Andy Holden and The Grubby Mitts will perform live at The ICA in London on September 27th 2026, the event will coincide with Andy's exhibition Love In The Misanthropocene at Palmer Gallery. Tickets can be purchased via the link below.
The Grubby Mitts are a nine piece band from Bedford U.K, fronted by artist Andy Holden in collaboration with composer and multi-instrumentalist Roger Illingworth, alongside Rebecca De Winter, Adam Knowles, and Steven Fothergill. The line up is completed by a brass section (Simon Gutteridge, Simon Martin, David Copperwheat, Jacob Atkinson) and Rose Gleadell on violin.
The band released their debut album What The World Needs Now Is in 2015. The singles, ‘To a Friend’s House the Way is Never Long’, ‘Standard’ and ‘Worm of Eternal Return’ were all played on BBC 6 Music. The album picked up radio play across Europe and the band were subsequently invited to play Donau festival in Austria, sharing a stage with Einsturzende Neubauten. The same year The Grubby Mitts were invited to play Latitude festival and performed live with Damo Suzuki. They are noted for elaborate live shows often accompanied by Holden’s video projections or performative actions, such as Cat-tharsis, in which Holden unboxed two-hundred ceramic cats, accompanied by a long monologue. The live show was later transformed into an exhibition and toured as part of the British Art Show 9.
They have performed at numerous galleries including Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, Milton Keynes Gallery. The Grubby Mitts returned this year with two new records. The first, Valediction, was recorded in the wake of the sudden and tragic passing of Holden’s partner in 2022. The EP centres around The Grubby Mitts’ version of David Lang’s composition Just (After Song of Songs), with Holden’s voice transformed through a vocoder. The ten track album Love in the Misanthropocene sees the band shifting between genres, mixing irony and sincerity, optimism and pessimism, resignation and triumph, in an often perilous state of equilibrium. With Freddy Lomas’ (Kinn) production the album is the most coherent statement of the bands philosophy and a continuation of many of the ideas explored in Holden’s varied practice as a visual artist.
