KID BRITISH @ MOHO LIVE
HUNGRY PIGEON 2010
SUNDAY MAY 30TH

Hungry Pigeon have confirmed KID BRITISH as the special guests for this years Closing Party at Moho Live on Sunday 30th May.

This appearance marks the second Hungry Pigeon appearance for the band who last year performed on the outdoor stage in Piccadilly Gardens and at the closing party they will be doing a special acoustic set

Kid British are one of the most successful acts to come out of Manchester in recent years and joined The Specials on their reformation tour last year as well as recently completing a hugely successful UK tour in their own right.

Previously announced artists for this years Hungry Pigeon Festival look like this

FRIDAY 28TH MAY
Reverend Soundsystem (Reverend & The Makers Jon McClure plus special guests performing Reverend songs in a dance style)
The Longcut
Karima Francis
Kirsty Almeida

SATURDAY 29TH MAY
Athlete
Very Secret Special Guests TBA
Misty's Big Adventure
Jessie Rose Trip
Lowline
To The Bones
Clint Boon

SUNDAY 30TH MAY
Liam Frost
Kid British
Thomas Truax

Many more artists are to be announced in coming weeks...

Day tickets available for £12 / Full weekend tickets available for £25 from...

http://www.wegottickets.com/event/77897

and http://www.seetickets.com / http://www.ticketline.co.uk

Available in person at Piccadilly Records

KID BRITISH
The global economy is in freefall. House repossessions are at a high. Woolworths is no more. But forget the credit crunch for a moment: Manchester four piece, Kid British are here to sprinkle some interest-free sunshine on what could be a bleak and bankrupt springtime. “We want to bring a feel good factor with our music,” says 25 year-old Simeon Mclean - one quarter of the singing/songwriting quartet that also includes Adio Marchant (25), James Mayer (22) and studio ace, Sean Mbaya (25). “Everyone’s going on about there being a depression. People are talking about the climate like there’s an apocalypse coming. We want to write about what we’ve experienced and what we understand. We think everyone needs to have bit of a laugh.”

Certainly Kid British are well poised to lift the gloom this year. Having drawn on the street smart sound of pop heavyweights Blur and Madness, the four piece – who were recently polled above Oasis in a survey of Manchester’s best bands – have allied their songwriting craft to a ballsy hip hop production. The results are a rude boy mix of club-friendly beats and bedroom-styled harmonies as evidenced by their Leave London EP (2008) and this year’s debut album, Are You Alright? Meanwhile, a riotous live sound has them earmarked as one of the must see new bands of 2009.

“We’re a product of the iPod generation,” says Mbaya. “We’ve been influenced by so many different bands from Nirvana through to The Beatles because music is constantly on shuffle. We like rap, reggae, jazz, indie, rock… and we bring all of those ideas to the music. It’s almost impossible to be original these days – people said we sounded like The Specials even before we heard them – so we don’t want to be pigeonholed to any sort of genre.” They’re not just a bunch of pretty tunes, either – Kid British’s razor sharp lyrical wit has seen them compared to The Streets and Lily Allen among others. “We don’t want to impose our views on people,” says Mayer. “We want our songs to be fun. We wrote single, Lost In London after spending a couple of days in the capital. Everyone we asked for directions was a tourist, it was so funny. We wanted to capture the fun and excitement of living in a multi cultural society rather than making a heavy political statement.”

This unusual union of sounds and ideas first took place in 2002, when bedroom rappers and schoolmates, Mclean and Marchant ran into Mayer on a bus. “I was carrying a Mystique record,” says Mayer. “I was a DJ and I was taking it back to the record shop because it was scratched - it stood out because it had a pink sleeve. Simeon asked me what it was and we got talking. It turned out that he was looking to work with a DJ and so we began writing and recording. It wasn’t a serious thing though - we’d meet up once a week and write songs and record beats.”

Working under the name Action Manky, the trio began working the Manchester club scene with a string of R&B, garage and rap cuts. “It was a bit of a nightmare,” laughs Marchant. “We would play live and backing tracks would skip and mics would cut out.”

It was only when the trio were introduced to multi instrumentalist and producer, Mbaya in 2005 that their current incarnation began to take shape. A former engineering student at Manchester Met, he had worked in a string of studios, including The Dairy in Brixton, South London. Pay was hard to come by and Mbaya – working under the title, Kid British - would often sleep on studio floors to save cash. Writing under the combined title Kid British And Action Manky, the four piece began writing new material and bolstering their live sound with a full band. “We weren’t sure whether it would work at first,” says Mbaya. “They had all these garage and R&B songs, so we began adding guitars to them and creating a poppier sound together. It was brilliant.”

A growing fan base and widespread acclaim soon followed. By 2008, the band were renamed Kid British and had signed to Mercury Records, played Glastonbury and embarked on their first headline tour. Months later they were recording an album with legendary producers Stephen Street (Blur, The Smiths) and Steve Dubb (Chemical Brothers). Already in 2009, they have released the limited edition ‘Leave London EP’ which sold out pre-release and they head out on a UK tour with pop-punk urchins, The Enemy in March.

Somewhere along the way they even managed to entertain controversial London mayor, Boris Johnson when an impromptu busking “tour” across the London Underground gathered at Westminster. We busked on the London Underground to celebrate the release of Leave London,” says Mayer. “We were at Westminster when suddenly Boris Johnson came past surrounded by aides. We carried on playing, but at first he seemed to think we were staging a protest. By the end there were tourists dancing. Somehow we even managed to put a smile on his face.”