Last updated: June 15, 2026
Article 5 — The Sabbatical Files
Part 5 of my UK trip: the May push for Ren and the artists along the way
So this is it. The last one.
After Brighton, after Bristol, after London, the final leg of this whole UK adventure came down to a train ride north and two nights in Manchester. And as much as I want to send this trip off with fireworks, I’m going to be honest with you the way I’ve tried to be in every one of these posts: this last stretch was quieter. I was tired. A month of living out of bags will do that.
Don’t get me wrong, this was one of my favorite trips of my life. Meeting people who love the same music I do, who found it the same way I did, was worth every sore shoulder. But the travel itself, the constant moving from spot to spot, takes a toll. And when I noticed that, a worried thought crept in: this was only one month. How am I going to feel after three? After six? After twelve?
Here’s where I landed. May was always going to be intense. Four Big Push shows across the UK, plus other gigs in between. There was no slow version of this month. August will be the same, maybe more so, since it’s nearly all festivals. But that’s not what thirteen months of sabbatical will look like. There will be bursts like this, and then there will be Berlin, my next stop on the itinerary, where things slow down. The intense stretches are chapters, not the whole book. I’m holding onto that.
Leaving Brighton
Saying goodbye to Brighton was harder than I expected. If you’ve been following along, you already know Brighton ended up being my favorite city of the entire trip, so packing up and dragging my bags toward the station had a real end-of-summer-camp feeling to it. Saying goodbye to the other Renegades, to Simon, to all of it, was bittersweet. August can’t come fast enough.
So off to Manchester. Randy and I made the trek together, Brighton to Manchester with a switch in London in the middle. On paper, a little over four hours of travel. In practice, its own little adventure.
Here’s the thing nobody warns you about when you romanticize train travel: the luggage. My bags weren’t enormous, but they were heavy, and heavy is the only word that matters when you’re hauling them up platform stairs, wedging them onto luggage racks, and then doing the whole thing in reverse at the connection.
The switch in London is where it tested us. Our train came into London Bridge Station, but our connecting train left from a different station entirely. There were some accessibility issues with the Tube along the way, long story, but we made it to the other station right on time. The second train was packed, so I spent more than half the journey standing up near our luggage.
Once we were settled on the leg toward Manchester, though, it was fine. There’s a particular kind of calm that sets in once the hard part of a travel day is behind you and all that’s left is to sit and watch the country roll by. Four-ish hours, one switch, two sore arms, and we’d made it north.
First Impressions of Manchester
Manchester didn’t really do it for me. Our Airbnb was on the outskirts of the city. A really nice place, but not much going on around it. We were wiped from the travel, so we grabbed takeaway, and I went out for one quiet beer at a local pub. The next morning we headed to the Northern Quarter to walk around and get a feel for the place.
And look, I want to be fair here. Manchester is a big city, and I almost certainly didn’t give it enough time to show me its best self. There are probably corners of it I’d have fallen for with another few days. Take this as one traveler’s snapshot, not a verdict.
But from what I saw, Manchester read as a pretty generic big city. It has a ton of history, especially industrial history. Warehouses everywhere, most of them converted into something else now, and a real post-industrial, grungy texture to the place. Some people love exactly that aesthetic, and I get why. It just didn’t grab me the way Brighton’s seafront did, or the way Bristol’s character pulled me in, or the way London just is London.
If I’m ranking the cities of this trip honestly: Brighton first, then Bristol, then London, and Manchester bringing up the rear. I kept it light there on purpose. Sometimes a city is just the backdrop for why you actually came. And the reason I came was the music.
The Queue, and a Bit of Ticket Drama
The evening of the show, we lined up outside the venue like good little superfans. The queue itself was mostly uneventful. Mostly.
This venue did not organize things well, in my opinion. They had everyone form a zig-zag queue, but for the first few hours that queue was just an open lot with no barriers and no structure. People came and went, and there was no separation for priority access, at least at first. About two hours before showtime they moved us into another section of the parking lot with actual barriers, and it turned into a bit of a free-for-all as people rushed the mouth of the entrance. That’s also when they finally separated out priority access.
