FEATURE:
The Digital Mixtape
PHOTO CREDIT: Thomas Butler/The Guardian
Guy Garvey at Fifty
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ONE of my favourite people in music….
turns fifty on 6th March. Guy Garvey is the leader of Elbow. To mark his upcoming birthday, I have ended this feature with some great Elbow hits and deep cuts. A selection of their music that also demonstrates Guy Garvey’s amazing vocals and songwriting. I am sourcing from Wikipedia here for some Garvey biography, as it seems to be the fullest and most up-to-date:
“Garvey grew up in Bury, Greater Manchester and comes from a working class, Catholic family and he is one of seven siblings. He told The Guardian in 2015, that he was named Guy, after another Catholic, Guy Fawkes. He also told them he was bullied at school, due to his ears, which he had pinned back at the age of 12, his sister Gina, told the Guardian that the school bullying may have contributed to her brother's sensitivity. His parents separated when he was aged 12, and they had divorced by the time he was 13. His father was a former grammar school boy who could not afford to go to University; a Trade Unionist, he spent most of his working life as a newspaper proofreader and as a chemist at ICI. His mother was a police officer who went back to university and became a psychologist. Garvey has five older sisters: Gina, Louise, Sam, Karen, and Becky. His younger brother is the actor Marcus Garvey.
In the early 1990s, while at sixth-form college in Whitefield, near Bury, Garvey formed Elbow with Mark and Craig Potter, Pete Turner, and Richard Jupp. He serves as the lyricist of Elbow, and has been widely praised for his songwriting throughout his career. As well as vocal duties Garvey has also played a wide variety of instruments live including both electric and acoustic guitar, trumpet, and various forms of percussion. Elbow won two Ivor Novello awards for best song writing for the 2008 single "Grounds for Divorce" as well as best contemporary song for "One Day Like This". He was awarded a lifetime achievement honour by the Radio Academy in 2014.
Amongst other work, Garvey produced and recorded the I Am Kloot album Natural History (2001). Alongside Elbow keyboard player Craig Potter he also produced I Am Kloot's single "Maybe I Should" (2005, not associated with any album), their Mercury Music Prize nominated 2010 album Sky at Night and their 2013 album Let It All In. Elbow were themselves Mercury Music Prize nominees, in 2011, for the album Build a Rocket Boys! and won the prize in 2008 for their album "The Seldom Seen Kid". In addition, Garvey made an appearance on Massive Attack's 2010 album record Heligoland.
He is a member of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA).In April 2012 Garvey became a patron of the Manchester Craft and Design Centre. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to music he received, in July of the same year, an honorary doctorate from Manchester Metropolitan University, a Doctor of Arts.
Garvey has been a presenter on BBC Radio 6 Music since 2007 (Sunday afternoon 2 pm to 4 pm, British time) and previously presented a show on Sunday evenings on XFM. He had a monthly column in the now-defunct listings magazine City Life and is a patron of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), the Manchester-based charity responsible for clearing war zones of mines and munitions worldwide.
In 2015, Garvey announced that he would be releasing his first solo studio album while continuing his duties as Elbow's lead songwriter. The resulting album, Courting the Squall, was released on 30 October 2015, by Polydor Records in the UK. On 27 October 2015 Garvey appeared on BBC Two's Later... with Jools Holland, where he performed "Angela's Eyes" and "Belly of the Whale".
In January 2024, Elbow performed on the The Graham Norton Show and afterwards Garvey joined Norton's guests to promote Elbow's tenth studio album, Audio Vertigo which will be released on the 22 March, their tour starts on the 7 May 2024”.
To mark the approaching fiftieth birthday of the wonderful Guy Garvey, I thought it would be appropriate to compile a playlist. I would suggest people check out his solo ands non-Elbow work, though I am going to keep it strictly Elbow here. Such an incredible talent, there is nobody in music quite like him. Such a distinct and consistently brilliant songwriter and artist, let’s hope we have many more years of the phenomenal Elbow. It is true that Guy Garvey is…
A music legend