, that voice was the silver lining of a potentially grave illness, when at just three years old, she contracted viral and bacterial pneumonia, and had to breathe through a tube for 17 days. “Only with the real heavy touring did I start to really understand that it's such a big part of me,” she reflects. “I know how fortunate I am that I walked away with a husky voice. And my life.”

After residencies on the Bristol scene, her first EP Who I Am To Me came out in 2015, followed two years later by that full Wildfire debut. It was an exhilarating confirmation of a unique talent already marking her card with passionate, visceral live shows. Two more years of touring and writing later, Road I Call Home arrived as a remarkable companion with all the fire of the first set, plus maturity, perspective and downright soulfulness.

Now back to the future, and the title of the new album. “It's called Shining in the Half Light because there we all were, in this time of complete uncertainty, worry and isolation, and yet artists were still putting themselves on a screen, warts and all, and that brought people together,” says Elles. “I was so inspired by all the musicians, poets, artists and everyone who were like, 'I don't quite know how to do me in this time, but I'm going to try anyway.' That to me is what the album is about. It is a record inspired by those who spread love in a time of heartbreak, happiness in a time of fear & connection in a time of loneliness.

Lyrically, Bailey has never pulled punches, and this time she's delivering knockout blows. Take 'Cheats and Liars.' “It's about the people in their ivory towers who made us feel like the arts don't really matter, and to go and retrain,” she says. “Thirty-eight percent of musicians, including myself, didn't get any kind of government funding, and some people lost everything. It's been so hard watching how arts has been undervalued at a time when that was what was bringing people together.”

For an artist who lives for live performance, lockdown brought its share of challenges, of course. Suddenly and unavoidably, after gigging her way to prominence over several years, the road she called home was home. But as ever, she turned it into a positive.

“It's the first full album I've made here in the UK, I was 6 months pregnant when I made it, and it was made right in the middle of lockdown,” she exclaims. “It still sounds like an Elles Bailey record, but it does feel like it's expanded and been given a new perspective.”

The record was made throughout December 2020, doing a week of pre-production followed by nine days in Middle Farm in Devon. “It was a very different, yet exceedingly fulfilling experience,” she admits. “I've made records in Nashville and I was going to make this album there in May 2020, but obviously that couldn't happen. But I knew I had an amazing band here that could do an incredible job on this record, I just needed to find the right producer.

The search for a like-minded collaborator led her to rock producer Dan Weller, best known for his long working relationship with Enter Shikari. “He's not in my musical world at all, so that in itself was a huge step into the unknown” she confides. “But we chatted on the phone a lot through the summer, and just clicked. We both seemed to be on the same page with what we wanted to achieve from the album, and how best to go about it. I had about 40 songs, probably, and it was a case of really shaking the tree until we got these ten tracks. Then we just got in a room, played live and let the musicians do their thing, and built it that way.”

The musicians that feature are Joe Wilkins on guitar, Jonny Henderson on ivories, Matthew Waer on bass duties and Matthew Jones on drums. The finishing touches were then added by artist Izo Fitzroy who brought Andrusilla Mosely and Jade Elliot on board to immerse the album in their stunning, gospel-inspired backing vocals.

An exciting team of co-writers came on board, too, with three credits for Ash Tucker & Will Edmunds, who also wrote with Elles for Road I Call Home. She teamed with longtime guitarist Joe Wilkins to write the slow-flowing, philosophical 'Riding Out The Storm.' Other kindred spirits include guitar maestro Martin Harley, for the gentle and romantic 'Different Kind Of Love,' and Matt Owens, co-founder of the hugely successful indie-folk outfit Noah and the Whale, on the aforementioned 'Sunshine City'. Alex Maile, Tamara Stewart and Brett Boyett also have one each. The album comes to a striking conclusion with its title track, co-written with Nashvilles, Craig Lackey, over zoom in May 2020. Its message, and its description of the time in which it was made, are delivered with restrained power. “Feel like we’re living where we can’t be seen,” sings Elles. “Here we are lost in the in-between, reaching out to each other through a cold glass screen, losing our grip on a dystopian dream.” As she says: “That's probably the only time that I was as direct as that. It's an album inspired and made in ‘lockdowns’, but I'm quite glad that it doesn't give that away too much.”

Shining In The Half Light is an album of self-realisation, but one that lets everyone share in its sense of realism and, ultimately, positivity. “It's a new perspective for me,” says Elles. “I have no idea what it would have taken to get me off the road. I think I would have found it really tough, taking time off to have a baby and watching everyone else still doing their thing. So the fact that there was this forced stop, gave me the time to shift my perspective, and that’s what this record is all about.

“This album has been about getting to know who I am without the show, the stage and the splendour,” she concludes. “unraveling the layers and being ok with them, and learning to love each and every version of myself, and of course getting to know this new version, being a mum! This whole record has been about finding a new way to do things, and seeing the blessings I have right in front of me. That's been really weight-lifting and refreshing.”

