Elbow

Bury

Elbow began in 1990, when guitarist Mark Potter asked Guy Garvey to sing in a band with drummer Richard Jupp and bassist Pete Turner. They had met at Stand College in Whitefield, near Bury, and Mark's brother Craig joined on keyboards. They called themselves Mr. Soft, after a Cockney Rebel song, played their first gig at the Corner Pin pub in Ramsbottom, and started out, in Sputnikmusic's phrase, playing chilled funk. From 1993 they were Soft, and in 1997 they took the name Elbow from a line in The Singing Detective.

A false start and a debut

After winning a local battle of the bands, they signed to Island and made an album with producer Steve Osborne at Real World Studios. When Island was absorbed into Universal, Elbow were dropped in a mass cull and the record was never released. Craig Potter later said the experience fed the confidence of what came next. EPs followed on the small Ugly Man label, among them The Newborn EP in August 2000, led by the seven-minute Newborn.

V2 released Asleep in the Back in May 2001. Produced by Osborne, Ben Hillier, Danny Evans and the band, it reached 14 in the UK and later went gold. NME gave it nine out of ten, Q placed it among the fifty best albums of the year, and the band were nominated for a Brit as Best New British Band. Newborn was its third single that October, and Asleep in the Back, paired with Coming Second, gave them their first top 20 hit in February 2002.

The V2 years

Cast of Thousands (2003), co-produced with Hillier, reached seven, and the band said they learned a great deal from him. Chris Martin of Coldplay called it "the best album by anybody except Coldplay, ever." For Leaders of the Free World (2005), made at Blueprint Studios, Craig Potter took on the larger share of production and mixed the record. It reached 12, but the band felt V2 had not promoted it properly.

The Seldom Seen Kid

In 2006 they began the next album with no label and no outside producer, then signed to Fiction. That year their friend Bryan Glancy, a Manchester musician, died suddenly. Garvey's father had nicknamed him the Seldom Seen Kid, after a Damon Runyon character, and the album took the name and closed with Friend of Ours, dedicated to him. Craig Potter produced and mixed The Seldom Seen Kid in the band's own room at Blueprint, and Garvey wrote the string arrangements. Released in March 2008, it reached five in the UK. Its last song to be written, One Day Like This, became their signature.

In September 2008 the album won the Mercury Prize, beating Radiohead, Laura Marling and Burial among others. Garvey called it the best thing that had ever happened to the band and remembered Glancy from the stage. In January 2009 they played the record in full with the BBC Concert Orchestra at Abbey Road, and the next month won the Brit Award for Best British Group. In May, One Day Like This won an Ivor Novello. The album is triple platinum in the UK and has sold more than a million copies.

Number ones

Build a Rocket Boys! (2011) reached two and was nominated for the Mercury. That June they played Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage before U2, and Garvey went on to write First Steps, the BBC's theme for the London 2012 Olympics. At the closing ceremony in August 2012 they played One Day Like This, which climbed back up the singles chart to four. The Take Off and Landing of Everything (2014) was their first UK number one album, and Little Fictions (2017), Giants of All Sizes (2019) and Audio Vertigo (2024) all topped the chart too.

Jupp's departure was announced in March 2016. Alex Reeves played drums with the band on record and on tour, became a full member in 2024 and co-wrote Audio Vertigo. Garvey began presenting on BBC Radio 6 Music in 2007 and released a solo album, Courting the Squall, in 2015. Mojo has called Elbow exemplars of rock'n'roll democracy, and The List's Doug Johnstone hears their mix of the epic and the intimate in Snow Patrol and Editors.