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Their mesmerising debut five-track demo, 'Noisebox EP', (now impossible to find even in the best Manchester collectors stores) was released on their own Soft Records label and featured, according to Guy Garvey, "songs pretty much about the same things; love and failure, failure in love, small town frustrations." He went on to say "I wouldn't say we were angsty, more low-key melancholy." Despite only 200 copies being released, the EP gained them enough interest to attract the big record labels, with the brilliant track 'Powder Blue' receiving airplay from John Peel on Radio One.

Together with their friends and fellow Manchester band, Witness, they got signed up by Island Records in 1998 and soon people were talking about Elbow as The Next Big Thing. They contributed a track to Twisted Nerve's 'Christmas Stocking Filler' and the future looked bright for the Bury band. However, their luck was out. They disappeared to rural France to record where "It was," chuckles Guy, "strangely like 'Big Brother'. It ended with the biggest row we've ever had. It lasted 16 hours or something stupid." Barely a year later, just weeks before their album was due to be released, Island dropped them. A lifeline deal with EMI collapsed weeks later and Elbow were left without a contract for ages.

Musically the EPs were compared to the cerebral, experimental rock of Talk Talk, Radiohead and Doves, whilst lyrically they're in a more poetic slipstream to the kitchen-sink romanticism of fellow Mancunian Morrissey. The seven and a half minute epic 'Newborn' - about growing old and getting ill with the one you love - is typical: full of romantic yearning yet anchored in the gritty realities of life; corpses and senile dementia. "We wanted the EPs to be a pair," says Guy. "One ['Newborn'] is the love and loss, the personal stuff, which obviously stems from me. And we wanted the next EP ['Any Day Now'] to be more of the shared experiences which is small-town frustrations, getting out of Bury for us. It's an introduction to us, where we're from and all that's important."

Heralded by the beautiful single 'Red', which gave Elbow their first taste of the UK Top 40 (reaching number 36), their debut album, 'Asleep In The Back', was one of the most hotly-anticipated British rock records of 2001. A peerless fusion of the personal and political, it is both a widescreen insight to life in a Greater Manchester town and poignantly introspective. Guy is determined to maintain a lyrical honesty, and many songs are torn, still bloody, from his personal life. "'Newborn' is like the most in love I've ever been," he says, "and 'Bitten By The Tailfly', is about exactly what went wrong, going after the cheap thrills, chasing girls. I'm not a harsh moralist, but I don't think I can be wildly romantic in a song like 'Powder Blue', without offering a balance, the nasty side." There have been times, in the past, when Guy admits he has revelled in his own drunken, self-destructive behaviour, pushed himself into situations to fuel his writing. "I've gone too far in the past. I got to the point, where I didn't know whether I was fucking up my life deliberately so I had something to write about, or the other way around."

Either way, such introspective angst never becomes self-indulgent, balanced, as it is, by Elbow's keen eye on the wider world. 'Powder Blue' is a typically complex observational lyric, based on a fucked-up, druggie couple Guy once saw in a Manchester bar. Both a wondering tale of one couple's touching co-dependency and a grubby, unsettling look at drug-casualties, Elbow's songs are all set a against a very real backdrop - Manchester, with all its poverty, violence and drug-culture.

"You can't help but love the city, but, like any relationship, it's tinged with sadness. Everywhere you've got reminders of a proud industrial city littered with men not working, and shut-down mills. The generation that went before us were very badly disappointed at the hands of Margaret Thatcher." - Guy Garvey, 2001

The upshot? A band who have things to say. A band who draw you into their own dirty, magical world, a world of inky black despair and heart-bursting idealism. But, above all, a world that's alive with honestly rendered emotions and truths. That is, music and life at its richest."I would like people to pick up on some of the more romantic notions of what we do," says Guy. "But the truth of the matter was that I wasn't happy for a long time."

Elbow, however, cannot simply be tagged miserablists. "There are three songs about babies on the album," smiles Guy. "One that's a real positive, 'don't worry, it's fine', song."

The single 'Asleep In The Back' wasn't originally on the album, however after it reached Number 19 in the UK charts in February 2002, there was a quick re-issue with the new track included. The album climbed back up the chart eventually reaching UK number 14 and being nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. The band returned to the studio, this time without having to worry about losing their record contract before their next highly anticipated release.

When the single 'Fallen Angel' was eventually released in August 2003 it took Elbow back to the UK Top 20 (again reaching no.19) and heralded the arrival of their second album, 'Cast Of Thousands'. Very similar to 'Asleep In The Back', it contained more downcast songs about relationships mixed with great rock tunes, albeit with the London Community Gospel Choir lending a hand on 'Ribcage'. Described by a cautious NME as "Very good. A classic perhaps!", it reached an impressive Number 7 in the UK album charts and spawned more singles with 'Fugitive Motel', 'Not A Job' and the Glastonbury favourite, 'Grace Under Pressure', which featured Manc mates Alfie and Doves Jimi Goodwin on vocals.

Touring the world, promoting 'Cast Of Thousands' and also supporting the likes of Muse, Grandaddy and Blur meant that Elbow were struggling to find time to record their next album. They decided to take a portable studio on tour with them and record as they were on the road before finally returning to Blueprint Studios in Manchester. The result, 'Leaders Of The World', released September 2005 includes the single 'Forget Myself' and the brilliant 'Station Approach', named after the road leading to Manchester Piccadilly train station ("Coming home I feel like I designed the buildings I walk by”). A truely Made In Manchester album, Stockport County supporters even provide backing vocals on the track 'Great Expectations'.

| Elbow biography | Elbow discography | Elbow merchandise | Elbow tour dates | Elbow links |