Bishopskin

unexpected, immersive, and utterly brilliant.“ DIY

“Bishopskin’s sound explores a musical landscape tread hundreds of years before, but presents something wholly revelatory” So Young

“...there isn’t quite another band, nor possibly has there ever been, that sounds like they do” - Backseat Mafia

“…something primal that transcends tradition and connects with the deeper spirituality that lurks at the bottom of folk music.” Hideous Mag

“Bishopskin…create music that contains both the glassy slickness of modernity and the essential, humming, throb of music at the beginning of language” Totally Wired

Ahead of the release of debut album Babble - due 13th October via Isolar Records - avant-folk nine-piece Bishopskin share its final teaser, 'Mother's Steel Bike'.

Offering up childhood schoolboy memories via odes to Psalm 139, 'Mother's Steel Bike' unreels another striking tableau from Bishopskin's delicately woven aesthetic tapestry. Mingling English Folk revivalism, 19th century Romanticism and Blakean spirituality - with a punkish flair that finds home at the Brixton Windmill - 'Mother's Steel Bike' showcases the group's idiosyncratic grasp of exquisite arrangements and melodic beauties. 

Recorded partly with Nathan Ridley (Blue Bendy, Phobophobes) in Stoke Newington, London, and partly at a rural Oxfordshire outhouse, the track was written in collaboration with band clarinettist (and qualified priest) Tati Gutteridge who shares lead vocal duties. Detailing the halcyon memories that informed the track's meaning, band frontman Tiger Nicholson explains:

"Before I was old enough to go to school my mother would have to cycle me in to drop two of my elder sisters off - I on the front of her bike and my twin sister on the back. As is common with early memories, they are often made by an unconscious blending of one’s own young memories, and the colours of our beloved ones’ memories. I conjure up a smaller, snot-nosed me, singing nonsense into the wind. My mother would say I’d sing this way a lot before I could talk."

Forming from a lockdown project between vocalist/artist Nicholson and guitarist James Donovan (formerly of HMLTD), Bishopskin have been quietly gaining notoriety in London's grassroots underground with their extravagant, eccentric, and spontaneous live performances. 

Offering up 'prayers to the wind', exaltations of the Virgin Memory, and reworkings of 14th Century Latin Church hymns, the band's debut album Babble offers up revolt against modernity, a call to spirituality; an escapist sojourn into the idyllic fantasies of a quaint, mythologised, Blakean England.

With tour dates in London, Manchester and Paris to come this Autumn, the band's uplifting and communal powers has already earned them support slots for Opus Kink, Wooze, Saint Leonard and DREXXXELS, as well as fulsome backing from indie tastemakers DIY, Rough Trade Counter Culture, So Young, Still Listening, Hard of Hearing and Backseat Mafia.

Bishopskin are Tiger Nicholson (vocals, songwriter), James Donovan (guitar), Tabitha Avanzato (backing vocals), Tati Gutteridge (sax & clarinet, backing vocals), Hana Miyagi (violin), James Moss (synth & guitar), Alex Prete (drums), Matt Baker (bass), Adam Brown (keyboards)