Anticipated latest release from Teesside trio - a beguiling collection of Northern stories delivered with their trademark power and warmth. In May 2013, a beautiful thing happened in the city of York. Muslims from a tiny mosque on Bull Lane met protesting members of the English Defence League with a pot of tea and invited them to come inside. This tiny act of love inspired the album. The Young'uns bold vocals and innate musicality take the listener from a tiny mosque in York to the Spanish Civil War through a landscape strewn with working-class heroes, lost sailors and abandoned lovers.
Nobody sleeps when The Young’uns are in town. They may have established their fast-growing reputation in the folk world with sublime a cappella harmonies, but the Teesside trio – Sean Cooney, Michael Hughes and David Eagle – are an unlikely force of nature on stage, beguiling audiences with irrepressible humour, bold vocals, gripping storylines and innate musicality. Describing their gigs as ‘absolute chaos’, they go on stage without set-lists, relying on infallible instinct and their unique rapport with audiences to deliver a killer show.
Their music is rooted fiercely in Teesside – specially, Stockton – where they first started singing together at the local folk club, although they spread their wings on their glorious album, When Our Grandfathers Said No, which includes a stomping French song, Pique la Baleine, a gorgeous unaccompanied arrangement of James Taylor’s You Can Close Your Eyes, some nifty instrumental work, a couple of rollicking shanties and plentiful strong original material from Sean Cooney. When Our Grandfathers Said No is a line from one of his most compelling songs, The Battle of Stockton, recalling an incident in 1933 when Oswald Mosely’s Blackshirts targeted deprived areas as potential fascist hotbeds and marched over the Tees – to be physically repelled by 2,000 outraged Stockton townsfolk.
"...a toucing, singulalrly British affair" Neil Spencer The Observer
March 2013