Photo by Michael Jullings
As Blue Bendy puts it, their band kind of came together by accident. When frontman Arthur Nolan moved to the capital from Scunthorpe for university, he felt alone and reached out to the only person he knew in his hometown. Joe Nash, who had known Nolan’s brother since they were children, had moved away that month for a job at a recording studio. “I was like, ‘No one else comes into my hall, but I have tickets to Sbtrkt at the iTunes Festival, do you want to go?'” We met over drinks in a pub in Hackney. , Nash said, eliciting a cringe from the frontman and laughter from everyone else.
Eventually, Nolan settled down and developed a friendship with classmate Harrison Charles. “The first day we met, we were talking about being in a band and eventually sharing a dressing room with Grimes,” jokes Nolan. With Nash, he went to gig after gig, one of which was with California experimental duo The Garden at The 100 Club. “The Garden was great, but they had a band supporting them and we thought, ‘These guys are fucked.’ If they can support The Garden at The 100 Club, so can we. .”
In 2012, Nolan’s older brother Oliver had also moved to London to pursue a degree in music technology at Kingston. When hungover or homesick, the brothers often got together in parallel, demoing songs and uploading them to Soundcloud to kill time. Drummer Oscar Tebbutt was a linesman at a football game Charles was attending when they met. Shortly thereafter, “I got a message from him saying, “Hello, would you like to join Blue Bendy?” “What is Blue Bendy?” I said. ‘ says Tebbutt. The band mistakenly assumed he was a talented percussionist based on a single rehearsal he had with the experimental duo Jupiter-C. “I lied and said I was the drummer, but in reality I had only played a few times.” Synth player Olivia Morgan’s ex-girlfriend was a friend of Nolan’s, and he was looking for someone to add keys. When he told her that he was working, she mentioned her name. Even though the two had broken up only a few weeks earlier, Mr. Nolan insisted that he call her. Morgan says: “I was with my mom, and she was like, ‘Don’t answer the phone!'” Oliver Nolan has been on the sidelines for a while since early demonstrations with his brother. , joined full-time after the original bassist left. live substitute.
I said it politely, although that may sound a bit like, as if Blue Bendy was simply shaping up. It doesn’t fit with their purposeful and ambitious music that their foundation is little more than solitude and random text messages across London. “Yeah, I kept stumbling over the next few years,” Morgan jokes. “I’d heard of them, but ever since I joined Blue Bendy, it was the worst!” When they started, the band’s sound was the epitome of It didn’t look like maximalism at all. very medievalneither is the ever-changing chatter of 2022’s debut EP. bike. “Before Olivia came on board, we were really on edge,” Charles recalls. “I’m a total purist,” Nolan added. “We had a set of principles: no barre chords, no pedals. If it was a poppy, it was scrapped.” Part of the reason was their fandom for bands like The Wire; I yearned for songs like “106 Beats That,” where I tried and failed to write a song in just 100 syllables, but some of it was due to lack of experience. Drummer Tebbutt wasn’t the only one learning on the job. According to Nash, it was a way of “trying to push myself in a different direction without using the greatness of my instrument.”
According to Nolan, they moved away from the simple wire-ness for two reasons. What they learned on the job was starting to pay off — “When you’re technically good, you get a broader range of philosophy,” he says — and the kind of music they originally played was “really saturated. It’s because I did it.” Post-punk was becoming a landfill.then it got Really Landfill.Something I thought was different has changed. [the norm]. At that point, the most subversive thing you could do was write the most expansive pop music possible. ”
It’s hard to imagine Blue Bendy as a post-punk scrapper. very medieval, but they’re not really a pop band either. It’s certainly expansive, like the grand emotional swell that closes out ‘Darp 2/Exorcism’ and the jam-packed six-minute epic ‘Cloudy’, which has some ear-wrenching hooks, but still. It never quite settles into a groove. This is the kind of music that’s hard to describe as a genre at all, a record of contradictions that run full throttle in one direction and then go the other way. Nolan cites One Hot Licks Point Never’s “Ezra” as a guiding light. “I don’t think he sits on any note for more than about 10 seconds. If he could make a guitar song like that, that would be the ultimate goal.” Tebutt adds: “We didn’t like jamming one groove for too long. We thought it would get a little boring if we just did a riff for two minutes, so why not do it in 16 seconds? I think it comes from my live experience thinking about what happens when you don’t personally understand what you’re doing.”
