Melting Vinyl: Bringing the cream of live music to Brighton.

Iron & Wine is the musical project of Sam Beam, a South Carolina-born former film studies lecturer, now living in Texas. With a softly spoken delivery conveying a certain cinematic gravitas, Beam conjures wonderfully evocative narratives rich in downhome symbolism and vivid characterisation. Despite the immediately sophisticated nature of his songwriting, Beam’s first forays into music mainly existed in isolation, his music only coming to the attention of the wider world when a home-recorded track was featured on a covermount CD free with Yeti magazine. Beam’s lo-fi recordings caught the ear of Jonathan Poneman, co-owner of Sub Pop Records, resulting in the release of debut album The Creek Drank the Cradle in September 2002. In 2007, Iron & Wine released the casually atmospheric The Shepherd’s Dog, which saw him ease into the mainstream, assisted in part by the presence of album track ‘Flightless Bird, American Mouth’ in the film Twilight at the request of actor Kristen Stewart. In late 2010, Iron & Wine signed to 4AD (also home to Bon Iver, Deerhunter and The National) for the release of their fourth studio album, Kiss Each Other Clean, on January 24th 2011.