BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//360exp//Events//ES
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Europe/London
TZURL:http://tzurl.org/zoneinfo-outlook/Europe/London
X-LIC-LOCATION:Europe/London
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:+0000
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
TZNAME:BST
DTSTART:19700329T010000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=-1SU
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:+0100
TZOFFSETTO:+0000
TZNAME:GMT
DTSTART:19701025T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=10;BYDAY=-1SU
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
TIMEZONE-ID:Europe/London
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Europe/London
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:8225f8e2-70f6-45eb-9b30-f4e633586633@360exp.net
SEQUENCE:0
DTSTAMP:20260815T171501
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20261130T200000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20261130T200000
SUMMARY:Insecure Men
LOCATION:York The Crescent Community Venue
DESCRIPTION:- Insecure MenThe Crescent\, YorkMonday 30th November\, 7.30pm
 Tickets are £16.50 (+ b/f) in advance and available from See Tickets.*Thi
 s is a standing show*Saul Adamczewski spent the summer of 2024 living in a
  cupboard in the South London suburb of Tulse Hill. No band\, no girlfrien
 d. Certainly no money. When you’ve lost your job as the tea boy for a Ra
 stafarian meth dealer\, where exactly is there left to go? Life\, for the 
 songwriter in his mid-thirties\, had darkened. “I thought that the chewi
 ng gum on the floor in Brixton was artworks with my face on it\,” rememb
 ers Adamczewski of his frayed psychological state. “Quite severe psychos
 is. Mental health services were called.” Adamczewski has lived with ment
 al health challenges all of his life\, but the hallucinations brought on b
 y psychosis were worse than anything he had previously experienced. Going 
 weeks without a proper meal\, Adamczewski became very\, very unwell.https:
 //www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtPX_hmUKAoHe was socialising only with the loca
 l methadone services\, or those who could procure him a cheap bag of fenta
 nyl (the street opioid of choice in English cities in the 2020s)\, and it 
 was a period he remembers as arguably the lowest of his life. “I looked 
 like I was going to die\,” says Adamczewski\, “and I suppose I was.”
  But something changed. “I called my Mum\,” he remembers today\, sippi
 ng Super Bock in a summertime Paris recording studio looking healthy and e
 ven handsome. “I said: I’m done\, I’m fucked. Can I come home?”. A
 damczewski began the painful process of opioid withdrawal in his mother’
 s house. “Since then\, everything has been much better\,” he says\, an
 d has spent the last year cheerfully cohabiting with his mum in South East
  London suburbia. “Everything started to come back to me. I really thoug
 ht I was a goner.” Instead\, out of a period spent fixing fractured rela
 tionships with the mother of his infant daughter\, his family\, friends\, 
 and Fat White Family (the band he co founded in 2011)\, came a new album. 
 A Man For All Seasons is the long-awaited return of Insecure Men\, the ava
 nt-pop band led by Saul Adamczewski and with a rotating cast of collaborat
 ors including Ben Romans-Hopcraft\, the Childhood multi-instrumentalist wh
 o went to primary school with Adamczewski. It was recorded at Konk Studios
  in North London as trees blossomed in Spring this year.Insecure Men began
  in 2015\, a repository for Adamczewski’s more reflective and melodic ma
 terial that was naturally completely unsuitable for Fat White Family\, and
  to make use of an in-joke that FWF should really be called “Insecure Me
 n Who Look At Their Phones Too Much.” Their self-titled debut album was 
 released in 2018. Adamczewski was out of Fat White Family\, out of rehab\,
  and turned in a melodically rich and sonically inventive album that surpr
 ised critics with its confident and focused songwriting (even if that song
 writing was about Operation Yewtree\, Cliff Richard and the death of Whitn
 ey Houston.) Praised by The Guardian as a redemptive breakthrough\, it was
  a top 5 Album of the Year for The Quietus. But where that album used a wo
 ozy stew of lounge\, exotica and off-kilter pop music as a base from which
  to examine the true-life horrors of fame\, substance abuse and imperialis
 m\, A Man For All Seasons fixes its gaze on something no less shocking or 
 ugly: the end of a relationship. Somehow amidst the chaos of the last two 
 years\, Adamczewski found time for a passionate and chaotic love affair. 
