Our beloved British neo rock sextet Black Country, New Road is back with third record, Forever Howlong. In response, we present you our third interview with the band, this time delving into a sincere chat with Lewis Evans and Luke Mark.
You probably don’t know this, but this is technically our third interview. The previous two times I talked to Tyler (Hyde) and Charlie (Wayne), and this time it’s you two.
Lewis Evans: Nice. Good to meet you.
Luke Mark: Yeah, good to meet you.
The last interview was in 2022.
Luke: Wow, it’s crazy that was three years ago.
I also tried to arrange an in-person interview on the day of your Istanbul concert where you opened up for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, which is crazy. What do you remember from that time?
Lewis: That was a tough gig, because we had played the night before at Green Man Festival in Wales and we were late that evening. We drove straight to the airport, slept for like an hour on the seats in the departure lounge, and then flew to Istanbul. We just hadn’t really slept at all, which I know is not very rock and roll.
Luke: We had to go straight to the venue and then we had this weird green room, this sort of empty meeting room and there was no hot water at the place, so we couldn’t properly wake ourselves up after not sleeping. We did eventually take a shower, but the water was cold and the lights didn’t work in the room as well, because the electricity had broken down. So it was pitch black. It was a weird day.
Lewis: Yeah. We did have a really good time in Istanbul though, because we got to stay like a day or two after the gig and that was really great. I really liked it.
That sounds tough, but you guys gave a great performance. I remember that much.
Luke: Thanks.
Lewis: I remember I was actually asleep on the floor of the green room. Then I got woken up by our tour manager saying, “You’ve got to go on stage!” So I went on stage. I kind of floated through that whole gig a little bit, I think. Would love to play there again.
Luke: Fingers crossed.
Lots of stuff happened in the first half of this decade. Black Midi is no more, for instance. When you emerged there was the Covid-19 pandemic, and now there is this surge of right-wing politics all over the globe. It’s a whirlwind of chaos. Personally, I don’t remember the past few years very clearly because I feel there’s just lots of stuff there that kept happening at the same time. Do you also get overwhelmed by all that is happening around us?
Lewis: Yeah, the last five years have felt like about five minutes. I think the pandemic definitely altered a lot of our time perception, and also the mass of hate that has come into the world as a result of that. This wave of hate has been quite scary. It’s even scary for us and we are the least affected by this hate in the whole world, people like me and Luke. It’s really crazy.
Maybe this will sound cheesy, but your journey in companionship is one of the things that makes me reaffirm my belief in the power of friendship within all this chaos.
Lewis: That’s nice.
Luke: That’s really nice. I mean, doing a job like this, you can sometimes think, “Why do I spend all of my energy doing this?” Because it’s essentially useless for other people. But, you know, it’s nice to hear things like that, because that is the point really, you know? If you believe in such things, you have the power, which I think we all do. But you have moments where you doubt it and you think, “I should just be doing a real job where I work with people and try to do something useful.” But, yeah, that’s very kind of you to say.
I would say that what you’re doing is useful to music lovers all around. I want to ask this, though: Within all the chaos around us, what are your detox routines? Do you have a specific routine to relax?
Lewis: I like to watch an incredible amount of TV shows. So many, it’s ridiculous. I think this year, I’ve probably already watched about nine full TV shows. That’s my detox. And not necessarily good ones. More like, “I’m hacking into the mainframe!” kind of TV shows. I like that kind of thing.
Luke: I don’t know what I do, actually.
Lewis: You play a lot of guitars.
Luke: Yeah, you know, I watch a bit of TV, watch movies. I was trying to watch a film every day again this year. I tried to do it a couple of years ago, and I failed around that time. I’ve fallen behind now. It’s now an insurmountable task, but I don’t know a lot about films. I’m just trying to just catch up with other culturally aware individuals.
Have you been watching Twin Peaks after David Lynch’s passing?
Lewis: No, I haven’t, actually. It’s. That’s probably a little bit too good quality for the kind of thing that I’m watching at the moment.
Luke: Well, then the middle of season two is exactly what you’re looking for. (laughs)
Lewis: Yeah, that’s true. It does get a bit dodgy there, doesn’t it? But no, that’s actually something I should definitely put on the list because I absolutely loved the bit I saw. And I’ve only ever seen it once. That’s one for the list.
Luke: I’ve been meaning to get to the Return. I’ve never watched it, but it’s probably the best thing ever, and I’ve never seen it. I’m a big fan of David Lynch, but I was like, “I’ll put it off for another time.” But now I’m watching The Sopranos for the first time, so we’ll see after that.
Forever Howlong sounds very prog folk in style. There’s joy and darkness in it, and also a weirdness that reminds me of Robert Wyatt. But first, I want to ask you about the album cover art. Is that character your new mascot reflecting the mood of the album?
Lewis: Yeah. I think it kind of reflects the mood of the album. There’s like a brightness and a happy happiness to it. But although I don’t quite see the dark.
