Legendary record store and label announced on Twitter today that the folk duo of Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler will be performing an unplugged show at Rough Trade West on Wednesday, 24th August 2022. Tickets are available here. The pair will perform songs from their Mercury Prize shortlisted album For All Our Days That Tear the Heart, which was released on June 17th of this year. Butler is most famous for being the former guitar player for the English band Suede and is hailed by many critics as the greatest guitar player of his generation and Buckley is most well known for her work on stage, television, and the big screen.
JUST ANNOUNCED@buckleyxbutler UNPLUGGED + SIGNING
The vital folk duo of Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler will perform songs from their Mercury Prize shortlisted album ‘For All Our Days That Tear the Heart’, out June 17th via @emirecords.
TICKETShttps://t.co/ABeMIiRiku pic.twitter.com/aLZF2IfTiJ
— Rough Trade (@RoughTrade) August 18, 2022
Their album was nominated along with offerings from Little Simz, Sam Fender, Harry Styles, Nova Twins, Self Esteem, Wet Leg, Joy Crookes, Fergus McCreadie, Gwenno, Kojey Radical and Yard Act. Asked what it was about All Our Days That Tear the Heart that got them shortlisted for the prize, Buckley told NME: “I don’t think you can ever be objective from the inside out. It’ll probably be 20 years down the line and we’ll put the album on for the first time in 20 years and be like, ‘Oh, that’s what it was!’ But I don’t know – it’s nothing to do with me!”
In a statement reported by NME at the time of the release of the first single from the album, “The Eagle And The Dove”, the duo revealed the genesis of their collaboration: “It all started with a FaceTime call from Butler’s North London kitchen to Buckley’s mountaintop residence in County Kerry, with their friendship growing from an unlikely shared love of Killarney and the small island of Valentia where Butler would go on holiday as a boy.
The statement continued: “Buckley had been listening to ‘Old Wow’ by Sam Lee, produced by Bernard, in the downtime between rehearsals for the National Theatre’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Butler had seen Jessie perform a song on an American chat show in promotion of 2018’s Wild Rose”.
Talking about hearing Buckley singing, Butler told NME, “I remember clocking just how much character there was in her voice and how freely she expressed it.” The musician finished talking about the album, “More than anything, I wanted it to be joyous – properly joyous – because there is such joy in Jessie, there really is. In spite of the darkness and the intensity in these songs, I’m just flying when I listen back to them.”
Buckley chimed in: “Right now, I feel like I’ll never make another album again, because I can’t imagine another album happening the way this one did. It’s amazing that it even happened once. This obscure, organic, odd little thing that just found us.”
Butler and Buckley will also be playing at Whitley Bay Playhouse on August 25, tickets are available here.
Upcoming shows:
24/08/2022 – Rough Trade West – London
25/08 – Whitley Bay Playhouse – Whitley Bay
