Ben Howard Plays Guitar Left-Handed on Right-Handed Guitars Turned Upside Down. That Detail Tells You Everything.
Two Brit Awards. A Mercury Prize nomination. A sold-out India debut. And music that sounds like it was written for the specific moment you needed the most.
His music found India first. He followed in May 2024.
There is a Ben Howard song for almost every version of a difficult feeling.
The specific ache of missing someone who is still technically there. The way a landscape can carry grief better than words can. The particular loneliness of a late night that will not end. He does not write about these things directly. He writes around them, through alternate guitar tunings and layered harmonics and a voice that somehow sounds both lived-in and completely unguarded at the same time. You do not find a Ben Howard song so much as it finds you, usually at the exact moment you were not expecting to feel something that big.
India had been living with his music that way for years. When he finally came in May 2024, for the first time ever, both the Mumbai and Bengaluru shows were full houses. He had not needed to visit for people to love him. The music had done that already.
Ben Howard grew up in Totnes, Devon, raised by parents who loved folk music. John Martyn. Joni Mitchell. Van Morrison. Nick Drake. The sounds of people who believed that a song could hold something true about a moment without explaining it, that the feeling was the point and the words were just how you got there. He absorbed all of that and then went looking for his own version of it. He got his first guitar at eight, taught himself to play left-handed on right-handed instruments turned upside down, and developed a style of acoustic guitar playing that is immediately recognisable as his alone. Percussive, fluid, deceptively complex. He dropped out of university six months before graduation, convinced by the response his music was already getting, and started playing wherever people would have him.
His debut album Every Kingdom came out in 2011 through Island Records. It reached number four on the UK chart, went triple platinum, and earned him a Mercury Prize nomination. At the 2013 Brit Awards he took home British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. For an artist making quiet, introspective folk music, the scale of that success was genuinely surprising. But it makes sense when you hear the songs. Only Love and Old Pine and The Wolves and Keep Your Head Up are not just beautiful. They are specific. They describe particular human states with such accuracy that people hear them and feel seen.
His second album I Forget Where We Were debuted at number one in the UK in 2014. His third, Noonday Dream in 2018, was a significant artistic evolution, bringing in electronic textures and ambient production without losing the intimacy that made the first two records work. His fourth, Collections from the Whiteout in 2021, was made with Aaron Dessner of The National and pushed even further into experimental territory. And then in 2022, Howard suffered two transient ischemic attacks that affected his memory and speech. The experience was frightening. It changed the way he thought about making music, about time, about the urgency of the things left to say.
His fifth album Is It, released in 2023, was the direct result of all of that. More guitar-driven than anything since Every Kingdom but filtered through everything that had happened in between. Honest in the way that only someone who has had a genuine scare can be.
That was the album he was touring when he came to India. And what made the India shows something beyond a standard debut was that the audience knew the context. They had followed the journey. The full house rooms in Mumbai and Bengaluru were not filled with casual listeners who stumbled across Old Pine on a playlist. They were filled with people who had been paying attention for years, who carried his catalogue in the particular private way that Ben Howard’s music invites you to carry it.
He performed ten songs from Is It? alongside material from across his catalogue. Couldn’t Make it Up. Days of Lantana. Richmond Avenue. Songs that ask questions and sit with the uncertainty rather than resolving it. That approach to songwriting, trusting the listener to bring their own meaning, is exactly why his music travels the way it does. You do not have to be from Devon or London or anywhere specific to feel what he is describing. You just have to have been a person in the middle of something you could not quite name.
The India shows were the definition of intimate. Not because of the venue size but because of the quality of attention in the room. That is what Ben Howard creates wherever he plays. A space where the music and the listener can meet each other honestly.
Myfandom brought the official Ben Howard India merch to life for the debut tour, exclusively for Indian fans. Always Official. Only on MYFANDOM.
First tour. Official Merch. Only on MYFANDOM
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