Alex Neilson recalls his musical career beginnings, working and touring with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and making his most recent album…
Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie) and Alex Neilson
While growing up as a pluke farming teenager in Leeds with a penchant for free jazz and traditional folk music, discovering the music of Will Oldham was a revelation. It combined arcane/familiar melodies with a looseness that verged on the audacious. Old Testament imagery sang in a faltering voice, with musicians that sounded to be learning the songs as they were recording them, seemed to draw attention to the act of creativity itself. This was tremendously exciting to me and embodied many other interests, as well as a quote I enjoyed around the same time by Patti Smith on William Blake: “Spontaneous pronouncements on the violence of inspiration”.
Fast forward four years and I was invited to play drums on a series of tours with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy across America and Europe. Stroking the skins behind the person who had done so much to define my aesthetic interest was an unspeakable thrill and a frontline insight to the craft or sullen art of songwriting. Around 2009, I started to write my own songs for the first time and drew upon a lot of these experiences, colliding them with many other burgeoning passions to form Trembling Bells.
Lavinia Blackwall and Will Oldham
In 2011 Trembling Bells and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy recorded a collaborative album together with many songs written as duets. To conceive an album with that particular dynamic was challenging in many ways but also a validation of many of the impulses sketched out above. The Marble Downs was released on Honest Jons records in March 2012, with a UK tour following in the April/May. The subsequent live album, The Bonnie Bells of Oxford, recently released as an exclusive download via our website, was a product of this trip. Touring for a living is a treacherous occupation- equal parts fun and deranging – and this one brought its own stresses and illuminations. But the music was among the most rewarding of any tour I have been involved in – always full of vitality and imagination. We would often segue BPB and TB songs – revising tempos and decapitating choruses to create new, writhing hybrids. Making flesh connections between the development of my songwriting and the shadow of influence Will’s music had cast over my creativity.
Bonnie Bells of Oxford Artwork by Lucy Stein
The titular Bonnie Bells of Oxford was recorded in one of my favourite cities on Earth. I have drawn immeasurable inspiration from frequent visits to my girlfriend’s family there, and find it a place of hallucinatory splendor. To tread past the same ornate sandstone buildings as Turner, Philip Larkin, Paul Nash, Jane Morris and more- crumbling gold and ochre against the morning sun – is profoundly evocative. I was glad to include it in the tour schedule and, though the venue is more like the proverbial ‘indie toilet’, it made for a dynamic environment to record in.
Comments