Still, perhaps the biggest juxtaposition of all is Blue Bendy. do know what they’re doing. Despite being all self-concealed in their conversations, they talk about Nash’s formal musical training, including grade 1 guitar lessons with a guy named Bob in a garage in Flixboro, and the “Arthur Nolan era.” They joke at length about the words they coined. There’s a distinct lack of rhythm in their frontman, and clear ambition beneath the surface. This can be seen, for example, in their keen awareness of the other bands around them in London when they first started out, and the way they felt the need to innovate to differentiate themselves. At first, when the topic is brought up, Arthur Nolan deflects by saying, “It’s a deep-seated need for attention,” but when pressed, much more becomes clear. “We always wanted to do something that no one else has done. We have high aspirations to start something new. We are trying to push something forward. Others Doing something a little different is always the most appealing thing. If you feel different, you won’t be satisfied.”
very medieval Give them a chance to prove what they can do. “You only get one chance to make your first album, so it’s a bit of a life-or-death situation,” Charles says. They are happy with his predecessor. bike ep, but admit that that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what they want to accomplish. “We thought of the EP as a calling card: ‘Here’s a song like this, but here’s a completely different song.’ There was really no story. Albums, on the other hand, don’t need to be front-loaded and can just go with the flow and reach their peak. ”
“And let me breathe,” Nolan exclaimed. “A lot of the criticism of our previous work is that we cared so much and wanted it to be different that we ended up loading it against the wall. But , the best singles just do one thing really well. An album can have 10 songs, each one doing a simple thing well, and still give you a broader view of the band. That way you can make each song its own without having to cram everything in.”
That is, each of the 10 songs included, very medieval Don’t pack too much just yet. Their energy is almost frantic at times, with the band tearing up the record with all their might. This also applies to Nolan’s vocals, which were recorded using an informal studio technique they call “death on the mic,” pushing his emotional expression to the extreme. In his words, “Amplify everything until the microphone is shaking.”
Sometimes he won’t reveal his lyrics to the rest of the band until the day of recording. “It’s because I’m worried about tying things down,” he says frankly. Not that they’re easy to decipher anyway. Nolan speaks and sings in a babbling stream of consciousness that shifts between meta and non-meta (he often calls out his bandmates’ names in his songs). Pompous demeanor and unflinching self-flagellation, micro and macro. There are echoes of immortal Christian ideas about purity and sin as much as there are ephemeral little depictions of Kendall Roy and meme lords. “I grew up Catholic, so I’ve always been drawn to Catholic mythology. It feels like the highest thing you can reach, and it’s confessional and cathartic,” he says. “But I find a lot of humor in delusions of grandeur. My favorite roles to play are ones where I’m the only one standing on the edge of a cliff, swearing into the abyss.” , drunken arrogance.”
“Secretly, it’s all very concerning,” Morgan says. Nolan’s multifaceted, enigmatic language is essentially just autobiography, “put through a meat grinder and abstracted,” as Charles puts it. Nolan added: “I try to play with heightened self-awareness. I didn’t have a lot of fun this time last year. This is a breakup album, even if it’s really boring. But it’s the best I can do. I thought the thing about “was to find a lot of comedy and tragedy to fuel that emotion.” He said, “It’s a cliché: a white man in his 20s crying over a breakup.” “It’s indie rock music,” he says. I’m not trying to avoid it because it would be wrong to do otherwise, but how can I do it in an original way? ”
After all, Blue Bendy’s originality lies in being a guitar band in a city full of guitar bands, with instrumentals that swing from one extreme to the other, multifaceted meat-grinder lyrics, and clashes between contrasts. in the constant pursuit of The words we say, the sounds we make, and even our awareness and aspirations towards our contemporaries set us apart. The band’s name itself has that in it, offering a playful yet subversive hint. “We didn’t just like serious band names,” says Nash. “Fucking hell, is that all we do? The exact opposite of what’s trending?” Arthur Nolan jokes. It’s there in the way they speak, too, with their nonchalance and humor hiding something much deeper.
Blue Bendy’s debut album ‘So Medieval’ will be released on April 12th via The state51 Conspiracy.