Music like Guy Garvey

Guy Edward John Garvey (born 6 March 1974) is an English musician, singer, songwriter and BBC Radio 6 Music presenter. He is the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Elbow.

Garvey grew up in Bury, Lancashire. His father was a grammar school boy who could not afford to go to university; he spent most of his working life as a newspaper proofreader and a chemist at ICI. His mother was a police officer who went back to university and became a psychologist. One of seven siblings, Garvey has five older sisters: Gina, Louise, Sam, Karen, and Becky. His younger brother is actor Marcus Garvey.

In the early 1990s, while at sixth-form college in Whitefield, near Bury, Garvey formed Elbow with Mark and Craig Potter, Pete Turner, and Richard Jupp. He serves as the lyricist of Elbow, and has been widely praised for his songwriting throughout his career. As well as vocal duties Garvey has also played a wide variety of instruments live including both electric and acoustic guitar, trumpet, and various forms of percussion. Elbow won two Ivor Novello awards for best song writing for the 2008 single "Grounds for Divorce" as well as best contemporary song for "One Day Like This". He was awarded a lifetime achievement honour by the Radio Academy in 2014. In the same year, he also featured on the re-launched Band Aid charity's single to raise funds for the 2014 Ebola crisis in Western Africa. Garvey, with Elbow, was commissioned by the BBC to write the theme song for the 2012 London Olympics and Elbow performed this song, "First Steps" at the closing ceremony of the Olympics.