Spitzer Space Telescope + Myer U Clark (Broadside Hacks Recordings Showcase)

Take note of Spitzer Space Telescope’s arrival on English shores. The folk singer has a knack of being in the right place at the right time – he’ll soon be the musician on everyone’s lips. Having spent the last decade travelling across America and Europe, instigating vital collectives, delving deep into existing traditions but unafraid to shake them up, now he settles upon an erupting English scene, armed with the charisma, the intensity, the experience, the power, the presence – and of course the straight-up songwriting chops, to push it to the next level. He knows what’s possible because he’s done it all before. “I’ve seen other scenes peak and crest, and now it’s London’s time to take that torch,” he says. “The tires hit the pavement as soon as I landed here.”

His is the kind of folk music that hits straight to the heart, that grabs you at the collar, that pushes you back against the wall. It makes sense, given that he’s taken the brash, soul-rattling singing of The Clancy Brothers as his model ever since encountering them as a teenager in an isolated Midwestern town. Just a 10-second snippet of the legendary Irish group in a Bob Dylan documentary was enough to transfix him, to teach him how to bombard early audiences at open mics by singing “to the back of the room,” as he puts it.

Presented by Broadside Hacks.

1:1 Under 18