Solstice Clann Tour With Special Guest Leonie Jane Kennedy In Oundle

Name: Solstice Clann Tour With Special Guest Leonie Jane Kennedy In Oundle
Start: 2025-04-05T19:00:00+01:00
Location: Queen Victoria Hall, Oundle

Schedule

Sat, 05 Apr, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Queen Victoria Hall, Oundle | Peterborough, EN

Solstice return to Oundle during their 2025 Clann Tour and bring along Leonie Jane Kennedy as their very special guest.
No stranger to the Queen Victoria Hall we are extremely proud to be hosting them once again here at the scene of their Soundle 22 headline triumph.
Tickets are £20 in advance and £25 on the door
I loved them then and I love them now... it’s a life affirming, joyous sound – Steven Wilson (solo, Porcupine Tree, No-Man, et al)
I know their next album will be probably the best album they’ve ever released and there’s not many times you can think that about a band. – Greg Spawton, (Big Big Train)
Solstice are pleased to announce the release of their 8th studio album, Clann, on 4th April 2025 through specialist US label Progrock.com Essentials.
Voted Best Band in Prog magazine’s latest annual Prog Awards, and arriving on an exuberant wave of positivity created by previous albums Sia (2020) and Light Up (2022), both widely acclaimed within the prog community and beyond, Clann completes the most recent phase of Solstice’s 40-plus year career. As band founder, composer and guitarist (winner of Prog magazine’s most recent Best Guitarist Prog Award) Andy Glass explains, “[Sia] made me realise the potential and by the time we were working on Light Up the whole band had raised its game. I believed then that a trilogy of albums was what it would take to create our best work and track that journey. Clann is the final album in the Sia Trilogy and it’s everything I’d hoped it would be. Let’s hope the universe likes it too.”
As Solstice keyboardist Steven McDaniel laughingly confesses “It’s terrifying to be in a band this good!” Boasting the same line-up since 2020, the members of Solstice channel their impressive individual talents to create music that melds elements of hi-intensity prog-folk, soaring new age, fragile ambience, fresh funky pop-rock with world music leanings, and fist- pumping heavy rock jubilance, demonstrating a sophisticated, multifaceted modernity while retaining transcendent timeless qualities. A lauded singer-songwriter in her own right, Ebony Buckle, backing vocalist and now solid member of the Solstice family, reflects, “I love how these new songs feel like they’ve always existed.”

Enjoying both an artistic and commercial rebirth over the past 5 years, Solstice owe much to the addition of young singer Jess Holland in 2020, who brought with her not just a clear emotive voice that communicates both stridency and tenderness with equal ease and charm, but a beguiling energy that has directly impacted everyone in the band. As Andy Glass is eager to explain “Sia was our first album with Jess and what a total game changer that was. I’ve felt incredibly motivated and inspired ever since. Since then I seem to have this relentless appetite to take this music as far as we can. There’s nothing quite like feeling that kind of drive.”
Recorded both in a variety of recording studios and by individual band members at home, Clann includes a first in the band’s career with the track Plunk which features a brass section recorded at the beautiful Grand Chapel Studio in Toddington, Bedfordshire. Glass admits that “there might be a bit of a Big Big Train influence there somewhere!”
Clann manages to cover a great deal of musical ground in its nearly 40 minutes running time. Firefly opens up proceedings and will be familiar to many already through its airing at numerous gigs and its inclusion on both the band’s Live At The Stables and Return To Cropredy releases. Its pulse-pumping energy, hard-edged yet infectious grooves, whirling bursts of synth and violin and its glorious guitar solo lift the spirit and sweep us into Solstice’s mesmerising world. Elsewhere Life delivers smooth, soulful, modern pop with an elegant dance-friendly heart and Plunk is taut swaggering funk in 7/8 with brass stabs and a left-field, gritty guitar solo. Frippa is built on an urgent, bluesy Crimson-esque riff in 5 and spotlights organ, violin and even more incendiary guitar. Final track, the 14 minute Twin Peaks, in some ways harks back to what prog polymath and longtime Solstice fan Steven Wilson once described as the band’s “spacey and spacious” early material – it’s gentle, reflective and airy with pastoral, folky strains, yet builds into a soaring expression of rapturous celebration and spiritual freedom.
Lyrically, the album continues established Solstice themes of love, joy, peace, harmony and acceptance, yet Clann admits that not everything in the garden is always rosy. Although longing for some ultimate redemption, both Plunk and Frippa feature a level of reproach for unidentified liars and cheats with Plunk even exercising some wry schadenfreude at the downfall of the song’s antagonist.
Solstice will be supporting the release of Clann with a strings of live dates including festival appearances in the UK, Europe and north America. The band’s live work has been fundamental to their growing popularity with a wide audience demographic. Always more than just a magical musical experience, the band’s gigs are consistently celebratory, invigorating, warm hearted and a lot of fun. The live work has fed directly into Andy Glass’s writing – “One of the joys of this beautiful band is the energy on stage... and that’s definitely played into the writing for this album. I only need to think about the gigs to imagine the possibilities and for the ideas to start forming.”
A story that began at the legendary Marquee Club in London's Wardour Street finally arrives at the chapter PROG journalist Martin Kielty describes as "Solstice be- coming the band they were always meant to be"
LEONIE :
Leonie Jane Kennedy is a multi award winning singer songwriter, often described as haunting by her audiences. With intricate guitar riffs alongside powerful, soulful vocals, Leoni is a musical polymath creating a new wave of rock with progressive influence in her rhythmic and melodic structures, offering lyrics that surpass her years. With a touch of a young Bonnie Raitt in her, Leoni performs her songs with a passion and deliver second to none and is described by The New York Times as "a welcomed portal to something passionate and powerful".
Winning her first title as the UK’s number 1 under 19’s singer songwriter award in 2014, thirteen year old Leoni performed live at the Houses of Parliament in London which led to a Yamaha sponsorship and an endorsement from Orange Amplification. Leoni would go on to win further songwriting awards and in 2018, 'Queen's’ Brian May and Roger Taylor chose her from hundreds of applicants to receive the 'Freddie Mercury' Scholarship, financing her entire university tuition fees. Leoni graduated with First Class Honours and then moved to North London were she is currently studying a Masters Degree in Songwriting.
She began touring with The Anchoress in 2023 as their lead guitarist and opened the shows with a set of original acoustic material, with some of the larger shows being support slots for The Manic Street Preachers at Trentham Live. For the majority of her work, Leoni uses PRS Guitars, and her talents were again recognised when she was chosen as a ‘PRS Guitars Pulse Artist’ for 2023/2024, representing the brand as an artist in her own right. Leoni’s latest album ‘New World Woman’ was independently recorded and released by her in 2023 as an acoustic compilation of reinterpreted tracks, originally penned by the Canadian prog rock legends ‘Rush’. After raising a whopping £5.8K via a Kickstarter’ campaign, Leoni then had the funding to create a huge merchandise range with products such as executive bundles, stunning limited edition marbled vinyl and the original album artwork on canvas up for grabs. ‘New World Woman’ has been a great success, completely selling out of CD’s with only a few vinyl remaining since coming back from Germany and The Netherlands on tour supporting Rush tribute band Moving Pictures. They have been doing so in the UK for a year to promote this album which has gained worldwide praise and the hearts of many.
Described as a ‘force of nature’, Leoni Jane Kennedy is recognised by most in the UK industry as one to watch out for.