The Unthanks Announce Home Gathering Festival Saturday 22nd August

The Unthanks are to headline and curate a day of music in their native city, at The Stephenson Boiler Shop, an impressive post-industrial space and birthplace of Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, just behind Newcastle Central Station on Saturday 22nd August.

The Unthanks have long held private ambitions of running their own festival one day, and this Gathering could be the first seed that steadily grows year on year. The Mercury nominated Tyneside band are delighted to have Newcastle’s finest on the first bill. Newcastle has a history of producing stupendous and musically intelligent festival bands, and both The Baghdaddies and Rob Heron’s Tea Pad Orchestra, who have both played private parties for The Unthanks in the past, will provide the perfect carnivalesque counterpoint to the beautiful and brooding music of The Unthanks.

The bill is completed by brilliant Glasgow folk singer and songwriter Alasdair Roberts, and Twelfth Day, a young duo featuring Orkney fiddle player Catriona Price and harpist Esther Swift from The Borders, whose beautiful playing can be heard at the start of the title track to Mount the Air by The Unthanks.

Home Gathering will also play host to 150 Unthanks Singing Weekenders. The Unthanks run special winter weekends at which fans come and sing with them on the Northumberland Heritage Coast. To mark the 5th year of these weekends, 150 attendees have been invited to Home Gathering and sing when you least expect them to! Or there might be dancers when you least expecting, or Maximo Park’s Paul Smith playing his favourite tunes.