Jack and Harry Lower, the brothers at the beating heart of London’s latest most-likely-to band Little Grandad didn’t have some big masterplan to form a band together whilst growing up. They hardly even acknowledged each other half the time. Jack couldn’t play an instrument, and Harry kept his songs to himself. It wasn’t until they found themselves back home after university with barely a dime between them that Harry semi-reluctantly shared some of his own songs with his music-obsessed brother. Harry was writing about everything and nothing; real London people, real London things and taking inspiration from everything he saw, read, or picked up along the way. Jack has an opinion on everything, especially music. His opinion was that these songs were fucking great, but he wanted to be singing them. He taught himself rudimentary bass too, trying to be helpful.
Despite, or maybe because of their initial differences and even a vague disinterest in each other, they slowly began to morph as one over the next year or two. Similar thoughts, similar opinions, and the same ideas of what makes a good song a great song. They shared vocals (“blood harmonies”) on these songs that Harry was still busy writing.
At the top of 2025, they met guitarist/trumpet player and fellow songwriter Ned Ashcroft at an open-mic night in Haggerston, and alongside Jimmy Brennan on drums (an old friend of Jack’s who, bonus, worked as a studio engineer) they soon became solid together as a unit of four. They initially bonded over the music of Chet Baker (Ned can play them all), but of other bands too. When Little Grandad became something more than just murmurings of a future conversation, they hung out together a lot as a gang, mostly at the spit and sawdust London grassroots venues they’d all grown up in, but primarily at The Windmill in Brixton. If that sounds cliched, it’s because it is, but they wanted to make some new friends, and see what everyone else was up to, holding opinions on who they rated and who they didn’t. Jack loved all that stuff (he moonlit briefly as a tour manager for another new “Windmill band” to make ends meet), Harry far less so, but when they got up onto that stage for the first time in the Summer, it all felt second nature, almost living room familiar, amongst pals, and they tore the roof off. They’ve been out on the road almost ever since.
