Page 458 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

whether they would ever play again until a friend offered their house for a rehearsal.
“At first I think it was just to have fun and keep spirits high, really,” explains violinist
Georgia Ellery, who also moonlights as one half of Warp signed experimental
duo Jockstrap.

From these free-spirited sessions Black Country, New Road became a band that
fluctuates between free jazz, post-punk, krautrock, often all within the same song. And
while taking cues from post-rock noise groups like Slint and Shellac, that really is only
one part of the story – all of the group have formal music education backgrounds,
mostly around London’s prestigious Guildhall School of Music & Drama. “We don’t
strive to be part of any particular genre, we just want to make music that’s playful and
creative to make,” is how bassist Tyler Hyde puts it, “the music just floats between one
genre and another.” (Admittedly, I’m yet to interview an artist who insists their music
sticks rigidly to one genre.)

It’s their adoption of Jewish klezmer music that breaks most excitingly with other
post-punk bands, trying on old Fall riffs one more time. “It’s party music,” explains
saxophonist Lewis Evans. “It’s played in Jewish culture at occasions where people get
together. Even the sad music is pretty happy.”

As Ellery points out, violin and sax aren’t traditional rock music instruments – “we
had to find a way in,” and their klezmer background proved an open gate. “It’s also the
feeling of it,” she explains. “It’s all quite sad because it’s in minor keys, but it is
celebratory music – wedding music, birthday music.” Or, as Wood puts it, “it’s like
crying in the club.”

When Wood began writing lyrics, however, things really changed. “I remember
thinking ‘Oh my God,’” remembers Hyde, still sounding slightly taken aback. “I was
amazed, and quite inspired.”
Issac Wood, singer and guitarist

As a lyricist, Wood uses a Swiss Army knife of writing techniques – unreliable
narration, shifts in character, all those modern pop cultural references. The latter, he
suggests, are a little bit of a red herring. “It’s a cheap trick for getting people to engage
with a story,” he says. “You don’t have to use beautiful language and literary flair to
help a listener imagine a landscape, you’re giving them something they already know,
if you give them a Coca Cola can or the apartment from Friends as a setting, these
places exist in our mind very vividly.” (This is correct, because I’m now picturing the
apartment from Friends, and so are you.) “Then you just fill the rest with any crap you
want.”

Though he’s cagey about his literary influences (claiming, perhaps not entirely
truthfully, to read about half an article a day) he’s an admirer of the beardy American
singer-songwriter Father John Misty – an artist who divides opinion on whether he’s a
wanker, simply writing from the character of a wanker, or indeed a wanker writing
from the character of a wanker.