Curtis Eller’s American Circus + A Different Thread + The Silver Reserve – 40th Anniversary Month
Part of The Adelphi 40th Anniversary Celebrations
Curtis Eller’s American Circus
Another Nice Mess UK Tour 2024
+ A Different Thread
+ The Silver Reserve
Sunday 13th October 2024
The New Adelphi Club
£12.50 Advance / £15 OTD
Curtis Eller is a banjo player, songwriter, and rock & roll singer. The beloved show business veteran started his career at the age of seven as a juggler and acrobat, but has since turned to the banjo because that’s where the money is. The iconoclastic troubadour has spent thirty years relentlessly touring the burlesque houses, beer halls, underground theatres, and punk rock shitholes of North American, Europe, and Australia, where his legendary shows once earned him the title, “New York’s angriest yodeling banjo player”.
His band, The American Circus, has developed a devoted international following based on spellbinding stage performances that combine an unsettling vision of American history with silent film style, physical comedy, and explosive rock & roll energy. The band has released a string of strange and compelling, phonograph recordings that present a dreamlike vision of American history where all points in time have collapsed into one. Fans of past recordings have come to expect a hallucinatory, historical landscape populated by corrupt 19th century politicians, faded Hollywood stars, two-bit prize fighters and frequent, inexplicable visits from Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. The ever-evolving cast of musicians spares no effort in their quest to bring Eller’s historically evocative compositions to vivid, cinematic life.
“A moustachioed, New York, yodelling banjo player, Eller sings for the unsung, rump-shakes for the ne’er remembered, and leg trembles for histories forgotten. He is a theatre of movement: a twitching, twirling time machine whose songs transport you back to the lost annals of history”
“Curtis Eller is a born eccentric, a throwback to a bygone age of Vaudevillian minstrel entertainment, Buster Keaton-esque slapstick humour & circus clowning, boxing rings & showgirls but all delivered with a contemporary street attitude; a song & dance man for our times”
+ A Different Thread
A Different Thread is a transatlantic band fronted by Alicia Best from Durham, North Carolina, and Robert Jackson from the Midlands of England. The two met busking in Ireland in 2016 and have been on the road ever since, touring and creating original music together. Pulling from their respective roots, they weave together elements of 70s’ Folk Revival, Country, and Appalachian Blues into a timeless blend of Americana, delivered with breathtaking harmonies, fiddle, harmonica, guitar, ukulele, and percussion.
Their music has garnered the attention of the BBC and NPR radio and landed them support slots with the likes of Jody Stevens (Big Star) Native Harrow, and the Milk Carton Kids. Even country legend, Steve Earl, praised their live performance at Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival where the artists shared a bill. Their intimate blend of raw vocals and atmospheric instrumentation is reminiscent of The Band, Bert Jansch, and Joni Mitchell, with a nod to more contemporary artists such as The Wood Brothers, Rhiannon Giddens and Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings.
The band released their second album, Call of the Road, in September last year, followed by a UK tour with double bass player, Mike Seal. The new album was recorded in Bristol, UK, with producer Luke Cawthra (Phantom Limb) and the Folk duo, Chris Elliott and Caitlin Jones. Written over lockdown, these eleven songs deal with the themes of love, loss, wanderlust, and life on the open road.
+ The Silver Reserve