Moncrieff

In the organizer's words:

Support: Quiet Man

Moncrieff: Hymnic melancholy

Irish singer succeeds with new EP "Highways & Hurricanes"

Live in six German cities in November/December

The great tragedy of life brought Irish singer and songwriter Chris Breheny, alias Moncrieff, to music - and you can hear that immediately, in every song and every note. In his soulful, honest songs, Moncrieff tells of all the fates and setbacks that affect everyone in one way or another. With four EPs to date, each featuring six new songs, he has played his way into the hearts and minds of many Irish and British people, with the singles "Warm" and "Serial Killer" achieving his first chart successes. Around the release of his new EP "Highways & Hurricanes", the solo artist, who has been living in Berlin since fall 2022, is going on a major tour at the end of the year. Between November 27 and December 6, he will be performing six shows in Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Hamburg and Cologne.

Yes, of course: Chris Breheny has always liked music - but only as a nice background, as a soundtrack that makes life more colorful and richer. The young man, who grew up in an Irish village far removed from any music scene, never had his own music career in mind: "In these parts of Ireland, music was something that was looked down upon. Instead, as a youngster, you tended to play sport to fit in," says Moncrieff. Instead, it took two really hard blows of fate to turn the budding law student Chris Breheny into the musician Moncrieff.

Chris' emergence as an artist began with the tragic loss of his sister: "I skipped school every few days, rode my brother's moped to the loneliest place I could find and listened to music alone for hours on end." Although he hadn't written a single song at that point, music became a constant source of comfort and encouragement, an increasingly important outlet. After all, "at 16, you don't really have the channels to express your feelings," he says. He listened for hours to the classic set music of Otis Redding, Etta James and Ray Charles, which often also told of serious setbacks. The grounded and sublime nature of this music would later have a lasting influence on his sound.

Two years later, life pushed him even deeper into a hole - and finally into songwriting: his older brother also died suddenly and unexpectedly. And just as suddenly, he felt that the best way to express his pain was to write his own songs. The tragedy and the disintegration of his family made him realize that music was more to him, "that it was something I could no longer live without." He wanted to live his dream - at all costs. "I just had to go to London and make music: as much as I could, anytime. From that point on, I just wrote songs: I was fully focused on trying to figure out who I was, what I wanted to say."

Through his first two EPs, "The Early Hurts" (2019) and "The Class of 2020" (2020), he discovered that for him, two forms of expression are synonymous: On the one hand, the purely acoustic - just him, his voice and a piano. And secondly, the embedding of his soul influences in contemporary, electrified pop. The intensity with which he performs in both variants was quickly mirrored: Grand seigneur Elton John introduced Moncrieff on his own radio show and celebrated the young artist almost hymn-like; Adele brought him live on stage; and techno star Avicii invited him to joint songwriting sessions (which unfortunately never came to pass after the latter also died unexpectedly). What unites all of Moncrieff's songs is their brute authenticity and sincerity: "It's important to me that people know that when I open my mouth, it's real. It's always about stories that people can ideally identify with."

Price information:

29,45€