Sleeper and Turin Brakes at the Brighton Dome

If your record collection still leans on the Britpop era, there is a double bill worth circling in the diary for next spring. Sleeper are taking their UK tour to the Brighton Dome on Thursday 1 April 2027, with Turin Brakes as special guests, and tickets for the show go on sale on 16 October.

Sleeper are one of the more enduring names from the 90s indie-rock scene, fronted by Louise Wener. The line-up is the one you will recognise: Wener on vocals and rhythm guitar, Jon Stewart on lead guitar, Andy Maclure on drums and Kieron Pepper on bass. In the 1990s they were a genuine force, landing eight singles in the UK Top 40 and three albums in the Top 10, with Smart, The It Girl and Pleased to Meet You among them. Inbetweener, Statuesque and Nice Guy Eddie are the singles that will be the ones people come to hear.

There is some good trivia attached to the name as well. Before Inbetweener they supported Blur on the Parklife promotional tour, their music ended up on the Trainspotting soundtrack, and they recorded a version of Blondie's Atomic after Blondie declined to use the original. Wener herself was a fixture of the music press at the time, topping Melody Maker and NME Sexiest Woman polls in two consecutive years, with an NME cover and a Top of the Pops performance to go with it. After a quiet period they reformed in 2017 to play the Star Shaped Festival, followed by an eleven-date UK tour in the spring of 2018, and released the album This Time Tomorrow in December 2020. In 2023 they toured the UK as Sleeper unplugged, so this full-band run is the next chapter.

Turin Brakes make a natural pairing. Formed in 1999 by childhood friends Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian in Balham, South London, they have built a long career on a melodic, acoustic-driven sound with a folk edge. They have sold roughly a million records worldwide across a discography that runs from The Optimist LP in 2001 through Ether Song, Jackinabox, Dark on Fire, We Were Here, Lost Property, Invisible Storm and Wide Eyed Nowhere. Their latest, Spacehopper, came out on 23 May 2025 via Cooking Vinyl and was recorded at Konk Studios in London with Grammy-winning producer Guy Massey, who has worked on everything from The Beatles to Kylie Minogue.

The Brighton date sits in the middle of a wider UK run that opens at Nottingham's Rock City on 12 March and takes in Manchester's Albert Hall, Sheffield's Electric, Newcastle's Digital, Glasgow's Barrowland, Bristol's Prospect Building and London's Roundhouse, before heading to Norwich's UEA and Birmingham's o2 Institute in early April. The Brighton Dome, at 29 New Road, is the biggest room of the lot, with the Concert Hall holding 1,700 people including the upper circle, so it should be an easy place to catch both bands on the same night. Tickets for the whole UK leg go on sale at the same time, so if you want the Brighton show, it is worth being ready on 16 October.