Luke: Oh, that’s in the single artwork. There’s more darkness there.
Lewis: Yeah, that’s for sure. I like the Robert Wyatt reference, though. That’s cool. It’s not one that I’d picked up on until now. I really like Robert Wyatt a lot.
When you think of the creation process of Forever Howlong, if you were to pick two tracks, one easiest and one hardest to create, which two would they be?
Luke: The hardest to create was probably “Forever Howlong”, the title song, just because it was a completely new process to us, all of us playing the same instrument. For the basic track, it presented some difficulties in recording, because we wanted to record it a semitone higher than we were able to perform it on recorders, which is what we made the basic track with. We had to do some studio trickery which was very complicated to try and make it work. So that was probably the hardest.
The easiest… Maybe the easiest to compose was “The Big Spin”?
Lewis: We had that whole end section, though.
Luke: That’s true. Then we just decided not to use it.
Lewis: I’d say “Happy Birthday” was really quick. That’s when we were really in the groove. For me, I think “For the Cold Country” was the hardest. But I’m thinking more about the amount of time it took to arrange and to get to a point where we were all happy with it. It’s such a demanding song. Not only is it such an epic, but it’s also really technically difficult, and the structures were really hard to remember. So learning it took ages. Then finding an arrangement that we all liked and being able to sign off on approval on every single bar was really hard. It’s a good mistake to make because we realized we won’t do it again, but we made the mistake of trying to work on it during sound checks when we’re on tour, which was actually something we discussed trying to do, and we were like, “Okay, this is the time to try it.” It’s actually just a really unpleasant way to do it. Just didn’t work for us.
Luke: It’s a mood killer.
Lewis: It was a real mood killer. Soundchecks are where you feel you’re in the groove on a tour, they’re like, bang, bang, bang, get off stage, do it, bang bang bang. But when you’re hanging around and doing this song, you’ve all got ear monitors in so you can’t hear each other speak. When you’ve tried something out, you can’t discuss it properly. You have your ear monitors set to levels that you want for the live gig, which aren’t the same levels that you’re going to want for arranging in a room together. That was really annoying as well. So I found that really difficult to arrange, but not so much in the studio. There it was more interesting and not too hard.
For this album, you’ve experimented with a lot of new instruments, like recorders and the harpsichord. Is there any instrument you haven’t experimented on yet, but would love to someday?
Luke: Yeah, totally. Maybe some more clarinet. We got that on this album a little bit.
Lewis: Yeah.
Luke: Lewis and I can both play it, so that would be cool to use more. I love that sound. I also think it’d be cool if May played some 70s electric piano. We didn’t really do that. I love the sound of that.
Lewis: I was slightly obsessed by the idea at some point of us doing a song where we all play guitar. I think that would be fun, but maybe pointless for a studio recording and only fun for a live gig. I don’t know. I like the idea of doing that, mainly because everyone is pretty good at guitar, but I’m extremely trash at it. So that would be quite fun to, you know, to try and get good at that, or good enough to play it live.
I would say the album has some nostalgic quality to it as well. Do you have a specific musical event in history that you would like to teleport to if you had a time machine?
Lewis: That’s a good question.
Luke: Great question. Maybe the Bob Dylan concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall In 1965, when a guy shouts “Judas!” and he says, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar. Play it loud!” I’d like to be there for that. They kind of do it in the biopic A Complete Unknown, but they change the location and they cut out a bit where he says “Play it loud!” for some reason, which would be a cool scene.
Lewis: He would have won the Oscar if they had that.
Luke: (laughs) Yeah.
Lewis: I’d like to be in the Swindon area in the mid-1980s when XTC were just putting out hit after hit and Andy Partridge was really honing in on something quite special. Or maybe wherever Sandy Denny was during the 70s when she was making music, but all of the music she was making was untouchable.
What did you think of the film A Complete Unknown? Did you like it?
Luke: I think it’s pretty good. I think Timothy Chalamet did about as good a job as you could hope for. I thought he was pretty cool. My only thing with it is… I think Bob Dylan in that period is one of the most well documented figures in music history. There’s so much footage of him from then. If you watch the Scorsese documentary, you’ll see that there’s an edge to him that’s kind of cruel but very charming, and also very, very witty and funny. I think that didn’t really come across in the script. He’s this amazing figure in the movie, but you don’t quite get why he’s so charming, which you do with the real guy in the footage of him and stuff. That was my only thing that I thought was missing, really.
Listening to Forever Howlong, I thought that you would absolutely rock it in a possible film soundtrack, maybe for a musical, maybe for another genre. Do you have a dream director you would like to work with?
Lewis: Robert Altman’s dead, isn’t he?
Luke: He’s dead. Robert Altman would be cool. Imagine Altman doing a film like Nashville, but instead of Nashville, it’s London.
