Big Boy Bloater Speaks To SonicAbuse #2 (2018)

With the release of the acclaimed Pills, Big Boy Bloater is back with a vengeance, riding high off the back of the quite fantastic Luxury Hobo album. With a knack for writing wryly observational lyrics and setting them to stinging guitar hooks, Bloater is a loquacious interviewee, always ready with an interesting tale from the road and this time is no exception. Poised to undertake a lengthy, twelve-date UK tour, we took the opportunity to speak to Bloater about the album and the inspiration for the lyrics within. Read on and dig into a world of Pills…

Hello?

Hello, is that Big Boy Bloater?

It is, yeah!

This is Phil from SonicAbuse…

How are you doing, mate?

Good – it’s nice to have this opportunity to speak to you again. Listening to the album, I remember that one of the things we chatted about last time was that Luxury Hobo came out of a somewhat dark period of your life, but this album immediately sounds a touch brighter – did the success of Luxury Hobo and the large amount of touring that you did in its wake help inform the sound of this record?

Yes, I think I came up with a lot of the song ideas while we were actually Luxury Hobo, so on the road kinda thing. I was making notes all the time and writing lines down and witnessing strange events as well, on the road and stuff, so yeah, it’s all come out of that really. Life on the road, yeah!

There’s one song in particular that you mentioned in a couple of previous interviews – she didn’t even buy a ticket – that’s related to a show you did I think?

That is, yeah. That’s based on a true story. It was a show we did and, after we played, the promoter came up and said “there’s some woman who kind of gatecrashed the gig and she was looking for her husband who was on a date with another woman…” and we were discussing this afterwards and I said “what, she didn’t buy a ticket?” and then I thought “Ah, that’s a great line for a song…” so, yeah, I banged it out after that really.

That kind of story is great fodder for lyrics – do you find it expands form the factual basis into a more fantastic realm as you develop the lyrics?

Well, strangely enough, the gentleman in question, in that song. I actually met him a few months after I’d written the song. I’d been talking about the song on stage and he came up after and he said “that song – it’s actually about me!” And told me the full story and what had happened. It turned out that the this couple were already divorced and he was out with another woman, so it wasn’t quite as clear-cut as it had been explained to me at the time, so imagination definitely kicked in a bit there and I finished it off. In fact I had a real quandary – I was thinking whether to finish the song with a sad ending, or a happy ending and I actually just left it in the end – I didn’t have the song resolve itself, so people can make up their own minds about what happened!

That’s sometimes the best way, though, isn’t it – to have a song that spins a bit of a story and then leave the character’s fate open rather than pin a specific outcome on it…

Yeah, I really ummed and ahhed over it – it could just be a mistake, or it could have been planned as a big surprise… I don’t know and then I thought, “no, it’s pretty lame! Leave it open-ended and then it’s much more mysterious and interesting.”

Some of the other songs on the album seem to be more societal in nature – the title track particularly. How much of that is personal experience and how much is observation on the way people subsist on a remarkable diet of supplements…

Yeah, it seems that everybody is taking something for something. You start to wonder, “do we all need this? Are they all necessary? Or is there some big pharmaceutical here that is very happy that we’re staying ill and keep on the drugs?” It’s quite a cynical sort of thing. There’s the thing about taking antibiotics for no reason and it gets to the point where they don’t work anymore and we all die out from the superflu or something…Yeah, it’s quite bleak really isn’t it?

But then the juxtaposition that exists in the blues is that you can have the societal observation, the bleak subject matter but then the music can be bright and lively and, on this album, there are some great riffs…

I think it’s the riffs that draw people in and then, if you’ve got that, people think “oh, this is a nice, jolly song!” And it gives it a second layer, people start listening to the lyrics and then they’re like “oh, actually there’s something going on… what’s this about, it’s actually quite dark!” It just gives the song a bit more life and a bit more interest. I like to take a really miserable, dark song and put it with a really jolly kind of melody, you know. I don’t know, I just like being contrary I think.

One song that immediately stood out for me is Friday night’s alright for drinking and it’s a great track and it has this really heavy, almost grungy vibe and it also seems to call back to Elton John’s earlier, rock stuff (Saturday night’s alright for fighting)…could you tell me a little about the influences on that one?

Yeah, that song is actually about where I live and what happens. Every single line in that song is actually something that’s happened. So, it’s very much autobiographical, that one. Yeah, you hear that Elton Jon song quite often on the radio and I thought, well, one of my favourite things is to sit at home on a Friday night and play a few records and have a couple of beers, maybe, so it was a pretty small leap to twist that to Friday night’s alright for drinking!

It’s funny because although Elton’s really famous for the ballads now, a lot of bands have taken his earlier, rockier stuff as an influence and that song in particular is pretty heavy…

Yeah… he was… the early 70s there was some great stuff. He was playing with a lot of good people as well… where did it all go wrong? Somewhere around the 80s, I think.

Well, that went wrong for a lot of people…

Indeed, but let’s not talk about that!

For this record, you’ve trimmed down to a power trio – was that a conscious decision, or did you lose a member naturally… how did that come about?

It was a bit of both. Dan, our keyboard player, had just had a baby, so he couldn’t tour quite so much and I was thinking about changing things a little. I think, all the time, I don’t want to get stuck in one kind of thing and get too complacent. As a guitarist, you start to rely on a lot on the keyboard player and you start thinking “keyboards can do that… and that…” and it’s good for me, as a guitar player, to think that I’ve really got to dig in and it’s all on me. That was a good thing to stretch myself and do that, I quite enjoyed that. It’s just an organic thing, really. It works, we’ve got a couple of different ways of doing things now. I’m sure at some point we’ll have a keyboard player again and, who knows what sort of crazy instruments, but I like to keep it moving and changing a bit.

