 Courtesy of the Artist
To date, The Big Nowhere have released two albums and three EPs on their own DevilShake label. Their newest, Forever, is a fiery ten-song collection that showcases the band's distinctive style; a style which has seen them playing with the likes of Justin Townes Earle, First Aid Kit, and Jonny Fritz as well as in the National Archive at the British Museum. Here Simon and Billy answer their Essential 8 where they share the story behind their album's artwork as well as the song "Wonderland," their biggest success and much more.
Please choose one song and tell the story behind it. One of our favourite tracks on the new album (‘Forever’) is ‘Wonderland’. It’s kind of a salacious modern-noir story, and tells the story of the Four On The Floor Murders in Laurel Canyon in 1981. The bodies of four men were found at 8763 Wonderland Avenue, dead and beaten to a pulp. It all started when small-time crook and drug dealer Eddie Nash suffered a home invasion and robbery, his bodyguard being shot during the commission of the crime. Eddie Nash suspected legendary porn star and frequent customer John Holmes of being involved after spotting him wearing a ring Nash said was taken during the robbery. Also caught up in the proceeding ‘interrogation’ of Holmes by Nash was Scott Thornson, another regular customer of Nash’s, and the then open-secret boyfriend of Liberace. Holmes was said to have implicated four people in the robbery, and then taken by Nash and some associates to find them. All we know for sure is what happened next. Which song gets the best crowd response? It’s a song from our 'Christmas In The Gutter' EP, ‘To The End Of The World’ – it’s kinda of a junk-band anthem for the impending apocalypse, with a sing-a-long bar-room chorus of ‘WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!’. We encourage the audience to bang, crash or smack whatever they have and when they hear the lyrics, they usually don’t need any encouragement to sing along! It’s at once blasphemous, profane, boozy, utterly ridiculous and life-affirming. Legendary singer-songwriter Tom Robinson played it regularly on his BBC radio show (also using it as the opening track on the final broadcast of his original ‘Introducing’ show), declaring it “Genius.”. Where do you get inspiration from when writing? From stories we’ve come across, to drunk texts, overheard conversations, to sometimes even mis-remembering something we’ve written. We have songs on albums we’ve never played live, and songs we’ve played live since the very first show we did that have never been recorded. Sometimes a half-snatched idea when we’re falling asleep, or even sometimes the song appears fully-formed. Some we’ve had one line, or a chorus, or even two chords for years, and one day it just falls into place. Picking up an unfamiliar instrument can be a great inspiration, as your hands then don’t go to the same places automatically.
Do you write about personal experience, the experience of others, observations, made-up stories, something else, or a combination?
In a word, yes. We’ve found songs emerge from different areas – some songs we’ve written are thinly-veiled reports of experiences we’ve had with current or former lovers (some are more direct), and some are stories made up from whole cloth – on our first album (Pull Down The Moon), we had three songs that told the same (fictional) story from the perspective of each of the three characters involved. Even sometimes the actions or motivations of characters in songs can be drawn from events from our own lives. Sometimes, they’re real stories, like ‘Wonderland’, or even urban legends like the story of ‘Bella In the Wytch-Elm’, which is something we’ve been working on. What has been your biggest success? I’d say beyond anything we’ve done, it was having our second album ‘Don’t Burn the Fortune’ inducted into the National Archive at the British Museum (the UK equivalent of the Library of Congress). For something that was produced on a budget of zero, recorded in Simon’s living room, and released on a DIY label with no distribution, it’s certainly strange that it should be ‘..preserved as an artefact for future generations of the British public..’ - as they wrote in the email – alongside albums by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. That this happened at all is in no small thanks to the artwork for the CD release of the album. To cut a very long story short, as we were (and are) completely DIY, we asked some people we admired for their own DIY ethos to contribute drawings based on the album’s title. In the end, we had such people as TROMA films’ Lloyd Kaufman, author Christopher Moore, country artists Devon Sproule and Paul Curreri, and writer Neil Gaiman (among others) provide us with artwork, which were then superimposed on photographs taken by the band and friends of ours. Are there any songs you are bored of playing, and why? No, none of them! We’re always writing, and changing the sets – we sometimes play songs live for years before they end up on a record, and we reconfigure songs sometimes as we go, so the live version and the recorded version might be quite different. We also change songs depending on who is actually available to play a show, so there might be 7 of us with keys, horns, electric guitars, backing vocals, and even strings – the whole shebang – or it might be three of us with one acoustic guitar and a suitcase organ. Please share the story behind your album’s artwork After how elaborate the artwork was for our second album ‘Don’t Burn The Fortune’, we were looking for a single image that would reflect the kind of material we were writing that would ultimately end up on this record. One night while going to a friend’s house, Simon’s girlfriend at the time saw the word ‘Forever’ painted on a garage door, and sent him a photograph of it from her mobile phone. It instantly struck us as a potential album cover. We went back the next day with a better camera, but it had been washed away. So the grainy, low-res, hastily snapped picture became the cover, as it just seemed too perfect. We usually start posting the cover of a new album online, as well as using it for promo materials, a long time before work on the album is even begun. Not only does this lock us in to using this image, it helps keep us focused on the shape the album will take, as we record a lot more songs than we need for each album. It helps us stick to a theme or a feeling for the record. If you weren’t a musician/songwriter where would we find you? Billy – Rodeo clown. The last rodeo here in Glasgow closed down in the 1960s (our studio The Audio Lounge is actually on the site where the rodeo once was!), so I’d need to have some kind of time-travel device, but that’s probably more do-able than actually becoming a rodeo clown. Simon – In-call escort. Not anything too expensive, but y’know, still classy. Or maybe working a premium-rate sex phoneline. I’ve been told I have the voice for it. The Big Nowhere : Simon Sinclair - Vocals, Guitar Billy Crowe - Guitar, Vocals Terry Nelson - Bass Joe Keegan - Keys DP Johnson - Drums Helen Mitchell - Trumpet, Vocals John McCann - Sax Kevin Canning - Violin Website/Facebook/Twitter
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