Leeds quartet English Teacher have been a class above in 2024. They released a brilliant debut album in This Could Be Texas, a record that melded jittery post-punk, soulful indie-rock and atmospheric grooves, got a load of gushing reviews hailing its excellence and ended up winning the Mercury Prize. They owe a big part of their success to the way they were able to hone their sound and develop their songs in small venues across the land and in an interview with this writer recently, singer and guitarist Lily Fontaine said that keeping grassroots music venues alive was vital to British music.
Fontaine noted that the first venue the band played in under their previous moniker of Frank in Leeds, a spot called Temple Of Boom, was now closed and said the work that the Music Venues Trust was trying to do in getting support for smaller venues was crucial. “For me personally, the first venues that I started playing wasn’t your Brudenells and Hyde Park Book Clubs, which are amazing venues in Leeds, but they were actually bars and pubs in semi-rural towns around Lancashire,” said Fontaine. “Those music scenes are supported by local musicians trying to help each other out, get shows, put on open mic nights and then pub owners and landlords allowing people to perform in there and paying them, actually quite substantially in some degrees. For me, it’s those venues that are really important because without that, I wouldn’t have developed my singing practice and my performance practice and I wouldn’t have decided to go onto university to study music.”
Fontaine added that those sorts of venues were ones particularly affected by the cost of living crisis. “Because it’s usually pure grassroots,” she said. “There isn’t any local schemes helping to support anything there, just people giving up their time and income to support music.”
English Teacher will cap off their triumphant 2024 with a UK tour in November, after which you imagine they were enjoy a well-earned rest before beginning work on album two.
