Bill Ryder-Jones

Born William Edward Ryder-Jones on 10 August 1983 in Warrington, Cheshire, the solo singer-songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist known as Bill Ryder-Jones rose to fame as a founding member of UK indie favourites the Coral, playing lead guitar on the band's first five albums from 1996 until 2008 when he quit to go solo. Beginning with his masterful 2011 debut If..., which was written as a musical adaptation of Italo Calvino's 1979 novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, he went on to carve out a name for himself as a purveyor of high-brow indie balladry, demonstrating his craft across an array of lauded albums and film scores, while simultaneously working behind the scenes as a producer and session musician for artists including the Arctic Monkeys and the Wytches. Released in 2013, his second album A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart was recorded at his mother's house in Liverpool and grazed the UK Album Chart at 174 while he went to number 100 with the revered West Kirby County Primary in 2015. He scored critical acclaim for his fourth studio album Yawn in 2018, also hitting number 57 in the UK, and released the Yawny Yawn follow-up in 2019. He returned five years later with his fifth studio album, the critically acclaimed Iechyd Da (meaning "good health" in Welsh), which was released in January 2024 through Domino Recording Company and reached number 30 in the UK.