Bingo Fury is from the shadowy part of the brain that everyone has. I use him as a buffer to help perform the songs. We have a strong working relationship. 

You just take in a lot of music and experiences into your brain and then make sense of them. I don’t want to complicate anything though. Everything’s complicated enough. Making sense of abstract feelings and thoughts and putting them into song form can feel like more of a dumbing down if anything. 

I think this kind of thing happens more in a live context for me. Getting into more industrial/techno/experimental music in Bristol when I was a teenager had a big impact. Seeing Giant Swan on the island back in 2016 was my first experience of underground experimental music at that point. To experience that kind of thing for the first time in a live context, without having listened to anything like that before was totally mind-bending. Think I was still using a fake ID at that point. That show was the gateway to acts like Bad Tracking (to unjustly simplify the project – they are a two-piece experimental industrial group, performing totally naked, one wandering the room screaming through a ball gag into a microphone). Knowing that live performance could be that extremely made me feel that whatever I was doing was totally tame, even if it’s slightly more left-field than your run-of-the-mill four piece guitar band. I think this pushed me further and broadened my horizons at that age. 

I like thinking about music in religious terms, it’s a familiar thing having grown up in church. My first experiences with music were my parents being in the church band (which I joined at 8 or 9 years old as the drummer). It’s the same with a lot of those worship songs – attempting to harness a huge feeling while trying to be as direct as possible. I think that’s what I was referring to. 

It’s a hard song to play because it was written in such a convoluted way. We vaguely jammed the structure in rehearsal as a group, none of us really understanding the song yet, then went into a studio the next day to demo a bunch of other songs we had written and had a spare 20 minutes in the end. We decided to just improvise the song once through (still none of us knowing the structure) without any vocals to guide it. I then took the recording away and pieced it together as a full song at home, adding guitar, percussion and vocals. It feels like a bit of a Frankenstein song with welded parts. When I brought it back to the band it was very hard to get all the changes/timings right as it was pieced together on a computer. 

I don’t think it’s intentional, but if that’s how you feel when you listen to it then that’s a valid proposition. I guess this is referring to the dissonant sections and changes in the songs. Since I was about 14 or 15 I’ve found dissonance and atonality weirdly comforting to listen too. It’s something that resonates with me in other people's songs so it comes through in my own. I can see how this can make people uncomfortable though. 

That’s very kind of you to say. If you think too much about what you're doing it becomes painstaking and generally a waste of time. But if you let things happen unforced and stay present in the moment it’s an easy and enjoyable process. How you reach that ‘in the moment’ mindset is a whole different question I’m not able to answer. 

Mercy’s Cut took everything from me. It was an incredibly draining collection of songs to write. Some of them I still find hard to sing at times. They all came from a very confusing, dark period of leaving and isolation. Lots of leaving at that time. I think it’s a good articulation of that period though, I’m very proud of it as a body of work and proud of the band for their incredible input. In hindsight, I also proved to myself that I was able to make good songs at a time when I had little self-worth and didn’t believe in anything I was doing. I still go back to that place sometimes but now I can reassure myself with Mercy’s Cut. 

I don’t think it feels particularly continuous from the previous stuff but maybe I don’t have the perspective to see that yet. I got to work with Peter Eason Daniels on the videos for the EP, he’s incredibly talented and definitely brought something fresh to the visual side. He has a real vision which comes through so starkly in his work. My girlfriend Holly took the artwork for the EP, she’s also taken all the press pictures surrounding this release as well as the previous single Birchall & Kings, she has an amazing eye. 

I think it’s universally agreed that good songs transcend time and genre. It’s important to be open to that and to try listening to styles you wouldn’t usually gravitate towards. My listening falls pretty evenly between current music and more traditional stuff. 

Yes! This is the first time I’ve been asked about those two in an interview. Exciting stuff. Robbie & Mona (not going to refer to their real names here) came into my life during quite a difficult period after the collapse of my previous band and during the inception of Bingo Fury. They brought a wave of inspiration and reignited my passion for music after a long period of disconnect. Robbie helped us demo the first-ever Bingo Fury songs, even before the whole Bingo Fury band had been assembled. He also helped me record a demo for the EP title track Mercy’s Cut the day that I wrote it so he definitely has a stake in this next release. Mona took the pictures that became the artwork for our first two singles Big Rain and Happy Snake and helped me explore the visual side of the project very early on, recommending films and artists.

They both massively informed the development of the Bingo Fury character. We met after they asked me to sing on their song Venice off their first album Ew. Robbie had a studio in the basement of a venue in Bristol called The Louisiana (which is where we recorded half of the Mercy’s Cut EP), he taught me how to be a live sound engineer in the venue upstairs (now my profession) and I ended up becoming Robbie & Mona’s sound engineer for their live shows. Me and Robbie were in the studio most days working on what would become the next Robbie & Mona album (set to release next year) which I’m fortunate enough to have played on and helped engineer. The album stands peerless. You can come to see us play together on tour this October. 

I’m trying to write an album at the moment. Writing music for Bingo Fury has become more collaborative between myself and the band (Henry Terret, Megan Jenkins, Rafi Cohen and Harry ‘Iceman’ Furniss). They are a devastating force by which I am grateful to be flattened. The songs we have so far are sounding solid and we’re hoping to record in the first half of next year. The plans I have for the album at the moment are extremely ambitious.