We are two brothers, Alessandro and Marco Cinelli, and we come from Latina, Italy. Musically we grew up together, on the trail of all the artists that our father Domenico, a true music lover, used to show us. He would spin records all day long, and just from a very early age we used to dance to Stevie Ray Vaughan not even knowing what his face looked like. Dad used to play guitar in church, and used to drum for fun. Marco picked up the guitar at the age of eleven, Ale started the drums when he was seven. We have a four year gap between us so let’s say we started together. We used to spin records and play along, sing and fool around swapping instruments all our youth. Marco left to live abroad and four years later so did Ale. We finally reunited in London in from 2015 to play every now and then, since Marco was still living in Paris, and steadily from 2017. We didn’t have a band then, nor an intention whatsoever to form one. Ale, who was the one who knew more the scene in the city, soon got well esteemed as a session player and became a steady house drummer in most of blues jams. Marco would come occasionally to play and got introduced to the bluesmen ring, so that soon we could host our own show under the name of the Cinelli Brothers. We met this fantastic bass player Enzo Strano, a Sicilian guy settled in UK since teenage. He impressed us right away for his massive stage presence, his magical touch on the bass as well for his simplicity. The kind of bass player you know how great he is when you play with someone else. Enzo joined the band immediately as he previously jammed with Ale and got to know him better. We started as a trio at the Ain’t Nothing but Blues bar, like most of the blues bands in London. We used to play songs from Muddy Waters, BB King, Bo Didley, Willie Dixon, Elmore James, but also Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, everything that made sense to us. We loved to shuffle jazz, blues and soul in the same night, feeding people with different sonorities. The sound was unique and the crowd truly went crazy each time we performed. Marco has got an Arline Tuxedo as “axe” that he bought second hand in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He plays with thick strings dropping the tuning in D, and he never plays plectrum, solely fingers. His voice is soulful, but he can phrases the right blues notes. Ale plays smooth, but groovy, and the pocket is there. Most of the time we are indisciplined and lousy as the show presses, but the machine works like a clockwork. People go nuts dancing on the table. One day Marco came up with this Muddy’s tune, “Forty Days and Forty Nights” and he said he was never going to play it anymore without an harmonica, because what makes the song special is just the messing-around chops of Little Walter over Muddy’s lead. We decided to call Rollo Markee on Harmonica for our next show. He is a wizard, he can bend notes like we’ve never heard before. He’s got this weird sound coming from his amp that sometimes can buzz like a fly or snort like a buffalo. He brought us to an higher level, and boy did we sounded bluesy! To expand the sound beyond we would call a guitar player or a keyboard player, among which our favourite was Alberto Manuzzi, an other fellow countryman. With this quintet formula we had a couple of successful shows as the crowd started really to be pissed that we didn’t have any record to sell, any website, nothing. We decided to write some songs and record an album. Marco had written already a bunch of blues songs so the writing task was rather easy. He’s got skill in producing and organising recording session, and with his brother decided to make an album the old fashion way, all analog and live-in-the-studio. We wanted to have something that sounded like the records that dad used to spin. A great blues record! We went with the quintet featuring Strano, Markee and Manuzzi at the Soup Studio, London. Everything was finalised, rehearsed, recorded and mixed on the spot, tape and plate reverb included. We recorded seventeen songs in three days, between covers and originals, but in the end we decided to release twelve tracks, due to the limited vinyl capacity. Ever since the record went out, we had the feeling that the response was quite good. People started to buying it at our shows and we would find our songs played at the radio as well as in album-reviewing blogs. Bar owners, festival programmers, bookers and music lovers from great part of Europe started contacting us to come play here and there. We toured in UK, France, Spain, Holland, Italy, Portugal and Germany not fully realising how powerful the impact of the band was. For us it’s all about having fun on stage, rock the necks and play some dirty gritty blues and rhythm ’n’ blues. The performance may sometimes start in a way and end in a completely different one. We might end up in some thirty minutes long medleys, as well as some psychedelic rock moments. We can also go funky sometimes. All that matters is that truth and honesty are there, without pretensions. We love to step on the footprints of our heroes, but we love to be ourselves doing it, without thinking we have to do this or that. Music is also freedom and above that we feel the connection of our brotherhood. The result is always unique, fresh, and true.

Brave new world, brave new band. The WILSON BROTHERS beamed in from another dimension with explosive contemporary rock and roll flirting with psychedelic blues culminating in an emotional experience that tantalises the senses. This is the sound of the future arriving as heartfelt, expansive, inspirational, delicate, exciting, perplexing and sometimes divergent philosophical journey.    
Ash& Phil Wilson have considerable musical experience playing alongside Sari Schorr, Scott Mckeon, Sean Webster, Jesse Davey and Well Hung Heart.
 
They have been joined on this exciting new venture by their musical brother Roger Wilson Inniss whose background includes artists such as Chaka Khan, Mike Taylor, Errol Brown and Joanne Shaw Taylor: adding a sonic chemistry that has to be heard to be believed.

“Our musical careers have been dominated by playing for other artists and collaborations, we came together in 2017 to make ASH WILSON’S critically acclaimed debut album “Broken Machine”. What people don’t know is the album was actually intended to be the debut WILSON BROTHERS record. When the covid-19 pandemic struck and stopped everything, everyone had to re-evaluate their lives. Trying to find some perspective and get a positive from a negative we started getting together to play the songs from “Broken Machine”. Before you knew it we started writing and recording together again. The electrifying musical force shared between the 3 of us was there from the first note played. The songs are our very lifeblood, we feel very passionate about what we achieved with “Broken Machine” regretably we never got chance to grow it on stage at that time.

We have now formed the WILSON BROTHERS to bring that lifeblood and passion alive for you with “Broken Machine Live & Re-paired.

An International touring band with a 10 year portfolio of festival, theatre and