James Harries

A bus to Prague, and a saxophone swapped for a guitar

Harries was born in Manchester and arrived in the Czech Republic more than twenty years ago on a school band bus, playing tenor saxophone. He settled in Prague, started writing, and traded the saxophone for a guitar. He has lived between the UK and the Czech capital since, and has spent roughly two decades touring the UK, continental Europe, the United States and Asia as both a solo performer and a bandleader.

The press shorthand attached itself early. Rolling Stone called him "the golden voice"; Vanity Fair described him as a strange mix of something between Jeff Buckley and Oasis; Czech and international critics tend to reach for Jeff Buckley or Damien Rice. Along the way he has shared stages with Jamie Cullum, Glen Hansard and Oh Wonder, which places him accurately enough — a songwriter who works at the scale of a listening room rather than a festival main stage.

He has enjoyed mainstream radio play across Europe and accumulated millions of Spotify streams without ever becoming a chart act in Britain, which is part of why his name travels better in Prague, Brno and Leipzig than in Manchester.

Until the Sky Bends Down, and a producer who argued about words

The record that established him beyond the Czech club circuit was Until the Sky Bends Down, released on 28 August 2015 and his first through a Czech label, Tranzistor. Its construction was deliberate: one half bold and band-driven, the other stripped back to piano or solo guitar. The Irish producer Paul Bell oversaw it, with guitarist Josef Štěpánek, bassist Jakub Vejnar, drummer Jan Janečka and pianist Viliam Béreš among the players, and Ondřej Ježek mixing.

Harries has said Bell pushed him to go looking for inspiration rather than wait for it, and that the two held long Skype arguments over single word choices and song structure. The album drew strong reviews and a vinyl pressing, and cemented the Czech ensemble he described as a band he could happily play with every night of the year.

His view of the job has stayed consistent across interviews from that period: "Being on stage is always a joy. No matter who's in front of you." He has said he feels most comfortable performing, and that the size of the audience makes little difference to what he gets out of it.

Love & Desire: an overexposed photograph as a production brief

The current album, Love & Desire, came out on 17 October 2025 on James Harries/Tranzistor. Its origin story is unusually concrete. Harries had a polished, heavily produced album finished when his young son found an old film camera and shot a roll of overexposed, technically poor photographs. Harries found them alive and human in a way his own record was not, scrapped it, and started again.

The replacement was recorded in three days in a small studio with friends, no click track and minimal overdubs — live takes, shaped by whatever momentum the room had that afternoon. It runs nine tracks and twenty-nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds: Sabotage, Shivers Down My Spine, I Didn't Come Here To Fight, As The Night Comes Down, To Catch The Moon, I Want Out, Love & Desire, Paris and Ungrateful Heart. Matěj Belko, Tomáš Neuwerth, Viliam Béreš, Klára Čmejrková and Katie Brown play on it; Derek Saxenmeyer mixed and Tim Debney mastered.

Reviewers picked up the method before the songs. Earmilk, writing on 21 October 2025, framed the album around the beauty of imperfection and singled out Sabotage for its emotional turmoil and Paris as a cinematic love letter. Illustrate Magazine's Naomi Joan called the whole thing understated brilliance and the sound of a songwriter learning, once again, to let go, flagging Shivers Down My Spine as an instant standout with a Van Morrison cast to it. Odyssey went further on the texture — guitars creaking, drumsticks brushing, voices overlapping — and reached for Big Thief and Blake Mills alongside Van Morrison. Shivers Down My Spine served as the lead single.

Czech recognition followed: the album made the 2025 Anděl Awards shortlist, the country's main industry prize, and venue listings through 2026 still lead with that fact.

The second trade: scores for sixteen films

Running alongside the songwriting is a composing career that pays differently and is barely visible in the song catalogue. Harries has written and performed scores for more than sixteen Czech, Slovak, Polish, British and American films, among them Lidice and Bobule. Czech listings routinely bill him as a singer-songwriter and film composer in the same breath, and the screen work explains some of the restraint in his records — a writer used to serving a scene rather than filling one.

An earlier single, Shooting Star, came with a video from director Jakub Zahradníček, who described the song as a piece about wisdom and experience. Harries has also recorded an album captured on a mobile phone, which fits the pattern: the recording constraint tends to be the idea.

Autumn 2026: fifteen dates, mostly small rooms

Harries is on tour as this is written. Songkick lists fifteen upcoming shows against 162 logged past events, with 593 people tracking him for alerts — a working mid-level touring act rather than a rediscovery.

The autumn 2026 run is concentrated in Germany and the Czech Republic with northern and western extensions. Confirmed dates include Stará pekárna in Brno on 26 October, Lagerhalle in Osnabrück on 30 October, the Savoy-Kino in Bordesholm on 31 October, Ponyhof in Frankfurt on 3 November, Råhuset in Copenhagen on 6 November and Tonfink in Lübeck on 9 November, with further German stops in Munich, Cologne and Duisburg later in the month and Swiss and French dates after that. The Copenhagen show at Råhuset on Onkel Dannys Plads has doors at 19:30 and music at 20:00, with tickets at 150 kroner in advance and 170 on the door.

The venues are the point: a cinema, a church, a music café, a Jewish ceremonial hall in Břeclav, a converted warehouse bar. When the album had its Czech live debut with the full band at Jazz Dock in Prague, the room sold out, with seated tickets at 750 crowns and standing at 400. A Prague bill at Lucerna Music Bar, with guest vocalist Maella, went out at 300 crowns.