Stand College
Guy Garvey was born on 6 March 1974 in Bury, the sixth of seven children in a working-class Catholic family. His father was a newspaper proofreader; his mother was a police officer. His parents separated when he was twelve, divorced by thirteen. He was bullied at school for his ears, which he had pinned back at twelve. None of this is the origin story of a rock star. It is the origin story of a songwriter who writes about ordinary life with extraordinary tenderness, because ordinary life is the only kind he has ever known.
In 1990, at the former Stand College in Whitefield, near Bury, guitarist Mark Potter asked Garvey to sing in a band he had with drummer Richard Jupp and bassist Pete Turner. Mark's brother Craig joined on keyboards. They called themselves Mr Soft, after the Cockney Rebel song, shortened it to Soft in 1993, and became Elbow in 1997, inspired by a scene in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective in which the character Philip Marlow describes the word elbow as the most sensuous word in the English language, not for what it means but for how it feels to say. It is a very Elbow way to name a band: quiet, literate, and not trying to impress anyone. Garvey had been kicked out of home at seventeen. He has said he would be lost without the band.
Dropped Twice
In 1998, Elbow signed to Island Records and recorded a full album with producer Steve Osborne. Within months, Island was absorbed into Universal, and the band was dropped. The album was shelved. They signed again, this time to EMI. That deal also collapsed. Two major labels, two dead ends, a finished album nobody would release, and the five of them were back in Bury.
They released The Newborn EP on the local independent label Uglyman in 1998. Then V2 Records picked them up, and the Any Day Now EP followed on V2 in early 2001. Asleep in the Back, their debut album, finally came out on 7 May 2001. It was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize. It earned them a BRIT Award nomination for Best New British Band. They had been together for eleven years. Most bands would have split three times over. Elbow had simply waited until somebody was ready to listen.
The Seldom Seen Kid
The albums came steadily. Cast of Thousands in 2003. Leaders of the Free World in 2005, entirely produced by the band at Blueprint Studios in Salford, which became their base of operations. Each one was better received than the last. Each one sold a little more. Elbow were not a band that broke through overnight. They were a band that kept turning up, kept writing, and kept getting closer to the thing they were capable of.
The Seldom Seen Kid, released on 17 March 2008, was the fourth album and the one that changed everything. It was named after Bryan Glancy, a Bury Grammar old boy and Manchester musician who knew everyone, from the rough sleepers on the streets to millionaire rock stars. Garvey's father, a former proofreader who knew his Damon Runyon, gave Glancy the ironic nickname: the seldom seen kid, because he was the least seldom-seen man in Manchester. Best man seven times. When Glancy died suddenly in 2006, the whole city mourned him, and his funeral was the biggest the Jewish cemetery had ever held. The album was a tribute, a love letter to the city, and the best thing Elbow had ever made. It debuted at number five in the UK, went quadruple platinum, and won the Mercury Music Prize. Garvey dedicated the award to Glancy, calling him one of the greatest men that ever lived. In February 2009, Elbow won the BRIT Award for Best British Group.
The first single was Grounds for Divorce, built around a Mark Potter riff that had been kicking around for ten years before anyone noticed what it was. One Day Like This was the second, released in June 2008. In May 2009 they won two Ivor Novello Awards on the same night: Best Song Musically and Lyrically for One Day Like This, and Best Contemporary Song for Grounds for Divorce. One Day Like This is a song about waking up next to someone and feeling, for one morning, that everything is going to be alright. It builds from a whisper to a roar. It has become the song that plays at weddings, at sporting events, at moments when people need something that sounds like joy without cynicism. Elbow performed it live at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, after which it peaked at number 4 in the UK. It is, by any reasonable measure, Greater Manchester's unofficial national anthem.
"It is a song about waking up next to someone and feeling, for one morning, that everything is going to be alright."
The Olympics and Beyond
In 2012, the BBC commissioned Elbow to compose the theme for their London Olympics coverage. The result was First Steps, a six-minute piece recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and NovaVox Gospel Choir. It played over every montage and title sequence, the sound of the summer, and it confirmed Elbow as something more than a band from Bury. They were a national institution that had never stopped sounding local.
Build a Rocket Boys! came in 2011. The Take Off and Landing of Everything went to number one in 2014. Little Fictions went to number one in 2017. Giants of All Sizes went to number one in 2019. Three in a row. Flying Dream 1 in 2021, which Garvey has called a love song to Prestwich, where he lived for years on Nursery Road and broadcast Finest Hour from his home until 2016. Each album was different in texture but unmistakably Elbow: Garvey's voice, warm and conversational, singing about love and loss and Manchester and the ordinary weight of being alive. Richard Jupp left in 2016 to pursue other projects, including his drum school, and was replaced by Alex Reeves, first as a touring musician and then as a full member. Audio Vertigo, their tenth album, arrived in March 2024, written around the drum kit with a punchiness that caught long-standing fans off guard.
Bury
Elbow have been together for over thirty-five years. Five lads from Bury who formed a band at college, were dropped by two major labels, released their debut album eleven years after forming, and then spent the next two decades becoming one of the most beloved bands in the country. They have never chased trends. They have never pretended to be something they are not. Guy Garvey still sounds like Bury. The songs still sound like the weather and the people and the terraced streets and the feeling of walking home at the end of a long day. That is not a limitation. It is the whole point.
Greater Manchester has produced bands that sold more records, bands that made more noise, bands that burned brighter and faster. It has never produced a band more loyal to where it came from or more patient about getting where it was going. They named themselves after the most sensuous word in the English language and then spent thirty-five years proving it.