Sleeper Tickets

Sleeper have announced a string of UK dates throughout April and May 2022, when they'll be celebrating 25 years of The It Girl – their platinum-selling, No.5-charting album – by performing it in full.

Few things sum up the 90s more than the video for Inbetweener – featuring the inevitable mash-up of Britpop and Supermarket Sweep. Dominating charts, airtime and magazine covers between 1995 and 1997, Sleeper helped steer the indie undercurrent of Cool Britannia with three consecutive hit albums full of garage pop hooks and shrugged-off charisma. 

Louise Wener and Jon Stewart met at Manchester University and bonded over a mutual obsession with Blondie, The Smiths, The Sundays, Hole, Nirvana and Pixies. Putting an ad in Melody Maker for two new members the pair found Diid Osman and Andy Maclure – naming their new band after the Woody Allen sci-fi comedy. One fake NME review later (that Wener wrote herself), Sleeper had bagged themselves a record deal with RCA sub Indolent and were supporting Blur on their Parklife tour. 

By 1995, Sleeper backed up their overnight success with the first of three critical and commercial hit albums, with Smart followed closely by The It Girl and Pleased To Meet You. Singles like Inbetweener (featuring a Dale Winton cameo), Nice Guy Eddie, Sale Of The Century and Statuesque became instant indie anthems, their cover of Atomic featured on the era-defining Trainspotting soundtrack, and Wener became one of the most photographed faces of Britpop.

Splitting in 1998 after three explosive years at the top, the various members of Sleeper went their separate ways. Wener became a novelist, Stewart started lecturing in music history (teaching The Kooks, James Bay and Black Honey at Brighton’s BIMM Institute), Osman became an artist manager and Maclure started a punk rock karaoke night with Steve Lamacq. 

Reuniting in 2017 for Star Shaped Festival’s Britpop revival, Sleeper returned with new drummer Kieron Pepper (formerly of The Prodigy) to headline a new set of shows alongside Space, Dodgy and The Bluetones. The next year, the band announced that they were working on material for a new album, and The Modern Age followed in March 2019. Reaching No.18 on the UK albums chart, Sleeper’s fourth record picked up right where the band left off almost 20 years earlier, with 2021’s “lost recordings album”, This Time Tomorrow, filling in as many of the gaps as possible.