Jess Silk and Johnny Fluffypunk
This is an intimate unplugged event at the Cube in the Cafe.
Jess Silk is a guitarist, singer and songwriter from the Black Country. Her passionate and melodic brand of folk/punk music gets people sitting up and listening. Armed only with an increasingly sticker-covered acoustic guitar, lyrics right from the heart and a distinctive, powerful voice that many don’t expect, Jess plays to audiences up and down the UK and has shared stages with many well known names among the folk/punk scene.
Jess released her debut album, Break the Bottle, in May 2018 with a packed out show at her spiritual home of Katie Fitzgerald’s in Stourbridge. Since then she’s shared a number of other releases including two live EP’s with tracks taken from shows at Katie’s and HMV Merry
Hill. 2020 saw the world shut down and Jess release two (almost completely) self produced EPs, the first of which, If We’re Damned, was put together from songs that had been gathering metaphorical dust on her hard drive, and the second, There’s A Bar At the End Of the World, a
collection of songs written between March and August taking their inspiration from the events of the year. At the end of August 2021 Jess released her second full-length album Blitz Spirit, and in April 2025 she released her new EP Old, Broken Isle which was recorded at Metway Studios in Brighton.
In recent years Jess has appeared at a number of festivals including Bearded Theory where she opened the main stage, Rebellion, Beautiful Days and Glastonbury where she shared a stage with Billy Bragg as part of his Radical Roundup on the Left Field stage. She has opened for the likes of the Levellers, New Model Army, Bar Stool Preachers, The Men They Couldn’t Hang and Merry Hell amongst others and she continues to tour around the UK playing festivals, supports and her own headline tours.
Johnny Fluffypunk.
An economic refugee from the home counties, Jonny began his ‘career’ spitting vicious political verse between bands at punk gigs until cured by a West Country shaman. Now he ‘does’ poetry that deafly fuses bittersweet autobiography, political disillusionment and surreal whimsy in an act which has established him as a firm favourite at festivals, arts centres and housing benefit offices up and down the country. Equally at home on cabaret, poetry and alternative comedy stages and stridently anti-competition in both the Arts and life in general, Jonny is- to his own disgust- winner of countless poetry slams and has come second three times in the UK National All-Stars slam. He has two volumes of poetry, prose and threadbare philosophy- ‘The Sustainable Nihilists’ Handbook’ and ‘Poundland Rimbaud’- out on the Burning Eye imprint, as well as numerous zines, pamphlets, alternative guidebooks and whatnot. His solo no-fi stand-up spoken word shows- including ‘Man Up, Jonny Fluffypunk- One Man’s Struggle with Late-Onset Responsibility’, ‘How I Came To Be Where I Never Was’, and ‘If We Just Keep Going, We Will Get There in the End’ have toured theatres and and festivals across the UK, as well as around garden sheds, allotments, summer houses, pubs, record shops, boats and (occasionally) churches in a blatant championing of homespun DIY culture. A collaboration with installation artists Miniature Museum resulted in the ‘valve-powered multi-media’ show ‘Test Transmission from the End of the World’, and he also wrote, performed and toured a show for children and families, ‘The End of the Pier Show’, about a refugee mermaid, a doomed pier,and a UKIP deckchair man. Jonny is currently trying to turn the latter into a novel.
