PLEASE Please You’s concert season for 2017 is bringing a heap of unpolished gems to York and beyond, picked out by the impeccable instincts of Joe Coates.

Promoting gigs involves taking risks, all the more so when the names are not of an “household status”, but Coates has a habit of producing “I was there moments” from his roster of emerging or left-field acts.

Already this year he has delivered The Be Good Tanyas’ reunited Jolie Holland and Samantha Parton to the City Screen Basement and psychedelic Nashville garage band Promised Land Sound to the Fulford Arms for a charmingly ramshackle York debut on their first UK tour. Brooklyn indie-rock foursome Big Thief made their way to The Crescent on Monday, charged with proving their debut album could live up to its braggadocio title, Masterpiece. It did, apparently.

Now, the Please Please You week ends with another first: the inaugural York show by New Zealand folk singer Nadia Reid at The Fulford Arms tomorrow at 7.30pm.

Reid has clocked up 10,000kms in 18 months to spread the message of her first LP, Listen To Formation Look For The Signs, and new album Preservation is sending her out on her travels anew.

“Preservation is about the point I started to love myself again,” says Nadia. “It is about strength, observation and sobriety. It’s about when I could see the future again. When the world was good again. When music was realised as my longest-standing comfort.”

York Press:

Promised Land Sound

Whether in New Zealand’s rugged beaches and mountains, brutally windy Wellington, her hometown harbour Port Chalmers or the untrodden territory of faceless hotel rooms or the jungle in Kuala Lumpur, every episode of loss, heartbreak, and disappointment glimmers throughout the new record.

“Travelling inspires me. I’m learning that things need to happen for the writing to come. Like making time to be alone with my guitar. I’ve grown to crave that. I almost like to starve myself of it to crave it,” says Nadia.

She embraces the challenge of moving forwards in the face of uncertainty. “This place of newness must be where all the good stuff happens,” she says. “An artist must be uncomfortable, must tour the world, and mustn’t stay in her hometown for too long. I feel very happy and changed by my time abroad.”

Preservation finds Nadia in a positive place but not a settled one. “This record is about being OK with who I am in the world, and who I want to be. Learning to live with the fact I’m a person who operates differently to others,” she says. “I’m richer for the fact I am a musician. Without this way of being, I couldn’t write songs.”

Her next stop will be York, tomorrow night, for which tickets to join Nadia can be booked at pleasepleaseyou.com

For Please Please You devotees, maybe there will be another “I was there” moment, like Holland and Parton’s voices entwining on The Littlest Birds, the prettiest of pretty songs on a night when they reflected on how much nicer it was to be in York than New York right now.