Kelley Stoltz - Psych-tinged pop, garage rock energy and melodic indie craftsmanship rolled into one.

Out on the Pacific edge of America, where the fog rolls in through the Golden Gate like dry ice across a psychedelic ballroom, there lives a musician who might easily have stepped out of the late-60s pop underground. His name is Kelley Stoltz — songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, studio tinkerer and wandering troubadour — a man whose records feel like they've been gently beamed in from some lost AM radio station where The Byrds, The Beatles, The Beach Boys and the Velvet Underground are forever spinning on the turntable.

Born in New York City in 1971 and raised in Detroit before drifting west to San Francisco, Stoltz eventually found his creative sanctuary in the city's fertile indie underground. In the tradition of the great home-studio mavericks, he began building songs alone — layering guitars, organs, harmonies and tape effects on humble recording gear in bedrooms and basements, chasing that elusive magic that once lit up studios from Abbey Road to Sunset Sound.

Those early recordings carried the unmistakable DNA of the golden era of pop — the jangling twelve-string spirit of Roger McGuinn and The Byrds, the melodic adventurousness of Lennon & McCartney, the shimmering vocal sunshine of Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, and the slightly crooked garage-rock pulse of bands who lived somewhere between psychedelia and punk. It was a sound that felt both timeless and homemade — like someone discovering the secrets of 1966 all over again in a San Francisco apartment.

Word began spreading through the underground when Stoltz released the cult favourite Antique Glow in 2001 — a lovingly crafted psych-pop record initially pressed in an ultra-limited run of just 300 hand-painted vinyl copies. Those records circulated like rare artefacts among collectors and musicians, eventually gaining enough momentum that the album was later reissued to a much wider audience. From that point on Stoltz became something of a secret hero of the indie pop world.

Throughout the 2000s and beyond he continued to release a rich catalogue of melodic, imaginative albums — issuing records on highly respected labels including Sub Pop, Third Man Records (the label founded by Jack White) and Castle Face Records, home to many of the West Coast's most adventurous garage and psych artists. Each release added another chapter to a musical universe where jangling guitars, vintage keyboards, tape echo and sunshine harmonies collided in beautifully unpredictable ways.

But Stoltz is far from just a bedroom dreamer. Beneath the psych-pop poetry runs a deep vein of rock 'n' roll garage bloodline — the raw spirit that links him to everything from 1960s Nuggets bands and West Coast psychedelia to the modern garage revival. That connection even led him to produce recordings for the San Francisco psych-garage powerhouse Oh Sees, helping capture their explosive sound in the studio.

Then came one of the more poetic twists in his musical journey. As a lifelong admirer of Echo & the Bunnymen, Stoltz once recorded an entire track-by-track homage to their classic 1980 album Crocodiles purely out of admiration. Fate has a strange sense of humour — because years later he would actually join Echo & the Bunnymen themselves as rhythm guitarist, touring with the legendary post-punk band across the UK, Europe and the United States, stepping onto stages once occupied by many of his own musical heroes.

By the 2020s Kelley Stoltz had firmly established himself as a kind of modern psychedelic craftsman — a musician whose work bridges decades of musical imagination. His albums continue to explore new corners of melody and texture while still echoing the spirit of those golden years when pop music dared to be adventurous, strange and beautiful all at once.

And now that cosmic signal travelling from San Francisco's underground pop laboratory is heading for the Pennine hills, because Kelley Stoltz will soon appear at Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre.

For one night the intimate listening room beneath Pendle Hill will feel a little like a lost club somewhere between Haight-Ashbury, Laurel Canyon and Carnaby Street circa 1967 — where jangling guitars shimmer like sunlight on the Pacific and songs drift through the air with the colour and imagination of the psychedelic age.

In other words…

a slice of San Francisco's psychedelic pop cosmos is about to land in Barnoldswick.

And if you love The Byrds, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, garage rock, sunshine pop and beautifully strange underground songwriting, you may well feel like you've stepped into a time machine.