About

Look up bard or troubadour in the OED and you get either a Celtic poet and keeper of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish culture, or a medieval lyric poet-musician from Southern France. Now you have the anomaly that is Mr. Novembre, a cultural mongrel born in France, raised in Dubai in French surroundings, with Celtic roots, and a third-culture kid identity crisis.

Before his current 11 year stint in friendly and rainy Manchester, the mainstay for Henry Colquhoun was a thirst for travel and a penchant for lyrical songwriters in the vein of Glen Hansard and Laura Marling. Hours on the school bus in Dubai reading tomes of Tolkien's tales and fantasies about quests, adventures, and friendship led to a yearning for new people, new cultures, new places, fuelled by his parents' many travels across the globe.

Studies in Paris, Bristol, and Granada followed, whitling away the hours writing songs about love, letters, friendships, cities, ecology, and endless people. A momentous trip driving from Australia to India brought out the performer in him, before Manchester was elected as the place to settle down for a while and let these creative tendencies be loosed upon the wider world.

His debut album 'Another Chapter' (2022) offered introspective musings and outward ruminations on a backdrop of folk and rock textures, before taking a left-field turn with the experimental and collaborative spoken work French album 'Menestrel Blues' (2023) with Copilot Claude. The joint EP with Casey Birks,  'Indeed I Did' (2024), returned Mr. Novembre to the folk where his upcoming sophomore album 'Petrichor' is deeply entrenched. A contemporary alt-folk sound, replete with string quartet, horn section, and a 30 minute suite, 'Petrichor' is many years of grief and relinquishment turning into peace, and many hours of fingerpicking callouses bottled into one Spring-like offering.