singer-songwriter

Declan Patrick MacManus was born 25th August 1954, in St Mary's Hospital, Paddington in London. He is the son of trumpeter, vocalist and bandleader Ronald (“Ross”) MacManus and record store manager Lillian Costello. His family had roots in Merseyside and he moved to Birkenhead at age 16, with his mother, when his parents separated. He is better known by the name Elvis Costello - a stage name suggested by Stiff Records manager Jake Riviera - but has used many other aliases including The Imposter and Napoleon Dynamite*.

Tania Bowers still remembers the rabbit footprints that once dotted her bedroom floor. It's hard not to. That's where it all started, after all—where she'd hide for hours dreaming up songs, letting her imagination take flight alongside schoolteacher parents who were "great storytellers" and "didn't always separate fact from fiction." "I was an outsider from an early age," says Tania, a Sydney native who's weaved in and out of the Chicago music scene for the past decade. "I've always been quite comfortable with it, though."

The Boy Who Trapped The Sun, funnily enough, is not his real name. Colin MacLeod - for it is he- was discovered swinging round the rafters of an Aberdeen bar, dishing out Deep Purple covers and, he says, “generally acting like an arse.” Having smashed his guitar and knocked himself unconscious on stage, he set to cleaning up both the broken instrument and his act. Thus The Boy moved to London; to become a solo artist and an adult. And so emerged a record - due out this summer - full of strange, sometimes sinister stories: equally inspired by home, Hemingway, ghosts and ex-girlfriends.

Sébastien Tellier is an exceptional, highly personal & intimate artist echoing such other one-offs as Robert Wyatt, Syd Barrett or Serge Gainsbourg. His first LP, L'incroyable vérité (The Incredible Truth) (2001), was a fantastical pop album, which careered from lo-fi electronica to bizarre cabaret tunes. Its sleeve featured Tellier in full evening dress on the front, while the back of jacket had a shot of him cavorting in some playboy’s pool. He instructed listeners to only listen to the album by candle light and won a tight band of adherents, who fell for his lush, humorous compositions.