 “I met a beautiful person and we were in love\,” he explains. “But t
 he struggles that have plagued me for most of my life rendered the romance
  doomed before it began.” The relationship survived as a friendship\, an
 d informed the more mournful cuts on A Man For All Seasons\, where heartbr
 eak tended to manifest in the form of wintry and fragile country songs. As
  far back as Adamczewski can remember\, there has always been country musi
 c. “My mum” he explains\, “is a huge country fan\, and we always had
  Lucinda Williams or Gillian Welch records playing when I was a kid. Dwigh
 t Yoakam and Patsy Cline. It’s a bedrock in my life and has always been 
 there.” Country was a nuclear influence on early Fat White Family\, and 
 will shape his next move\, an album he plans to record in Memphis\, no les
 s. But the country songs on A Man For All Season were finessed closer to t
 he Thames than the Mississippi. “I was feeling absolutely sorry as shit 
 for myself and wanting to die\,” remembers Adamczewski of his time in Tu
 lse Hill\, “and I’d sit out the back with these two elderly alcoholic 
 friends of mine playing them blues and country songs on the guitar. They w
 ould nod if it was a good one.” This unorthodox process minted the stark
 \, haunting Tulse Hill Station - for its songwriter\, the best thing he ha
 s ever written - and Time Is A Healer\, whose luxuriant mid-60s soulfulnes
 s makes Adamczewski’s original aim of writing a song for labelmate Al Gr
 een not as implausible as it might sound. Recording work on A Man For All 
 Seasons began in spring 2025\, working with producer Raf Rundell at Ray Da
 vies’ Konk Studios in Hornsey\, surrounded by post-war analogue gear and
  Kinks ephemera. Adamczewski surprised himself and his Insecure Men band m
 embers - which\, this time around\, include Ben Romans Hopcraft\, Marley M
 ackay\, Victor Jakeman\, Fat White Family’s Alex White and Steely Dan Mo
 nte - by loosening his once vice-like grip on proceedings. “My role in t
 he band has changed\,” he explains squarely. “On this record\, we real
 ly came together as a band for the first time in the studio. I’ve learnt
  to relinquish control\, and it worked. Everyone felt much more free to of
 fer and create in the studio\, and it paid off really well.” https://www
 .youtube.com/watch?v=17W7S8oB7RwSome of this is audible in the album’s m
 ore junkshop pop instincts. “I’ve definitely been guilty of taking mys
 elf a little too seriously\,” concedes Adamczewski\, “and it was nice 
 to be more: this is just a fun pop song.” Take the whipsmart new wave of
  Cleaning Bricks\, whose nursery rhyme chorus began life as a workplace jo
 ke that those around him began taking seriously\, or lead single Alien\, w
 here a descending\, Sweet Jane influenced riff is augmented by weeping lap
  steel in one of Adamczewski’s most straightforwardly lovely recordings.
  All of this is bound together by the distinctly opiated mid-frequency tex
 tures that link A Man For All Seasons with the first Insecure Men album: i
 nfluences from the hypnotic\, fabricated soundscapes of US mid-century exo
 tica and lounge\, all vibraphone\, organ\, sax and flute. “It’s an aqu
 atic thing I suppose\,” wonders Adamczewski. “Something ghostly and su
 bmerged and distant. It recreates the narcotic feeling of calm in me\, and
  I can go back to a place where I feel stoned.” A pause. “And I like f
 eeling stoned\, as we know.” Looking ahead to A Man For All Seasons\, it
 s songwriter is enthused about what comes next. “As I’m getting older\
 ,” he reflects\, “I’m not so interested in hopping around the stage 
 with a guitar with my mates. I want to do something a little more dignifie
 d.” This searching has manifested itself in extreme drone music (in 2022
 \, he recorded a drone record as malevolent and extreme as his life at tha
 t point\, which was rejected by the record label and resides only in the v
 aults))\, autumnal folk songwriting (Adventures in Limbo\, eventually rele
 ased on streaming and limited vinyl in 2023)\, an underrated volume of end
 -of-the-pier style covers of Peter Andre and Van Morrison (Karaoke for One
  Vol 1 from 2019)\, and as well as that planned Memphis project\, Adamczew
 ski is plotting a dub record.“It sounds very fucking corny\,” he says\
 , “but it’s about finding truth\, some inner truth or meaning. That’
 s what I’m trying to do now. Life is hard\, and I haven’t made my life
  that easy\, or certainly not for those around me. But music can be a heal
 ing force or a way of getting through it.” What all of this shares is an
  effervescent ability to transport him somewhere else\, even if just fleet
 ingly. “When I play those songs\, I leave my head\,” says Adamczewski\
 , “I guess that is all I’m ever really trying to do.” Brilliant song
 writer\, unlikely auteur\, serious maverick: a man for all seasons. https:
 //www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8hDFvuBDu4\n\nBoletos: https://wegottickets.com
 /event/710259
URL;VALUE=URI:https://360exp.net/events/8225f8e2-70f6-45eb-9b30-f4e6335866
 33
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR