tmbg tour uk

They Might Be Giants to play ‘Flood’ in full on 2023 UK tour

The dates follow over 70 sold-out shows in the US

They Might Be Giants have announced a new string of UK tour dates – playing their fan favourite ‘Flood’ in full. Check out full dates and ticket details below.

The UK shows come as a newly-added extension to the band’s ongoing Evening With tour, which is currently taking place across the United States. So far, the Grammy-winning alt-rock band have sold-out over 70 of their scheduled dates in both North America and Australia, including two performances at The House of Blues in Texas.

With dates set for Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Bristol and London, the tour will see the band perform their classic 1990 release ‘Flood’ in full – including tracks ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ and ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’. The shows will also celebrate the band’s latest album, ‘Book’, which was released in 2021.

Tickets for the UK leg of the tour are available now and, surprisingly, there will be no opening act at the event – instead, the band will hit the stage approximately one hour after doors open.

Find a full list of upcoming UK dates below, as well as the tour poster.

NOVEMBER Tuesday 14 — Manchester, O2 Ritz Wednesday 15 — Leeds, Leeds Beckett Students Union Thursday 16 — Nottingham, Rock City Friday 17— Bristol, O2 Academy Saturday 18 — London, The Roundhouse

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Previously, They Might Be Giants performed a string of UK dates back in 2018. This followed the announcement of their 20th studio album, ‘I Like Fun’, which NME regarded as being one of their “most diverse and sonically adventurous work to date” .

Alongside their aforementioned tracks, the New York-based band also gained notoriety for their 2001 song, ‘Boss Of Me’, which became the theme for Malcolm In The Middle , starring Bryan Cranston. Recorded in 1999, the single won a Grammy Award for Best Written Song For Visual Media in 2002.

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They Might Be Giants

Innovative American indie popsters, the dynamic duo of John (Flansburgh) and John (Linnell) are best known for their early 90's anthems 'Birdhouse In more...

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They Might Be Giants tour dates 2024

They Might Be Giants is currently touring across 4 countries and has 35 upcoming concerts.

Their next tour date is at Mr Smalls Theater in Pittsburgh, after that they'll be at Mr Smalls Theater again in Pittsburgh.

Currently touring across

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Upcoming concerts (35) See nearest concert

Mr Smalls Theater

Madison Theater

Majestic Theatre

First Avenue

Fitzgerald Theater

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Forum Melbourne

Astor Theatre

O2 Guildhall Southampton

Cambridge Junction

O2 Shepherds Bush Empire

Galvanizers, SWG3

Boiler Shop

Mandela Hall

Vicar Street

O2 Ritz Manchester

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O2 Academy Bristol

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As much a spectacular performance of comic genius as a musical delight, TMBG never fail to deliver a captivating and memorable show. There’s always a few stories to tell! Even during intermission (bexause yes, it’s a two part special) we were treated with a hilarious video of the demo version of “Last Wave”, perfectly created for and overdubbed on top of “Walk this Way” by Run DMC & Aerosmith. Brilliant. And they never cease to play their fan favourites, which is impressive to say the least! Thanks TMBG for another stellar show.

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What a brilliant concert! The venue was very suitable for the audience who were a mix of middle aged and older people (I think me and my friend were the youngest people there). The actual band were very passionate and sounded amazing, just like the tracks. In between some of the songs, they talked a little and told funny stories. All in all, great show and great music.

Double set power!

Fantastic show from a fantastic band. Two sets and two encores, classic tunes, new tunes, jokes and a massive tuba all contributed to a wonderful evening. More than made the 7 hour round trip worthwhile.

If you're in Antwerp, go and catch them on the 26th. They will thank you for it.

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An Evening with They Might Be Giants: Flood, BOOK and Beyond

Southampton : O2 Guildhall

Cambridge : Junction

London : O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire

Glasgow : SWG3

Newcastle : Boiler Shop

Manchester : O2 Ritz

Leeds : LEEDS BECKETT STUDENTS UNION

Nottingham : Rock City

Bristol : O2 Academy

London : The Roundhouse

With 70+ sold-out shows so far in the US and by overwhelming demand, They Might Be Giants is extending this most popular “Evening with” performance of their breakthrough album Flood in its entirety into the United Kingdom. How will Flood be presented? Hard to say, as the show evolves every night, but needless to say, this is a once-in-a-lifetime tour.

TMBG will play two full sets that span the band's entire career from early favorites to brand new favorites from their current Grammy-nominated album BOOK , as well as the spontaneous and improvised moments that have made They Might Be Giants shows legendary. Joined by their incomparable live band, now featuring the show-stopping Tricerachops Horns, this is an evening guaranteed to delight the most dedicated TMBG fan as well as brand-new participants.

No opener! They Might Be Giants ' performance starts approximately one hour after doors open.

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SOAK IT UP – They Might Be Giants To Play Seminal Album ‘Flood’ In Full On UK Tour

Off the back of a sell-out 70-date US tour They Might Be Giants are bringing their ‘Evening With’ show to the UK in November.

The us duo will perform two sets comprising breakthrough 1990 album  flood  and a mix of old and new favourites, including cuts from latest album   book ..

Featuring contributions from UK producers  Clive Langer  and  Alan Winstanley  ( Madness ,  Morrissey ),  Flood  saw TMBG reaching worldwide recognition.

The band’s first album for major label  Elektra , it was recorded at New York’s Skyline studios and saw songwriters  John Linnell  and  John Flansburgh  experimenting with new recording techniques, including samples from the latter’s kitchen sink and fridge.

Lead single  Birdhouse In Your Soul  was a massive global hit, reaching No 6 in the UK chart. It remains their best-selling 45 to date.

Other highlights include  Your Racist Friend ,  Lucky Ball And Chain  and   the second single off the album  Istanbul (Not Constantinople) .

The platinum selling album peaked at No 14 on the UK chart and its iconic status led to several reissues – most recently in 2015 on TMBG’s own  Idlewild Recordings  label.

Joining the two Grammy-winning Johns on their UK tour will be backing band  The Triceratops Horns , for shows in London, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and Nottingham (full details below).

• They Might Be Giants November 2023 UK tour dates: Tues 14 Manchester O2 Ritz; Wed 15 Leeds Beckett Students Union; Thurs 16 Nottingham Rock City; Fri 17 Bristol O2 Academy; Sat 18 London Roundhouse. Tickets  here .
• For more about TMBG visit their  website  and  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram  pages.

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They Might Be Giants is not a cult: How they built a birdhouse in your soul... and a 40-year sustainable creative enterprise

Later this year, They Might Be Giants are coming to the UK to celebrate their 1990 hit album Flood. John Flansburgh looks back at the album and the band's 40 year history.

They Might Be Giants (L-R John Linnell and John Flansburgh) are coming to the UK to celebrate their album Flood. Photo: Sam Graff

They Might Be Giants did not intend to go on an international tour celebrating their sparkling, witty and weird 1990 album Flood . But at the end of 2019 – almost 30 years after Flood ’s lead single, Birdhouse in Your Soul , propelled them into UK living rooms through the time-honoured medium of a spot on Top of the Pops – they figured the anniversary would be a good hook for a handful of US gigs.

“It was just like… well, you know, everybody loves that album. It’ll be really easy, it’ll just be like falling off a log,” explains John Flansburgh, one half of the restlessly creative band who recently released their 23 rd studio album, the Grammy-nominated Book . “We weren’t expecting it to be something that we would take on the road across the world.”

Given their aimed-for dates were in 2020, the c-word and its rolling series of lockdowns and illnesses somewhat delayed the enterprise. Still, in June 2022, They Might Be Giants finally took the stage at the Bowery in their native New York to play their first show back after Covid, the delayed start to Flood ’s 30 th birthday party. It was a great show, by all accounts. It was not a great night.

“I was coming back in an Uber to my apartment in Manhattan,” says Flansburgh, “and a drunk driver T-boned our car. The car got flipped over.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by John Flansburgh (@flansyflans)

Seven ribs down one side smashed, John Flansburgh was genuinely lucky to make it out alive. Instead of continuing the tour, he spent the next few days in hospital. “I was kind of a mess,” he says, “but I didn’t realise how much of a mess. For the first 12 hours of the ordeal, I was like, I gotta do a show in Washington DC tomorrow. The doctor’s like, you’re not going to be walking for two months. It was really bad. But, you know, I survived and I’m a lot better now. I’m just grateful it wasn’t more serious.”

