All the Way: Milan W. Comes To Stockport
An intoxicating evening at MØ6B
Welcome to edition 54 of LS, and our first of the year. Rich Walker heads down to Stockport to see Milan W. play songs from one of our favourite albums of 2024.
Stockport. ‘The New Berlin’. All investment and cranes and diggers and churned earth. Regeneration and new bus interchanges with parks on top. Natural wine. Michelin chasing restaurants. Small plates, £9.50 a taste. Quality fish in fancy tins. Bakeries winning awards for their sourdough. New people. Old people. Edgeley Park. The Merseyway and Plaza. The Chestergate and The Pineapple. Record labels with bars. A place to see feted ambient-turned-crooner musicians. Stockport. The New Berlin.
It’s a decidedly chilly evening. Through the steamed up windows of MØ6B, the small but perfectly formed bar opened last year by the people behind the immaculate record label Youth, we can see punters coming and going from the Wetherspoons opposite. Some stop by to peer in through the haze of condensation at what’s going on inside. What they would see is a blurry mass of black clothing, piercings glinting in the low light, football scarves wrapped around shaved heads, as a small clan of devotees watch Belgian musician Milan Warmoeskerken, commonly known as Milan W., mesmerise us with his timeless dream-pop heartbreak.
Milan’s latest album Leave Another Day is a stone cold stunner. Released on another immaculate label Stroom at the perfect time in October, it’s a devastating, heart wrenching breakup album dressed up in the perfect jangle of smudged dream-pop. His first solo album to feature vocals, it has won him many fans, with Boomkat naming it their album of the year. He’s outside when we arrive, dressed in black with a Burberry scarf wrapped around his shaved head against the frosty air, casually smoking and drinking a half pint with his two band members, Martha on synths, and the brilliant Elko on acoustic guitar. The small space is vibrating with anticipation, there’s NTS DJs here of course, White Hotel regulars, a smattering of older folk who could have come across him on 6Music maybe. There’s a unicorn lamp and a panda lamp on stage, it’s cute. Milan, Martha, and Elko (seated) take to the space allocated as the stage at the front of the venue, and a pure alchemy begins, unfolding at a languid, intoxicating pace.
Milan is on his cream electric guitar, teasing downbeat melodies out of it with the aid of his pedals and the tremolo, crooning his heartbreak into a microphone covered with a cloth. Martha plays the synth and contributes intermittent percussion and heavenly vocals; Elko sits, eyes mainly closed, lost in providing exquisite texture to each song. It’s music to drink wine and smoke cigarettes to, alone. The highlights are all here; ‘All the Way’, ‘Face to Face’, a stunning ‘Days in My Arms’ (the new ‘Wicked Game’). Instrumental passages like ‘Interlude’ are palate cleansers before more late night confessionals. I’m transfixed. I think it’s on ‘Memories’ (ironic) Elko pulls out a little device that turns his acoustic into a slide guitar, his eyes closed, lost in ecstatic, glorious sliding chords interspersed with delicate finger picking, an absolute delight to watch. It helps that the sound is pure crystal, a hat tip to the PA set up.
It’s over in a flash, most of Leave Another Day run through, left in the damp, humid atmosphere of MØ6B. We finish our wine, we long for a cigarette. We put our scarves around our heads and head out into the crisp Stockport night in search of a newer natural wine bar. We pass the Wetherspoons. We skirt the Chestergate. We circumnavigate the new bus interchange. We get on the 192 and look at the blinking lights of the cranes competing with the pollution smeared stars. We head away from Stockport. The New Berlin.
As you may be aware, it’s 2025. As such we have new playlists for you to listen to and follow featuring all the tracks we’re loving this year. Click here to listen on the good ship Apple, and click here for the damned hell hole of Sp*tify.