It's The Nightingales Week in Outsideleft in OUTSIDELEFT

Nightingales Week logo

To coincide with the release of the latest, critically acclaimed studio LP, The Awful Truth (Fire Records), we couldn’t be more thrilled than to introduce It’s the Nightingales Week in Outsideleft!

Current band members Robert, Jim, Andreas and Fliss have surpassed themselves in revealing potentially hitherto known unknowns, truths and maybe awful truths, pulling the curtain back on a lifetime or sometimes way less as a Nightingale. This is not some rose-tinted hagiography, we’re not rehashing the Nightingales history, you’ve got wikipedia and everywhere else for all that. We don’t see Birmingham’s most enduring birds through an exhausting haze of endurance nor anchored in their past moment - do I need to add, like so many others?

If there was ever a rock’n’roll bible I cleave to, it’s Ira Robbins Trouser Press Record Guide. With the Nightingales though, they seem flummoxed and perhaps as Martha Stewart would say, that is a very good thing. Who cares for the bathed in self-confident polished opinions of professional music critics? So unappealing when unprofessional low self-esteem ones will do. But there between Nico, Steve Nieve, the Nihilistics, Canadian punkers Nils and Nine Below Zero singer Robert Lloyd’s work is considered snide, self-mocking, self-pitying, annoyed, despairing, sarcastically scathing [although] generally intelligent tirades. Anyone could dine out on that forever. This isn’t about 1991, or John Peel’s quote which you can look up for yourself. Nope.This is about how in 2025, this is about now and how in spite of a considerable distinguished history, the Nightingales are still the most thrilling, daring, challenging and refreshing musical artists round about. Sure, there’s an ethos that reaches all the way back, that still informs, but you know all that.

The Nightingales Week gets underway with our Robert Lloyd's Sunday Interview. On Sunday. This week, let’s brighten up, lighten up and tighten up together, with the Nightingales!