FACT SHEET

● For fans of Ethiopian jazz, John Surman, Arthur Russell, Alice Coltrane, Jarvis Cocker.

● ”The name Alabaster DePlume came about when I was walking up Upper Brook Street in Manchester dressed quite strange. Someone driving past leaned out of his window to share with me what he was feeling about me. But he was driving so fast that he didn’t have time to make a real sentence. He could only make a sort of noise, and the noise he made sounded to me like ‘Alabaster DePlume!’ So I couldn’t argue – that was my name.”

● Tattooed on Gus’s right hand are a line of small stick figures that represent everyone he’s been in the past. “The poet, the traveller… I have killed them off,” he says. “But they served a purpose.”