Kai Bosch announces UK headline tour allongside support shows with Katie Gregson-MacLeod
TICKETS FOR HIS 2024 SHOWS GO ON SALE DECEMBER 1ST
Praise for Kai Bosch:
“Electronic soul with plenty of pop appeal, his work feels reminiscent of everyone from James Blake to Metronomy’s more melancholic side” - Clash
“No wonder Bosch has captivated audiences and critics alike.” - The Line of Best Fit
“I think he’s got something proper special” - Maia Beth, BBC Radio 1 Future Pop
*****
After the rousing response to his much-loved new single “Bodybag” in recent weeks, fast-rising alt-pop artist Kai Bosch has now announced his plans for a UK headline tour, as well as support shows alongside Katie Gregson-MacLeod.
Having already been extremely busy on the live circuit throughout this year, including festival appearances at Latitude, Boardmasters and The Great Escape, and supporting Seafret in both London and Manchester, and Gretel Hanlyn on her recent UK/EU tour, Kai Bosch will embark on a four-date stint in late April/early May, after seeing out 2023 with Katie Gregson-Macleod on her Big Red Tour.
Speaking about his upcoming live shows, he said, "I’m ecstatic to be going on my own headline tour, it’s a lifelong dream of mine to do that so it feels very surreal to finally be going on one! Touring and doing festivals over the past year has really shown me how far your music can reach on it’s own accord, I’ve consistently been shocked going to places I’ve never set foot in before and seeing people at the barrier singing the words back at me - so the chance to do these headline shows around the country are going to feel really special!"
"I’m so excited to support Katie Gregson-Macleod on tour, as well as being my flatmate and close confidante. She also happens to be the best songwriter I know and living with her has shown me a whole new perspective to making music."
Tickets for his 2024 shows will go on sale from the 1st December, and see the full list of live performances below.
KAI BOSCH LIVE DATES: * supporting Katie Gregson-Macleod
Nov 30 - Edinburgh, Summerhall
Dec 3 - Glasgow, King Tut’s
Dec 4 - Manchester, Deaf Institute
Dec 5 - Birmingham, Hare & Hounds 2
Dec 7 - London, Tabernacle
UK HEADLINE DATES:
Apr 30 - Prince Albert, Brighton
May 1 - The Social, London
May 2 - The Castle Hotel, Manchester
May 3 - Poetry Club, Glasgow
Staged under the cover of darkness and imbued with a subtle yet high-stakes sense of emotional drama, the music that Kai Bosch crafts makes a lot of sense if you look not at where he’s come from, but where he’s been. Having uprooted himself aged 17 from the sleepy town of Polzeath, Cornwall to the throbbing nightlife of Berlin before moving to London, his music is as indebted to the pursuit of sensation as its author.
If the narrative of the small town boy finding himself in the big city sounds like one taken from a coming-of-age film, then Kai’s early years serve only to amp up the redemptive story arc even further. It’s easy to forget given the positive recent leaps in queer representation in the media that, even half a decade ago, the public role models for a young gay man growing up in a “very Tory, very closed-minded” area were far more limited. “I came out when I was 14, I was the only gay kid at school and I didn’t quite know how to act,” he recalls. “At the time, the only film on Netflix that was gay was called ‘Gay Best Friend’ so you bet I became that. All of a sudden I changed my voice, bleached my hair and started wearing iridescent silver jackets and horrendous foundation. The further and further I got into that, I really did have an identity crisis that took quite a long time to pull myself out of.”
During this time, however, Kai had started to discover artists such as Lana Del Rey and Lorde - people whose music embraced sadness and vulnerability, and who showed that there was a beauty to be found in life’s messy grey areas. These were women who could transport you to a whole different universe, one far removed from the blinkered reality Kai was actually living in. “From then on, music really became the only thing that helped me cope and escape,” he says. “I think someone like Lana probably resonated with me because I wasn’t very happy at the time. I’d listen to her and get to be in my own world.”
Taking this increasingly important passion, teaching himself the keyboard and starting to write in secret, it took a while for Kai to let anyone into the private musical safe space that he’d started to build. But by the time he reached his second year of college, it just became everything. He applied early to Goldsmiths, was accepted to start on a music course the following year and immediately left for Berlin.
Inspired more by the idea of articulating feeling than any particular genre, the sensory explosion of his new life quickly translated into ripe material. The duality of vulnerability and hedonism that runs through Kai’s music, can all be traced to those formative Berlin months.
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