Guy Garvey has spoken to NME about his friendship with “wonderful man” Robert Smith, and revealed that Elbow are working on a “sonically ambitious” new album.
The frontman caught up with NME on the red carpet for the Ivor Novellos yesterday (Thursday May 21), and looked back on his recent performance at the 2026 Teenage Cancer Trust gigs, with the gigs hand-picked by The Cure’s Robert Smith following The Who’s Roger Daltrey stepping down as curator.
Elbow joined a stacked line-up including Mogwai, Manic Street Preachers, My Bloody Valentine, Garbage, Placebo and Wolf Alice at the charity series, and kicked things off with a selection of their biggest hits.
As for what it felt like to be hand-selected by The Cure frontman to take part in the 2025 edition, Garvey told NME: “If Robert Smith gives you a call, you better get there! He’s a wonderful man, and we’ve wanted to support the Teenage Cancer Trust for years, so it was a really great opportunity.”
When asked if it was the ‘Just Like Heaven’ singer who reached out to invite them to the event, Garvey replied: “Yeah, it’s him direct. He does everything! Even if you get sneaky tickets to a Cure gig, it’s his handwriting on the envelope.
“So he’s a wonderful man. He types in capitals too, and he’s just really sweet and kind and polite… And he’s really funny as well.”
After going on to name UK alt band MRCY as one of his favourite artists at the minute, Garvey went on to reveal that Elbow are heading back to the studio and working on new music, which will be the follow-up to their 2024 album ‘Audio Vertigo’ and the 2025 EP ‘Audio Vertigo Echo elbow EP 5’.
“We’re writing another album, which will be our 11th. We’re just about to get together and make that happen,” he said. “It’s too early at the moment [to say how it might sound], but it’s all sonically ambitious.
“But quite often it does take a few turns before we put it to bed… so I don’t know just yet. I’m just so happy that we’re all together. I’m just so proud of being in the band for 35 years.”
Garvey also said that he was excited about Elbow’s debut album ‘Asleep In The Back’ recently turning 25 this year, and revealed that he had “been looking back through that stuff” and noticing how it was “a much edgier record than I thought it was.”
“Looking back at it, you can feel the disgruntlement, which was part of life when we wrote it,” he said.
As for whether they had any plans to celebrate the milestone, the frontman kept his cards close to his chest, saying: “Watch this space. There will be something.”
The interview at the 2026 Ivor Novellos came just over a year after Elbow teamed up with the Co-Op Live arena in Manchester to help donate sound equipment to the city’s grassroots venues.
When asked why they wanted to play their part to help support local music spaces – particularly as July 2024 and July 2025 alone saw 30 UK grassroots venues lost forever – Garvey explained that those venues were not just integral for musicians, but for artists, authors, and the community as a whole.
“It wasn’t just musicians that came through spaces like the Night and Day Cafe in Manchester. It gave a platform to us, Jane Weaver, Doves, Badly Drawn Boy, but also you had novelists like Gwendoline Riley working behind the bar there! There was Stanley Chow, the Grammy Award-winning illustrator, and actor Benedict Wong hanging around there.
“When you put a venue together, you start something for all of the arts. That’s how this stuff grows, and it should be looked after,” Garvey added. “So when you axe something with that much history, what you get after is soulless. So I think the small venues of a city are its soul, and they have to be looked after.”
At this year’s Ivor Novellos, Rosalía was crowned International Songwriter Of The Year, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke was handed the Academy Fellowship award by surprise guest Harry Styles, and George Michael posthumously received the Academy Fellowship, too.
Other winners included Jacob Alon getting the awards for Rising Star and Best Song Musically and Lyrically, CMAT getting Best Album, Fraser T Smith and Kae Tempest winning Best Contemporary Song prize, and Sam Fender getting Songwriter Of The Year.
