Media and Music: Black Country, New Road’s “Live at Bush Hall”
The English rock sextet made a triumphant and elaborate return to the stage in their recent concert film, offering brand new songs and a real-time case study of a band in radical evolution.
Written by Ethan Rubenstein
The release of Black Country, New Road’s 2022 sophomore record Ants from Up There was a bittersweet one. While the collection of bombastic bleeding-heart anthems was hailed by critics and listeners as a masterpiece, the band’s lead singer, Isaac Wood, announced his departure from the group four days prior to the release for mental health reasons. This led the band to cancel their upcoming first North American tour and left many fans wondering if and how the group would continue. A little over a year later, the band returned to the spotlight with a new concert film featuring all-new material released to YouTube in February, followed by an accompanying live album on March 24 of the same year. “It would’ve felt like we were quitting music if we’d had stopped,” pianist and vocalist Mary Kershaw told NME, “You have to keep momentum.”
Filmed over three nights at London’s historic Bush Hall, each night’s set is themed after a different fictional school play, each with their own distinct costumes, decorations, playbills, and loose narratives. “We had concerns from live sessions we’ve seen or done in the past. They are very obviously clumped together visually from multiple performances. That can take you out of the performance and make it seem artificial and like it’s not actually live,” Kershaw said in a press release, “so we came up with the idea to make the three nights look visually distinct from one another. To scratch the idea of trying to disguise anything. We wanted it to be very honest and let people know that we had three goes at it. This isn't just us playing the whole thing nonstop.”
The pastoral-themed first night, entitled “When the Whistle Thins,” follows “a council of farmers in Somerset [who] gather for their quarterly harvest summit,” according to the programs given out to concertgoers. The second, “I Ain’t Alfredo No Ghosts,” takes place in a haunted pizza parlor and features band members in bloody chef coats and violinist Georgia Ellery cross-dressing with a drawn-on pencil mustache and a suit with tails. The final performance, “The Taming of the School,” is fittingly set around a prom night in 1981, and opens with bassist Tyler Hyde rebelliously announcing “Guys, listen to your prom king: Fuck the dean!” In keeping with the film’s theatrical pastiche, there is an intermission halfway through in which the audience gets a peek at the DIY production method used to make the decorations: “It’ll be quite funny if some of them are a bit shit and some of them are quite good,” an off-screen voice comments as the bandmates paint stenciled portraits on cardboard scraps.
The intricate lore of the shows are also an opportunity for the band to showcase their trademark cheeky sense of humor, with drummer Charlie Wayne’s character inexplicably being named “Weggums” in every playbill. The band and filmmakers’ willingness to bust open conventions of cinematic continuity also allows them to subvert temporality for the advancement of lore, such as in the song “Turbines,” when the band is seen playing alongside Kershaw in one shot and then are sitting at a table watching her in the next. Notably, a seat is left open at the table for fictional playwright Hubert Dalcrose, possibly as a tribute to their former lead singer.
In the new line-up, Kershaw, Hyde and saxophonist Lewis Evans take turns filling in for Wood at the main mic, and while his unique vocal delivery once defined the band’s sound, this rotating trio offers a new and exciting diversity of performance styles. The band is as impressively virtuosic (three of them are classically-trained) and viscerally impassioned as ever in spite of Wood’s departure.
For evidence, look no further than the exhilarating opening number “Up Song,” which ends on a note of camaraderie as the band leads the audience in a refrain of “Look at what we did together / BC,NR friends forever.” The lyric directly acknowledges fans at home as a vital part of their success even if they weren’t in the intimate crowd at Bush Hall. The egalitarian spirit of the band has never been more on display, although it has always played a part in their creative process: “Music for some songwriters is like their baby, but that’s never been our ethos,” Evans told The Guardian in 2021, “We change songs all the time and the ability to let go is really important in a seven-person band. You don’t want to be dictatorial.”” It remains unknown whether these songs will appear differently on streaming services or physical media, if at all. Some fans might find this constant flux frustrating, but for many it’s part of the band’s cult appeal.
BC,NR’s resilience through the obstacle of losing their signature voice isn’t without precedent, especially within British rock history: Pink Floyd only grew larger in reputation after vocalist Syd Barrett’s deteriorating mental health led him to leave the group, while Joy Division reformed as New Order after the suicide of singer and guitarist Ian Curtis, incidentally also on the eve of their inaugural North American tour.
BC,NR’s ability to turn the crisis of losing a bandmate into an opportunity for creative reinvention speaks to the fact that this isn’t their first time evolving, both in cases of necessity and artistic exploration. The band had previously existed as Nervous Conditions before their lead singer Connor Browne left the band due to sexual assault allegations, causing them to shelve their debut album and reform as Black Country, New Road with Isaac Wood in his place. In this second iteration, Wood’s agitated sprechgesang deliveries and the band’s jagged experimentalism led them to be lumped in with the post-Brexit wave of post-punk bands such as Dry Cleaning, Shame, black midi, and Squid. Once armed with a caustic sense of irony and abrasive instrumentation, BC,NR surprised listeners with Ants From Up There’s relative accessibility and tonal shift into New Sincerity, a trend that continues at Bush Hall. This rapid transformation within the last five years is merely one of the reasons that the group is one of the most exciting new bands of their generation.