After Flansburgh posted an update to social media from his hospital bed, the story was picked up across the New York papers, which leant the whole thing a surrealist edge. “Guitar man a DUI victim,” ran the New York Post headline. “It’s a little bit like seeing your obituary,” says Flansburgh. “I’ve never thought of myself as a ‘guitar man’. It was weird.”

Coming so close on the tail of the world-shaking effects of coronavirus, the accident was unsurprisingly a trigger for reflection.  “This has been such a tough interval,” says Flansburgh. “I feel like the whole Covid thing is just has really made everybody realise that life is really fragile.”

And has he changed anything as a result? “I call my mom a lot more.”

Thankfully, by August, Flansburgh was well enough to hit the road again. Six months on, he and his partner in music, John Linnell, have scores of Flood shows under their belts and just announced a series of UK dates for later this year.

“We weren’t really aware that this kind of ritual self-celebration thing was going to become such a strong current in rock music,” laughs Flansburgh. “But you know, we’re happy to celebrate ourselves. I’m just grateful that Flood is such a solid album to get behind. It’s got a lot of unusual things about it. It’s not just a bunch of bangers and a bunch of filler.”

Now a staple of student discos, weddings and karaoke (at least in my house), it’s hard to remember just how spectacularly alien Birdhouse in Your Soul sounded when it arrived on these shores just as the 80s turned into the 90s. It was the tail end of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s glory days; rave culture and the Manchester scene were starting to take over UK music. The week Birdhouse hit TOTP , other acts included a B-list Jason Donovan song and Happy Mondays twistin’ my melon man.

Flansburgh and Linnell were two geeky Americans spouting lyrics about Jason and the Argonauts, listening “filibuster vigilantly”, telling stories as infinite as a Longines Symphonette and having a blue canary to watch over you. In the days before you could easily Google what the hell they were on about. They were charming and energetic, unapologetically intellectual, a playful, pogoing missive from the exotic US college-rock world that would soon birth grunge . “A lot of guitars, a lot of out of tune singing, a lot of very uncomfortable ideas. It was quite a time in the US. And that was our scene.”

It soon became clear that the culture clash was real. “I remember sitting down for an interview,” says Flansburgh, “and the first question the interviewer asked was, ‘So, you must be into the Stone Roses …’ And I remember thinking, I don’t even know who the Stone Roses are.”

Nonetheless, Birdhouse was irresistible – bucking all available trends to reach number six in the UK charts and propelling its parent album into the top 20. “Our career in the United States is very typical of a lot of bands. We have had a very slow and very steady climb,” says Flansburgh. “Whereas our experience in the UK was like, ‘Alright, we’re gonna launch you out of this cannon, and you’re gonna be in the stratosphere for a little while, and then you best understand that you’re going to come down. And no one is ever going to want to hear from you ever again.’ So it was just very cruel.

“I’m grateful that it happened when I was 29, and not when I was 19. If I had been 19, I would probably be calling you from rehab right now.”

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Granted, pop culture with its newness obsession, its fixation on youth, may have moved on from the Johns. (It’s a danger they always recognised, having earlier written the toe-tapping Youth Culture Killed My Dog about the perils of not being down with the kids – a song that Elvis Costello later named as his favourite They Might Be Giants tune). But for a significant minority, Flood ’s worldview, populated with particle men, minimum wage laments, sparrow best friends, accordions and captivating choruses was the start of something.

Oddly, the very things that made They Might Be Giants out of step with the hitmakers make them look prescient now, as they mark 40 years since their first show. From their very earliest days, TMBG has understood the power of “what internet people now call the ‘free economy’: that you can be generous with people, and you can expect a lot of positive things back by giving things away.” In the early 80s, their Dial-A-Song service – literally an old-school answerphone on which you could listen to their new tunes for the price of a local phonecall, “or free if you call from work” – baffled record labels. The execs couldn’t understand “the idea of just having an ongoing creative enterprise”.

