Fresh Thursday // Mary Ocher + Penny Black

Name: Fresh Thursday // Mary Ocher + Penny Black
Start: 2026-03-19T19:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-03-19T22:00:00+00:00
Location: 10 Boyd Street,Shieldfield,NE2 1AP,GB

Schedule

Thu Mar 19 2026 at 07:00 pm to 10:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

10 Boyd Street,Shieldfield,NE2 1AP,GB | Newcastle Upon Tyne, EN

Please note, the advertised start time is when our doors will open, generally music starts one hour after doors.
Fresh Thursday is a unique regular event that showcases new music alongside a home-cooked meal. For more information about how this event works please read the info at the bottom of this event carefully. Thank you. If you have a dietary requirement you can indicate it by selecting one of the free add-ons when purchasing your ticket.
Please note we are unable to offer refunds.
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Mary Ocher is one of the most distinctive and endlessly engaging, brave performers who plays here – travelling Europe with her ‘impossible to put in a box’ approach to making music she is a compulsive performer full of fierce strength and tender vulnerabilities in equal measures. When we hard Penny Black we knew that she was the right match for this fresh Thursday.
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Mary Ocher
Berlin's Mary Ocher returns to the UK for selected shows following dates in North America, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Ocher has been pushing the boundaries between pop and avant-garde for the past two decades, with playful and colorful form, and clever content that winks at everyone who recognizes its cultural and historical references. Her new album joins a series of apocalyptic and politically charged concept albums.
The critically acclaimed new album Your Guide To Revolution is a joyful ode to hope, released just six months after its predecessor, the edgy and experimental Approaching Singularity: Music for The End of Time. It was picked by The Quietus as "Album of The Week" and it joins Bandcamp's favorite Records of The Year. It also received the German Record Critics Prize.
The new recordings feature collaborations with Mogwai, Les Trucs, composer Roberto Cacciapaglia, pieces by fusion harpist Dorothy Ashby and 12th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, a homage to electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire and much more.
They cover a vast musical landscape from post-punk, folk and field recordings, to cosmic synth compositions and deconstructed techno.
The two albums are accompanied by the texts:
- "A Guide to Radical Living: A no nonsense guide to living comfortably with just enough: Why wealth needs poverty and how not to play along"
(available digitally, as an accompaniment to "Your Guide to Revolution").
http://maryocher.com/G2RL
- The full "Approaching Singularity" essay (a short version of which is available in print with the album):
www.maryocher.com/essay-approaching-singularity-music-for-the-end-of-time
Mary toured in 40 countries with previous releases, recorded and produced with Canadian Psych guru King Khan and Hans Joachim Irmler of Krautrock pioneers Faust, and feature collaborations with avant-garde legends Felix Kubin, Die Tödliche Doris and Julia Kent, among others.
"There is no artist quite like Mary Ocher. Her music is like an organism, evolving with each project, adapting to the world around it. "
- The Berliner
"A compelling piece of genre-spanning avant-pop equally suffused with a love of humanity, reflected in its voracious appetite for the many nuances of groove and sound, and an abhorrence for the many ways humanity is oppressed, compressed, and vaporized via the soul-crushing pressures of capitalism and encroaching technocracy."
- Bandcamp - Best Releases of The Year
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Penny Black
Penny Black is a songwriter and performer who has spent the past six years developing her skills as a mix engineer and producer. Her first self-produced album, My Skin Brought Me Here, was released on January 22nd, 2025.
In addition to her own work, Penny Black writes and produces for other artists and has begun composing for the commercial sector. She was recently a runner-up in SheCreates, a worldwide search to discover new female producers and engineers, where her contribution, Be Your Own Dolly, was signed to Media Tracks UK. Following the release of her debut single, The Red Relief, she has also proudly signed a publishing deal with Warner Music Group.
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More about FRESH Thursdays...
FRESH happens every Thursday during our open seasons. It is a platform to bring you fresh new music served up alongside a homecooked plant based meal, board games and candles. It can be hard to get people out to hear music that they don’t know yet & this is why we decided to offer dinner as an incentive to try something new, these gigs are cosy, communal nights and often you get to hear completely new music for the very first time. The music varies across multiple genres but it is usually fairly gentle listening type music & well suited to a relaxed Thursday night. The gigs are seated and during the sets the audience is very music focused & quiet with time to chat in between the sets and at the end when we keep the bar open.
We cook the food from scratch usually and dinner is well suited to lover of vegetables and wholesome cooking, it's usually something like a dhal, veggie chilli, tacos, roast veg or similar, our base line is vegan sometimes with veggie options. We can cater for nut/gluten free meals, but nuts & gluten are used in the kitchen so if you have serious allergies please bear that in mind.
Doors at 7pm, we aim to get dinner ready by 8pm and will bring it to you when its ready… music usually starts around 8pm, sometimes later if it’s a busy night for food (we are a tiny team) and we aim to have the music finished by 10-10.15 pm. We can only guarantee dinner with advance tickets and these days we cap dinner at 60 meals and the food tickets do often sell out.
We hope/think it's obvious that quality music and dinner for £10 is all about culture & community and that these events cost us money… If you can afford to purchase a higher level ‘Cobalt supporters‘ ticket we appreciate the additional help towards costs very much.