What bugged me is that a lot of us had been there early, queueing properly, and by the end the zig-zag system collapsed entirely. People gave up on it and swamped the entrance, and folks who arrived later than us got in ahead just by pushing their way forward. But in the end, it was fine.
The one real moment of tension came down to tickets. A couple of my friends had bought theirs through Fatsoma and only had printouts rather than proper Ticketmaster tickets, and for a few minutes it looked like that might be a problem. Some back-and-forth, some nervous energy in the line. Randy had a brief scare with her ticket too. I wasn’t one of the affected ones, so for once I got to be the calm friend, but I felt for them. There’s a special kind of stomach-drop that hits when you’ve traveled this far and there’s suddenly a question mark over whether you’re getting in.
The good news: the venue sorted everything out before they even opened the doors. Crisis averted, heart rates returning to normal, and in we went.
The Big Push, the Final Show
And then there it was. The Big Push, live, one last time.
For anyone just joining: The Big Push is Ren’s band, and this Manchester date was the closing night of their entire tour. That’s what made it special beyond just another great gig. I didn’t catch the first show in Glasgow, but this was my fourth show of the run, which means I only missed one venue on the whole tour. I’m not sure what that says about me as a functional adult, but I’ll wear “crazy fan” as a badge of honor.
Being there for the final notes of the final night carried a weight the earlier shows didn’t. When you know the curtain is coming down for good, you pay closer attention to every second. This time I was front row, and, a first for me, on Gorran’s side of the stage. (Gorran Kendall, one of the band’s frontmen alongside Ren.) After three shows from other angles, being that close on that side made it feel like a different show entirely. I grabbed some videos from up there that I might drop into this post, because the vantage point alone tells the story.
Knox Hill, and the Surprise That Stole the Night
The next day, we went to a Knox Hill, Vikus, and friends gig, also in Manchester. I’d seen Knox Hill perform back in DC and loved it, so catching him again on this side of the Atlantic was a no-brainer.
The lineup had a few acts I was excited about. Black Pegasus was on the bill. I know him from the reaction community on YouTube, so seeing him live was a kick, and he struck me as a seriously talented rapper. I’ve got a note to myself to dig into his catalog properly.
But here’s the moment. The one I’ll be telling people about for years.
Knox Hill was on stage performing “Fentanyl,” the track Ren is featured on (Knox Hill ft. Ren, for the record), and as the song built, Ren walked out to sing his chorus. A surprise appearance, completely unannounced, in the middle of the song he’s literally on. The room went up. You can’t plan a trip around a moment like that. It just happens, and you happen to be standing there for it.
And it wasn’t just Ren. At some point I realized The Gulls band was in the audience, and I think I caught a glimpse of Gorran backstage, or side stage, somewhere in the mix.
That community, that mutual respect between these artists, was one of my favorite things to witness on the entire trip. It’s easy to be a fan of the music. It’s another thing to watch the people who make it root for each other in real time.
Looking Back at the Whole Trip
So that’s the trip. Five posts, four Big Push shows, four cities, more train platforms than I can count, and a running theme of chasing music across a country that wasn’t mine.
If I zoom out, what stays with me isn’t the sightseeing. It’s the through-line of Ren and the artists orbiting him. Brighton won my heart as a place, but the trip as a whole was about the push: showing up, night after night, city after city, to be in the room when something real was happening on stage. The heavy bags, the tight connections, the ticket scares. None of that is what I’ll remember.
I’ll remember Ren walking out for that chorus. I’ll remember being front row on Gorran’s side for the final show. I’ll remember a community of musicians who clearly love what they do and love doing it together. I’ll remember meeting Ren and the rest of the band. And I’ll remember the people I met along the way, and the tattoos we share.
What’s Next: August and the Festivals
The best part? This isn’t actually over. I’m already looking ahead to August and the Ren-related festivals coming up, and I’m walking into them with the bar set high and a full tank of enthusiasm. If this UK run was the spring chapter, August is the summer sequel. And this time it won’t be a trip. It’ll be the beginning of the sabbatical itself.
But that’s a story for a future post. For now, there’s just the flight back to the US, a head full of memories, and a phone full of front-row videos I get to relive whenever I want.
Thanks for coming along for all five of these. The push continues. See you in August.