Lewis: That would be funny. (both laugh)
Luke: Who would be a cool one? The thing is, there are directors that would be cool, but that I don’t think that we’d necessarily fit in with very well. Altman though, I think we probably could have actually done just about if he wasn’t dead.
Lewis: Yeah. Robert Altman, or whoever did Oppenheimer. That one. (all laugh)
I personally love watching music videos as well, and I liked both of your music videos from Forever Howlong that are out so far. Obviously we’re not in the MTV age anymore -and none of us are really MTV children generationally anyway-, but do you enjoy watching music videos in a general sense? Do you have a few favorites that instantly come to your mind?
Luke: Yeah, for sure. I have been watching some recently. Through this campaign, we wanted to, or at least I wanted to do more than one music video. That’s all we got to do for the last album. Watching some classics, you forget how good they used to be, and I’m talking about the stupid ones from the 2000s. I was watching some OK Go videos a couple of weeks ago. The music itself was never my favorite, although it’s actually pretty good. But the music videos are insane. I can’t believe what they were doing, how creative they were. It’s like. It’s a weird format because they don’t really enter a pantheon of greatness like movies or albums do. But when you go back, they are really great, extremely imaginative things. The other week, I watched a load of The White Stripes ones as well. There are some amazing videos by them, like “Fell in Love with A Girl” with the lego animation and “The Hardest Button to Button” with them spreading down the street. I love those. Those are ones that I saw when I was a teenager that I thought were cool.
Lewis: I really like the early 2000s R&B ones where there’s a really muscly guy in a tank top and it’s raining and he’s going all dramatic. Those ones are cool. (all laugh) They’re so fun. And they’re all the same as well, all those videos. That’s all steeped in irony these days. So it maybe wouldn’t be the best idea to recreate something like that. But I wish we could in some ways.
Luke: I’d have taken it at face value. (laughs)
Lewis: Yeah. This is kind of unrelated, but I remember when I was a kid, I was assuming that every single song ever had a music video to it and my dad had to tell me that just wasn’t the case.
I get you, though. The ones with the videos are usually the singles, the songs that are more publicized. So it makes sense to me that you thought those are all the songs out there.
Lewis: I don’t know, I just thought that.
Luke: Have you got any favorites, just out of interest, while we’re on the topic?
I really like the videos of MGMT. They’re really crazy and psychedelic. I also like the video for “War” by IDLES.
Luke: I think I have seen that actually. MGMT’s “Congratulations” is an amazing one, where they’re going across the desert with that creature and it slowly falls apart. That’s an amazing video.
Yeah, that’s a cool one. I really like the video of “Starburster” by Fontaines DC as well, and their other videos too.
Lewis: I remember there was a Kirin J Callinan video with the guy in the sky. “Big Enough”, I think it’s called. For me, that’s the golden age of music on YouTube. It might have been 2017 when we basically saw the very end of the long form content, if you can call three or four minutes long form anyways. I love that video. That was really funny. I remember in that period I was discovering loads of music from just music videos on YouTube, it just being a thing that me and friends used to have beers and watch music videos. But that just doesn’t really exist anymore.
Yeah, you have to actively seek them now, instead of them handed to you.
Lewis: Yeah.
When you check out your streaming platform history, what are the last three tracks you see there?
Luke: I actually do know the last two songs because I just had a shower like an hour ago: “Right Back to It” by Waxahatchee with MJ Lenderman was the last song I listened to, and the one before that was “Gethsemane”, the new Car Seat Headrest song. I didn’t really hear it properly, though, because I was in the shower.
Lewis: My last three I can actually tell you. So I was listening to them last night. I have a radio show, and at the end we stick around, have a couple of beers and we listen to tunes. The last three songs I listened to was “A Shot in the Arm” by Wilco from summerteeth (really loudly), “Treason” by The Bats, and “She Rings the Changes” by Martin Newell, AKA Cleaners from Venus. So indie rock bangers indeed. We had a bit of an indie night as always.
This next question I asked to Tyler and Charlie before, but I also am curious about your answers: Let’s imagine we’re at a Musicians Theme Park 100 years from now, where every artist or band featured has their own memorial stone with a certain lyric by them written on it. Which one of the lyrics would you like to see written on Black Country, New Road’s stone?
Luke: Oh, good question. (both think extensively) Everyone that comes to mind are really jokes.
Do you want to know what Charlie and Tyler picked?
Lewis: What did they pick?
“I’m becoming a worm now and I’m looking for a place to live.”
Luke: Nice.
Lewis: Yeah, that’s great. I’m going to go with something from the new record, though. I feel like there’s definitely something good there. Oh! What about… (coughs) “The rapture of the autumn eve…
Luke: “Led to a fate no one believed.” Yeah, that’s pretty cool.
Lewis: That’s a pretty insane lyric. I could never write something like that.
You can check out Black Country, New Road’s Bandcamp profile here.
