After earning acclaim for their current album ‘Essex, Drugs and Rock and Roll’ and playing a wild UK headline tour that saw them sell-out London’s Electric Ballroom, the Bilk boys are clearly firing on scintillating form. Having earned a devoted cult following, the Chelmsford trio now team up with Music Venue Trust for their autumn Grassroots Venue Tour.
This is the first tour to be funded by the Liveline Fund which was created by Music Venue Trust and live music advocates Save Our Scene (SOS) to distribute funding directly to grassroots venues, artists, and promoters with financial support raised by contributions from arena and stadium ticket sales. Artists including Sam Fender, Coldplay, Enter Shikari and Katy Perry were early adopters of the Grassroots Levy and have enabled Liveline to begin fuelling the future of UK grassroots music.
Bilk are championing the initiative – and with good reasons. Like almost all UK bands who have made an impact, Bilk have built their reputation the hard way: playing grassroots venues across the land and making such an impression that their next visit inevitably sells out. And from there, gradually scaling up with each new tour. It’s the same road that numerous summer festival headliners have also taken, such as The 1975 (Glastonbury), Bring Me The Horizon (Reading / Leeds) and Biffy Clyro (TRNSMT). At a time when countless venues are struggling, this initiative helps them to help the next generation of festival headliners to start their rise.
Bilk vocalist / guitarist Sol Abrahams says, “This tour is obviously gonna be chaos. We’ve been wanting to do a tour of grassroots venues for a while as we’ve seen a lot of these places keep closing down and it ain’t good for music. Everyone deserves a chance to grow, when we were coming up as a band, those are the places we’d play week in and week out. We need real life, we need real energy, real connection, in the flesh, in person. That’s what it’s about. That’s why we’re doing this. It’s gonna be sweaty, intimate and a good time so to our fans, we’ll see you there!”
Tickets for the tour are now available HERE.
Completed by Luke Hare (bass) and Harry Gray (drums), Bilk channel an incendiary mix of punk, indie-rock and rip which captures the lifestyle and experiences of their generation. The industry underdogs are famed for which have included pulverising festival sets at Reading), Leeds, SXSW, Truck, The Great Escape and Louis Tomlinson’s Away From Home, while their unrestrained mania also resulted in a ban from Rough Trade after their in-store turned anarchic. But fans keep coming back for more – and in greater numbers.
In addition to the Grassroots Venue Tour, Bilk will also be igniting manic scenes around Europe in the coming months with a mix of major festivals and headline gigs. Their full tour schedule is:
TOUR
JUNE
20th – Germany, Southside Festival
22nd – Germany, Hurricane Festival
JULY
4th – Italy, Off Tune Festival
26th – France, Festival De La Mer
AUGUST
7th – Germany, Haldren Pop Festival
8th – Germany, Weinturm Open Air
13th – Paris, Supersonic Club
OCTOBER
5th – Sunderland, The Independent
6th – York, The Crescent
7th – Sheffield, Sidney and Matilda
8th – Hull, The Polar Bear
10th – Preston, The Ferret
11th – Manchester, SOUP
12th – Chester, Alexander’s Live
14th – Liverpool, The Jacaranda
15th – Lincoln, The Komodo
17th – Peterborough, The Met Lounge
18th – Hertford, Corn Exchange
19th – Colchester, Coda
21st – Bedford, Esquires
22nd – Oxford, Bullingdon
24th – Milton Keynes, Crauford Arms
25th – Bournemouth, Anvil
26th – Guildford, Boileroom
28th – Tunbridge Wells, The Forum
29th – Hastings, The Piper
NOVEMBER
1st – London, The 100 Club
18th – Utrecht, Ekko
19th – Arnhem, Luxor Live
20th – Eindhoven, Altstadt
21st – Groningen, Simplon
22nd – Germany, Rolling Stone Beach Festival
24th – Cologne, MTC
25th – Stuttgart, Im Wizemann (Club)
26th – Munich, Live Evil
28th – Lyon, La Marquise
30th – Brussels, Cirque Royal (Club)
DECEMBER
1st – Lille, L’Aéronef
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