Low Four Studio — a fascinating blink-and-you-miss-it bunker off Deansgate — hosted one of those strangely intimate Manchester nights where half the room feels like they’re in a documentary. Before any music, BBC 6 Music’s Chris Hawkins led a Q&A with Andrew Gower and Elbow’s Craig Potter, the whole thing shadowed by the city mourning Stone Roses/Primal Scream legend Mani. Potter summed it up perfectly: “When you hear a Mani bassline, you know it’s a Mani bassline.”
Gower — Liverpool-born, actor-turned-musician, pandemic-era self-reinventer — talked about finally embracing the songs he’d been writing since he was 15. “The collective is more powerful than the individual,” he said, and somehow didn’t sound like a man who’d rehearsed it in the mirror.
Their new single Dance To The Algorithm is a retro-funk swing at the streaming void, the band insisting they’re not scared of AI. Gower even predicts we’ll end up craving imperfections again. He might be right — the track grooves like something human on purpose.
When the Q&A dissolved into the gig proper, Gustaffson — Gower plus Graham Bennett, Liam Morson, James Webster and bassist David Gleave — snapped into a warm, cinematic indie haze. Gleave had called it “a f***ing new dimension,” and the set really did feel like a scrapbook tour through Sweden, Paris, Avignon and Belfast. During Some Kind of Sweden, Gower told the crowd to clap because “it’s as cold as Sweden right now so let’s generate some central heating,” which somehow worked in the shoebox venue.
He’s ridiculously comfortable onstage — enthusiastic, generous, the kind of frontman who looks genuinely thrilled that you turned up. The band’s debut Black & White Movie already proved they can do lush widescreen indie, but live it’s sharper, stranger, more alive.
They closed with Northern Baby, a love letter to the North and a reminder of why Manchester clings to its music mythology. They pretended to leave before the encore, but in Low Four there’s nowhere to hide — everyone could see the joke.
If this is what Gustaffson’s “new dimension” sounds like, the next album can’t come soon enough.
words Al Woods
