Carla J Easton + Creepy Crawly + Broken Chanter / Low Four Studio, Manchester / Thu 28 May

Name: Carla J Easton + Creepy Crawly + Broken Chanter / Low Four Studio, Manchester / Thu 28 May
Start: 2026-05-28T19:00:00+01:00
Location: Low Four Studio

Schedule

Thu, 28 May, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Low Four Studio | Manchester, EN

Following her 2023 album Sugar Honey, Scottish songwriter, producer and now filmmaker Carla J Easton (Teen Canteen, Poster Paints, The Vaselines) made an award-winning documentary called Since Yesterday, about the history of pioneering Scottish girl groups. Often a collection of women who hardscrabbled their way through the industry with little more than, as the cliche goes, three chords and the truth, their stories inspired Easton to take a new approach to her fifth album I Think That I Might Love You. She picked up the guitar and learned it for the first time, pushing her keyboard sound to the fringes on an album that’s a celebration of guitar-led music – pop, indie and power. The single Oh Yeah, out 11 February, is the first track and mission statement of this sound.
The single, like the rest of the album, was recorded off the floor at the fabled Chem 19 studio and is an example of the collaborative nature of I Think That I Might Love You. Co-written with Simon Liddell (Poster Paints, Frightened Rabbit) – the rest of the album features collaborations with MALKA (Hen Hoose), Man of the Minch, Stevie Jackson (Belle and Sebastian), Johnny Scott (Chvrches) and outsider indie legend Darren Hayman of Hefner – Oh Yeah was written after Easton and Liddell had gone to see a Teenage Fanclub show.
‘Oh Yeah is the sound of loving someone who doesn’t quite love you back, but giving that love anyway,’ explains Easton. ‘Knowing the cost and paying the price with a defiant smile; beauty with a bruise underneath. It’s a song about reaching outward, leaning forward, heart wide open, and hoping to be caught.’
‘It’s not bitter – I think it’s brave to let yourself glow for someone even if they are half a step away. Musically, there are big Teenage Fanclub guitars, huge strings, and harmonies stacked like confessions you never quite say out loud. It’s the sound of standing in your bedroom, heart pounding, replaying voice notes that don’t say what you hope they will, and still pressing play again. The reckless, gorgeous place where you still believe love might turn around and choose you.
‘It was brilliant to work with Simon again on some new songs!’
Done in under two minutes, Oh Yeah is a Jenga tower of harmonies, 4/4 drums, riffs, melodies that almost threatens to collapse under the weight of its sheer joy but comes out the other side as a celebration of love, friendship and community.
Oh Yeah and I Think That I Might Love You are both produced by Howard Bilerman (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade, U.S. Girls, The Weather Station).
The album was made with support from Creative Scotland.
Main support comes from Creepy Crawly. Creepy Crawly is the project of Bristol-born and Manchester-based musician Rachel Cawley, weaving bittersweet narratives through shimmering, multilayered songwriting. Her distinctive crystalline vocals guide listeners through ethereal dreamscapes, moments of eerie unease, and the satisfying crunch of ’90s alt-rock melancholy. Growing up in the rural West of England, her music is, in part, inspired by a childhood soundtracked by folk revival artists and traditional British folk music. But the pull of the city was huge and, aged 18, she moved to London and submerged herself in the many worlds of music available to her there – working at venues, writing for music magazines, temping at record labels – and going to a lot of gigs. But, as it so often does, London spat her back out.
And so, during a period of self-reckoning with the question of ‘how the hell did I get here?’, living a life that seemed frighteningly ordinary, she returned to writing songs – tracing out the path of how she found herself in a place she didn’t want to be – and armed with newfound hope and resilience, plotting a route back out of it. The result of this reflective work is her debut album Like a Real Thing, which will be self-released on 30 May 2025 and draws from a diverse palette of influences including Scott Walker, Big Thief, Laura Marling, Anne Briggs, Cat Power, Breeders and Heatmiser.
Opening the show is Broken Chanter. Broken Chanter is the stage name of Glaswegian songwriter David MacGregor. Broken Chanter can be MacGregor on his own or, more often than not, with an array of extremely talented musicians joining him. His latest album, Chorus Of Doubt, (‘Agit-pop with heart, 8/10’ – UNCUT) was released by Chemikal Underground in April 2024 and was on the longlist of 20 for the 2024 Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award. Prior to this incendiary new gem of an LP, MacGregor has released two critically acclaimed albums as Broken Chanter – 2019’s eponymous introduction to his new guise (‘A stunning, stately debut’ – The Skinny) and 2021’s Catastrophe Hits (‘Muscular, fast-moving indie-pop’ – The Scotsman).
He spent 2007-2017 as the principal songwriter of Scottish alt-pop darlings Kid Canaveral – a band that could get you to dance, laugh, and weep all in the space of the same set. Their debut LP Shouting at Wildlife was described by The Herald as ‘a Scottish pop classic that should be mandatory in every record collection in the country’, and saw the band perform across a large chunk of the western hemisphere, with the similarly well-received follow-up Now That You Are a Dancer being longlisted for the SAY Award in 2014.
This show takes place at Low Four – a recording studio situated on Deansgate Mews in the Great Northern warehouse. This intimate venue features a fully stocked Cloudwater bar.
Price: £14 adv
Info/tickets: https://www.heymanchester.com/carla-j-easton