The Hoosiers
Sam’s Stage (Main Stage), Friday 2024
The multi-platinum success of The Hoosiers 2007 debut Number 1 album, The Trick to Life, and Top-10 singles such as Worried About Ray and Goodbye Mr. A, raised huge expectations for its follow-up, the prophetically titled The Illusion of Safety, which reached Number 10 in the UK charts in 2010.
The News From Nowhere, released in 2014, was an astonishing return to form. Doing it on our own terms,
says Irwin, and actually having a proper say in it, felt wonderful. We had nothing to lose, but a lot to prove.
Shattering their previous run of an album every three to four years the release of The Secret Service – only a year after their third album – reveals a band hitting their stride through a purple patch; improving as they discover they have more to say than ever.
Tension, creativity, democracy, arguments, time apart, coming back together, and then songs. Lots of them. Gone is the self-consciousness of the dog days around their second album; gone, too, the self-doubt. In their place is a deeply rooted – and hard-won – confidence, and a determination to lock back in to the freedom and joy of the early days