Paddy Steer – Saturday 7th March 2026 | Sunbird Records, Darwen

Darwen Music Projects and Sunbird Records presents Paddy Steer

PADDY STEER
Paddy is a Zelig-like character along the timeline of Manchester’s musical activity. It’s a testament to his musicality that he has played with such a wide range of music and artists over the years, be it as a bass player, drummer,
Hawaiian guitarist etc. or all these roles at the same time.

His own Homelife project released six albums in recent years, Homelife’s sound was intricate but with a warm sense of wonder, a balance of songs and instrumentals. Many musicians contributed to the Homelife project, brewed
slowly by Paddy in his attic before being taken out as a small orchestra for some very unique concerts.

Never one to blow his own trumpet, Paddy quietly gets on with developing his craft. There is something of the fairy-tale cobbler working late into the night in order to make the finest shoes in the kingdom, or maybe the musical elves
strike up while he’s in bed. Recorded , It’s a sometime cartoon-like music dense with events, new textures and the colours of children’s paintings,sounds like a Swiss cuckoo clock made of egg boxes and horsehair, glued together by an African Moog player in a Vietnamese iron monger’s shop.

In rejection of the notion of ‘immaculate reproduction’, live performances err more daringly and admirably on the frontier of chaotic abstraction, expression and focussed blunder, dice rolling down the hill in case of duende, as from behind his stacked array of instruments, the anarchically intrepid punk gargles through a vocoder with his xylophone, all a-clatter under disco lights and doilies.

Over 10 years I have witnessed Paddy Steer develop his alien avatar in the most difficult of nightclub and festival circumstances. It’s a synthesiser show that is so far away from kling klang clinicalism and the
haughty air of the modular meet. On the surface it is a pound shop space program. A one man Mercury capsule born of and attempting escape velocity from the derelict high street of Cash Converters, Maplins, abandoned antiques, yam, export & sari shops.

People are drawn in by Paddy’s glowing pantomime. He could be a time traveller from a Victorian night garden with his gas powered calliope or a future Arkestra Brundle Fly with ten Hindu arms. He’s out of time, out of place, quantum now and out of space! Freeze one stacked second and see how many sounds and spaces are
being juggled from the bearded brain in the bone case in the cardboard box with the battery watery eyes.

In performance after the false starts and furniture adjustments, without fail I‘ve seen the casual listener fall into Paddy’s magic tar pit. The music is hellishly funk driven as if Larry Graham and Carl Stalling had a love child.
Fat primary colours from the bass synths, grubby afro charcoal drums go down wires to lava bubble bursts.
Every limb is attached with some kind of electric shaker, there is indeed a whole lot of shaking going on!
The top synths are melodically mental, a tapestry of royal fanfares and stacked harmony that reflects the density of his hand wired world. Audiences just surrender or leave, too much data! Heads are mashed, shapes are thrown in tangled dancing as our Alien jerks the strings.