Toby Martin is a musician and songwriter. He is perhaps best known for his role as the lead singer of much-loved Sydney rock band Youth Group, with whom he has released five studio albums, toured the world, won an ARIA, and had a Number One single in 2006 with ‘Forever Young’. The band’s most recent album, 2019’s Australian Halloween was feature album on Double J and named by the station as one of its top records of the year.

Toby has also released three solo albums, Love’s Shadow (2012), Songs From Northam Avenue (2017) - inspired by stories from the Sydney suburb of Bankstown and featuring musicians based in Western Sydney from a diverse range of backgrounds – and his most recent offering, I Felt The Valley Lifting. Released through legendary Sydney label Ivy League Records, I Felt The Valley Lifting was written while living in the small northern English village of Slaithwaite and is a collaboration with local folk, rock and Persian musicians from that region.

The result -- recorded and mixed at Yellowarch Studios in Sheffield, UK, with Colin Elliot (Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley) -- is a heady mix of freak folk explorations, freewheeling melodicism, molten white noise and, in true Toby Martin style, sharply observed story-telling. Equal parts tender and abrasive, challenging and inviting, moving and slyly funny, I Felt The Valley Lifting sits comfortably alongside acts like Neutral Milk Hotel, The Decemberists and The Mountain Goats, while also possibly being the only record made this millennium to use the word “widdershins”.

Toby is also a historian of music, especially country music, and is currently based in Sydney/Gadigal where he works as a Lecturer in Contemporary Music at the Conservatorium of Music.

BAR & KITCHEN OPEN - 5.30PM

BRUNSWICK ARTISTS' BAR, downstairs of the BRUNSWICK BALLROOM, 314 Sydney Rd, Brunswick

Delicious food menu on offer 6 nights a week, kitchen open until 9pm.