Vera

"Why should music be a genre of music?"

Ahead of a December release, Stephen Armstrong talks Manchester, blues, and the deadline of turning fifty

Interview by Vera Halliwell.

Ten years ago, a Midlands-born engineer living in Manchester released a twelve-track album about a working-class lad on a night out. It was called *Fred in the Two Cities*, it turned out to be a country record entirely by accident, and it arrived with a month to spare before its author's fortieth birthday.

This December — a month before he turns fifty — he's back with a new album, and this time it's the blues. Mostly.

Let's start at the beginning. Who are you, and where did you come from?

Originally West Bromwich, in the Midlands. I first came to Manchester in 1996, lived in and out of the city for years, and moved here permanently in 2003. I learned guitar while I was here — I could already play trombone. I started gigging at university, more or less because a friend wanted me to play a gig. Then I started writing songs to play at those gigs, and it led from there.

What made Manchester stick?

It's a great place — a real melting pot when it comes to music. I had a really good group of musician friends here. And I got a nice job, which allowed me to pursue the music.

Your first album was *Fred in the Two Cities*. Which two cities?

Manchester and Salford. I lived in Salford for a long time and then in Manchester itself. It started as a series of disconnected songs — some of them going right back to when I first started gigging — and at some point I thought, this could be an album. It's a working-class lad's story, on a night out.

It's all set in places I knew. Streets I lived on. A bakery round the corner from my old front door. That kind of thing.

And it ended up a country record. Was that the plan?

Not at all — accident. I was writing a song inspired by a night out in the Northern Quarter, in a bar where the staff were very rude. I was desperately trying to make it a blues song and it just never worked. So it turned into a country song with a couple of guitars, and it triggered off from there.

But it's not country all the way through. There's rock and roll on there, a ukulele song, something quite Dylan-adjacent, and one that's very, very proggy.

That's a lot of range for one record. Was the album refusing to sit still, or were you?

I refuse to sit still. I don't want to be typecast into a genre, and I'm willing to go out of my way to have a go at something different. I love all types of music, with very few exceptions, and that influences everything. Why should music be a genre of music? Music is just too great to be pigeon-holed.

There was a single in between — a pop song. How did that come about?

Another one conceived by accident. I bought a five-string banjo, came up with a riff, and put it with an Irish flute. Lovely tune. Then a musician friend told me: *you don't write songs with middle eights, you need to write more middle eights.* So I went back and wrote one, put in a key change and a big guitar solo. The vocal harmonies are very boy band, honestly. Although one of my friends reckons there's a bit of Elvis Costello about it.

And now the new album. Blues.

Blues has always been my love, predominantly, but not entirely.

Where did it come from?

Something very specific, and something real. Back in the sixties, a group of blues musicians came through Manchester on tour, and while they were here Granada TV asked them to perform for a special. Granada dressed up a disused station out on the Fallowfield Loop, ran trains down from Manchester Central, and staged the whole thing on the platform. Muddy Waters. Sister Rosetta Tharpe. An absolutely epic line-up. The place is mostly gone now.

I saw that and thought: there's a lot of music in Manchester that gets ignored. I love blues. I'd like to do a blues album around that event — and tie it back to *Fred*.

Tie it back how?

There's a new central character, and he's a contemporary of Fred. Fred's from Salford. This one is a product of South Manchester and everything that comes with that — which is a very different social world. There's a night out on this album too, and it happens on the same night as something in the first record. There are a few nods as it goes on. I'll leave people to find them.

What's on there besides the blues?

Delta blues, Chicago blues, Memphis blues — and then a heavy metal track, a country-blues comedy number, and a jazzy acoustic waltz that's essentially a song about nothing. There's also a track that started life as a hatchet job and turned into a love letter, because I went and visited the place I was writing about and it turned out to be lovely. That'll teach me.

A metal track on a blues album is quite the swerve.

That's exactly the point. Back in the day my best friend used to drag me to the all-nighters — started Friday evening, finished Saturday morning. Great laugh. Those venues have gone. There's virtually no metal venue left in Manchester now.

That's partly a product of now, and partly a product of what came before — the Manchester music revival in the wake of Tony Wilson's death, when a lot of people thought, *he's gone, we can exploit Manchester music.* That's one of the main reasons the scene went. And it's still happening in its way: Manchester's the fastest-growing city in the UK, there's a commercial edge to everything, and the smaller venues are being squeezed out.

What was the hardest thing on the record?

Relearning trombone. It was my first instrument, and I hadn't played it properly since about 2007, when a friend convinced me to join a contesting brass band for a year. There's a solo on the album. Just a short one, a bit of different colour. It was weird picking it up after that long.

I also taught myself cross harp for this record. I'd had a harmonica knocking about for twenty-odd years, but I bought a load of new ones and actually learned it.

What do you hope people take from this one that they didn't get from the first?

I’ve always thought there was a naivety about *Fred*. It wasn't the best writing I've ever done, and musically it wasn't as good as it could have been — partly because the process was rushed. I'd set myself the arbitrary deadline of releasing before I was forty, and I turned forty in January 2017. And now I've set myself the arbitrary deadline of releasing before I'm fifty.

What I hope people take from it is that I love blues, I love Manchester, I love other genres, and that it's a proper journey to listen to. I want someone to hear it and think: *yeah, that connects with me.*

Everyone seems to have a different favourite already.

They do. I've got mine. My partner has a completely different one. And my friends have picked other ones entirely. That's probably a good sign.

Stephen Armstrong's new album is released on the first Friday in December 2026, on all digital platforms, with a limited run of fifty CDs available directly from him.

The gear and halo is a personal trade mark of Stephen Armstrong