Mark Stoney

Sheffield songwriter Mark Stoney has spent twenty years making music that resists easy categories — folk-tinged indie, trip-hop, baroque pop, dirt-rock — and somehow making it all sound like the same person. His 2006 album The Scene & The Unseen became an underground touchstone – NME called it “a hidden gem, packed with invention.”

What followed was a decade that resisted any tidy narrative. Tours with the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Jamie T and Laura Marling gave way to label deals, a private showcase for Rick Rubin and a relocation to Austin, Texas, where he co-founded dirt-pop trio Bobby Jealousy and spent a few formative, hazy years touring both US coasts, before returning to Sheffield and releasing the much lauded “More Than Animals” — an arc he describes with a smile as “critically acclaimed, yet commercially challenged”. Since then he’s worked as a producer and collaborator for artists on both sides of the Atlantic, while finishing a new record rumoured to be the best thing he’s ever done.

On 10 July — the exact 20th anniversary of The Scene & The Unseen — Stoney plays Yellow Arch with a full band featuring former members of Harrisons, Reverend and the Makers and Baba Naga, to mark the occasion with a special vinyl pressing of that album alongside a first look at new material – what comes next is something else. One foot in the past, both eyes forward.