Party: RHODES + Special Guest JP COOPER // Plug Sheffield // 5th Oct

Party: RHODES + Special Guest JP COOPER // Plug Sheffield // 5th Oct

Musicians who entertain a degree of self-doubt about their craft aren’t exactly rare. Indeed, it can sometimes seem like a requirement of the job that they should feel a bit uncertain of their place in the musical scheme of things, for all that the sounds they make strike us as sublime. If that stark and often baffling contrast is a time-honoured one, the Hertfordshire-born singer-songwriter Rhodes manages to take it to new extremes.

Here is a singer blessed with a voice of stripped-back, stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty and honesty, whose early EPs, Raise Your Love and Morning, saw him compared to the likes of Jeff Buckley and Adele, whose singing conveys emotion at its most visceral and soul-baring. So it comes as a surprise, to put it mildly, to discover that Rhodes only began singing – and only found the confidence to do so – as recently as two years ago. You sort of want to shake him when he mentions this; and go: ‘Wake up!’ Because his voice is so magical, so evocative, it’s impossible to imagine that its owner wasn’t singing as soon as he could talk.