I always really like the power trio format because, as you say, it can become easy to rely on another guitarist or keyboardist, and when you strip that away, the pressure’s really there (particularly if you’re playing a solo) to make sure the sound is still filled out…

Yeah, and also as well, you’re not quite so nailed down. If you haven’t got someone there playing those chords, or whatever, you can be a little bit more ambiguous with what scales you’re using and things like that. So, you can take it in different directions, that’s always what I was thinking –it’s going to make a slight difference and hopefully not just doing the same old thing, but on a different scale.

So, now that you’re playing in this format, does that mean you’re re-working the older stuff as well?

Well, we’ve been doing the trio thing for about a year now, actually, so we’d already re-worked a lot of Luxury Hobo stuff. That came out not too badly, I think, so, it’ll be interesting when we take this out on the road. I’ve still got to work out how we’re going to do a couple of songs. It won’t be the same as the record, but it will be interesting.

Luxury Hobo, I think was the first time you’d worked with Adam Whalley, having produced yourself before… but obviously that combination worked because you teamed up again on this record. How was it going into the studio this time round?

Yeah, it was great! Adam’s such a positive force. He’s so up all the time and it’s… I think, when you’re in the studio, it can get a bit laborious. TO have someone like that, almost calling the shots, going “right! Let’s do that, let’s do another take!” It keeps the energy alive and he comes up with some great ideas. He’s forever telling me about what microphone he’s going to use on the guitar… I don’t know, it’s just numbers to me, but… he gets very excited about it and it keeps him happy, so I let him do it, and it comes out sounding great, so I’m happy as well.

I guess it helps to have that outside ear, because there’s that temptation to obsess over a riff…

Yeah, and vice versa as well – so I’m just “yeah, that’ll do!” and he sends me in to do it again. So, yeah, he’s that second ear and someone who gets what I’m doing, but has his own influence as well and stuff like that. He brings something to the table himself, so it’s good working with someone like that.

Luxury Hobo was very successful it seemed – there was a lot of press and the tour after was awesome – was there, in the end, a sense of pressure to get another album out, or were you very much keen to move forward?

I think the time was right. I was quite surprised at how much life there was in Luxury Hobo, it seemed to keep on going. People were still interested and discovering it and I figured it would burn out soon and actually it kept on going and going. I think I could almost have fallen in to the trap of not getting on and doing it because it was great and people still loved it, but, for me, I started having a few ideas and I wanted to get them down and I wanted to do more and I started getting these ideas and bringing it all together and it was clearly time to do another album. I think Mascot were just about ready, so yeah, it all worked out…

Which comes first – your songs obviously detail these little vignettes from your life: do you have ideas that you fit to musical ideas or do you specifically work the music around a given concept?

What I did mostly, on this album, was that I’d write the odd line – make notes on my phone or a song title… things like that. I sat down and I had a few riffs and pieces that I’d been kicking around on the guitar as well and I kind of just bought it all together and tried to figure out what worked and what didn’t. There was probably about 35 songs in total that were either finished or half-started and some of them made it and some of them didn’t. The twelve on the album were the ones that were the best and worked together. So, yeah, bits and pieces written on the road and it was quite an interesting little snapshot, I think.

One of my favourite tracks from the last record, and incidentally my favourite video, was It came out of the swamp, which you animated in lego. Is that something you’re still doing because I know you got into it when you were more housebound, but is it still a passion?

It is, but you know, I’ve been working so hard on this album that I haven’t had time to do any for ages actually. I’ve got all these ideas of things that I want to do and I’ve got to find some time to lock myself in a room and make something. The ideas tend to get grander and grander and bigger, so I have to tell myself to slow down.

There’s a sequel to that song, on the new album?

Yeah, I kind of wanted to catch up with the swamp monster and see what was going on with him. But I changed it around. I didn’t want it to be… back in the 50s, if they had a hit record, they’d bring out another record straight away, almost exactly the same, to cash in, they’d do a follow up. I wanted to completely turn it on its head. The original was a dirty, grungy, swamp thing and I wanted to do a kinder song about the monster this time.

Would you be tempted to revisit him in animated form?

Um… I am sort of tempted but I don’t want to be “that guy who does all the Lego videos” and that kind of thing. I think it would be great fun, but I might have another idea for the video for that one anyway, so we’ll see what happens with that. Yeah, you never know…

Videos are always a bit of an oddity because, when done well they can be a part of the art form, but they seem to be so ubiquitous that it must be difficult to find something that’s novel…

Yeah, I think it’s really hard when you’ve got no budget! I tend to do my own and some of them are a bit of a miss and some of them work… it’s just another part of the creative story-telling of the songs, I think. It’s part of the music business that I enjoy. It’s good fun, you get the chance to work on something like that and it can be a lot of fun.

So, you’re very hands-on with the music video process…

Yeah, it’s almost like I couldn’t hand it over. It’s my song! I’m still quite attached to it, so I’m happy to be involved because it’s another part of it.

So what’s next for you?

In September we’re doing a bit of a tour and there’s lots of touring in the pipeline. We’re looking forward to getting out on the road and working out these songs.

Any final words for your UK fans?

Keep taking the pills!