The Greek folk revival band play their only London date on a six-city British tour, bringing gaida, lute and clarinet to Brixton.
Gidiki sit at the front of the folk revival now running through Greek music, and they take their name from an instrument rather than a place. Three albums in, they work the repertoire of the whole country rather than one island tradition — songs from Crete and the Aegean, and from the villages of Epirus and Macedonia — on lute, violin, clarinet, percussion and the Greek bagpipes. Their singles Αφούσης and Το Γλέντι were viral hits in Greece across 2024 and 2025, which is not a phrase that usually attaches to a gaida record.
What separates the revival from the taverna is arrangement. The band’s own description is blunt: this is not bouzouki and plate-smashing, and the closest English comparison they offer is Dead Can Dance, had Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry come from the Greek islands. Tradition supplies the tunes and the instruments while the shaping is progressive folk, which is why the audience in Athens is young.
Their British tour runs six cities in seven nights, opening at the Carlton Club in Manchester on the fifth and closing at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh on the eleventh. London is the second night, half past seven until half past nine, and the only capital date on the run. Brixton Jamm has been on the Brixton Road for twenty years, in a building standing since 1750, and gave Adele her first gig.