“I mean, nobody thought we were hippies, but there was definitely something very hippyish about just giving music away,” says Flansburgh. “The labels were not in the business of giving anything away. So it was very confounding then, but it also taught us a lot about the potential that an audience can have, beyond just a regular teenybopper thing.”

That deeper relationship between band and audience goes some way to explaining how They Might Be Giants has continued to plough their own idiosyncratic furrow – outliving Top of the Pops , watching as CDs rose and fell, and seeing (almost) the entire history of music become (almost) free in the Spotify era.

“We want to embrace those people and tell those people that understanding and common language that we share is real,” Flansburgh says of their loyal audience. “But at the same time, we don’t want to sound like we’re running a cult.”

And so they’ve kept innovating. They’ve won two Grammys, created one of the first artist-owned online music stores, written numerous soundtracks (including the hit single Boss of Me for Malcolm in the Middle ), released 18 albums for adults and five for kids, and remained occasional visitors to UK venues, where – contrary to Flansburgh’s assertion that we never wanted to see them again – their gigs are packed, sweaty, joyous affairs.

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For the upcoming shows, the Johns (accompanied by their full touring band), will play all of Flood , before treating the audience to a whole second set exploring the rest of the band’s deep catalogue. “It’s not like some crazy Bruce Springsteen-length show,” but running to around two hours it is a lot of TMBG bang for your buck. And don’t worry, newbies – “We’re not a cult. It’s safe. Come on out. There’s no secret password.”

How have the US cult members – *cough* I mean, audiences – responded so far to hearing Flood in full? “There’s some strange songs that get big responses,” says Flansburgh. “ Dead [sample lyric: “Now it’s over I’m dead and I haven’t done anything that I want or, I’m still alive and there’s nothing I want to do”] turns into this big, swaying, New-York-drunken-men’s-choir singalong in the show. Road Movie to Berlin gets a strange, sentimental response.”

And of course, there’s one song that always brings the bounce. “When we do Birdhouse ,” Flansburgh smiles, “everybody’s jumping up and down.” Still pogoing, just like Flans and Linnell, all those years ago on Top of the Pops .

Tickets for They Might Be Giants’ UK tour are on sale here now . Book is out now. Find out more at theymightbegiants.com

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Mike + The Mechanics announce 30-date UK greatest hits tour for 2025

Mike + The Mechanics will hit the road for widespread tour billed as featuring "all the hits and a drift into Genesis"

Mike Rutherford has announced a 30-date Mike + The Mechanics UK tour for 2025.

The widespread run of shows is billed as the 'Looking Back – Living the Years 2025 Tour' and a promotional poster promises "all the hits and a drift into Genesis."

The shows kick off at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow on March 3, wrapping up with a date at London's Royal Albert Hall on April 14. See the full list of dates below.

Tickets are available now from the band's website.

Mike & The Mechanics released their latest album, called  Out Of The Blue, in 2019.

Mike + The Mechanics Looking Back – Living the Years 2025 UK Tour

Mar 03: Glasgow Royal Concert Hall Mar 04: Aberdeen Music Hall Mar 05: Edinburgh Usher Hall Mar 07: Perth Concert Hall Mar 08: Stockton Globe Theatre Mar 09: Manchester Bridgewater Hall Mar 11: Nottingham Royal Concert Hall Mar 12: Stoke Victoria Halls Mar 14: York Barbican Mar 15: Ipswich Regent Theatre Mar 17: Cambridge Corn Exchange Mar 18: Sheffield City Hall Mar 20: Halifax Victoria Halls Mar 22: Gateshead Glasshouse Mar 23: Llandudno Venue Cymru Mar 24: Liverpool Philharmonic Hall Mar 26: Leicester De Montford Hall Mar 27: Basingstoke Anvil Mar 29: Bournemouth Pavilion Mar 30: Portsmouth Guildhall Apr 01: Southend Cliffs Pavilion Apr 02: Northampton Derngate April 04: Birmingham Symphony Hall April 05: Eastbourne Congress Theatre Apr 06: Oxford New Theatre Apr 08: Guildford G Live Apr 10: Bristol Beacon Apr 11: Swansea Arena Apr 12: Plymouth Pavilions Apr 14: London Royal Albert Hall

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Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022. 

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