live with extra love at HiFi Club, Leeds November 2011

Fool's Solo (live)

Throwback to 2014 and a raucous Outlook Beach stage gig/equally wild and warts n all end of set solo. One of my favourite reggae artists, Horace Andy, was on stage immediately after and complimented my playing before I got a chance to fanboy him! Not to namedrop or anything... haha. Big ups to all the boys. my men MC's Dr. Syntax and Sparkz on the shouts of encouragement :) good times...

Beach Wails (Live Solo w/ Mouse Outfit @ Outlook Festival 2014)

Live for the very first time with my great friend John Daly and the 'Rothman Blues Band', featuring another top pal Dave Slavin on some sort of drum thing...A raw phone recording from the regular Thursday open mic at my cherished local, the Spoon Inn in Chorlton, we'd only had a half hour run through before but the gig was pure vibes :)John's since not been in great health but is well on the mend now so all the love to you, sir...a great man and a top songwriter, this is from his song 'Cardboard Box' which he always plays in memory of his friend Priya. Keep your eyes peeled for some proper Rothman Blues recordings in the near future...

Cardboard Box Solo (Live w/John Daly @ Spoon Inn, Chorlton 2019)

'Cliftopia' OUT SOON.... 

How vague was that? Early next week realistically. 
Whatever the words 'week' and 'realistic' mean in these times...

Cliftopia Album Sampler

Phil is a guitarist and music maker coming straight out of the West Coast (of Wales), who has made Manchester his home since moving from Tenby, Pembrokeshire in the early 2000’s. 
Having arrived from ‘The Land of Our Fathers’ as a shy yet party-loving teen blooded on boozy and blues-ey gigs in and around the 'shire, Phil carried on business as usual once the other side of the Severn.
Thanks to the incredibly welcoming nature of Manchester and its music scene, not to mention its people (whose ‘our kid’ culture i.e.. ‘our kid’s band needs a guitarist, gis’ yer number lad’), he quickly found himself plying his trade with a decent fistful of gigging bands at a time. 
This exhausting yet pivotal period is, at least in part, documented in the music you hear on the retrospective ‘Young Bucko’ EP. Some of the ‘young buckos’ featured on the aforementioned project have remained collaborators right through to ‘increasingly old, grey and wizened buckos’ heard on ‘Cliftopia’, and beyond!  
The aforementioned 'Cliftopia’ is a collaborative project that kind-of occurred of its own accord during 2019, a turbulent year for Phil and most of his fellow Cliftopians to say the least. An inebriated and bedroom-produced audio documentation of life/love/loss/friendship/madness/recovery and many more emotions us humanoids feel, this genre-hopping mini-album was borne of therapeutic purposes rather than than commercial desires…this music needed to be made, whether it ever got released or not.

PhilRatcliffeGuitar