Southern

Doors: 19.30
Age: 14+

If Haim were the siblings of 2013, medical then brother-sister Southern will surely do the same in 2014.

Citing “spite, search desire and ambition” while mashing up folk, order blues, hip hop and alt pop-rock, Southern love everyone from Nick Drake to John Martyn to Beck to Danger Mouse in a blend of finger-picking guitar, loops and beats.

Put simply, this band is awesome and going to be SO SO BIG …

Manchester-born, relocating to Belfast and then London in 2011, the pair worked in pubs and dossed on sofas, but ironically it was at their lowest ebb that the breakthrough came. Flown to LA to shoot a music video for a software company, the pair soon found themselves gigging in Paris and doing a photo shoot with world-renowned French photographer Phillipe Mazzoni.

“We were living on a fiver a week,” remembers Thom. “We could barely afford a jar of pesto and pasta and a packet of HobNobs. At the same time we had so much going on with all these management offers, and we had to play a show – a Vogue fashion night – sponsored by Burberry, who gave us all this gear to wear. So we were living in squalor, and starving hungry, dressed head to toe in Burberry.”

Lucky for us that hunger made them better artists, and self-produced debut Where The Wild Are sparked a major label war, and they sold out Belfast’s Mandela Hall.

“We want to reinvent ourselves on every album the way Beck and Radiohead do,” decides Thom. “The goal is to see what happens as we grow, and to be the best we possibly can.”

Guys, we’re there for the journey …