Celebrating 40 Years Of Recordings (Pt. 3)

The Band Of Holy Joy: celebrating their 40 years of recordings (Part 3)

Now in their third decade of existence, The Band Of Holy Joy continue to intrigue and astound by entering their most prolific period yet with a whole slew of new releases and multi-media ventures. Martin Gray steels himself for the creative onslaught (again!).

At the end of the previous decade, The Band Of Holy Joy had delivered several new albums, a couple of EPs, another live document lovingly captured for posterity, filmed in New York’s Brooklyn and issued on DVD, and undertook tours of Europe and UK showcasing a couple of rapturously received song plays, thus effectively becoming a multi-media proposition aside from just another well-respected musical collective. In many other bands’ eyes, such a productive period would usually imply that a short break or pause in activities would ensue.

Far from it. Not so with the Band Of Holy Joy. If anything, they would crank up a few gears further with an even more sustained burst of activity. In fact, between 2011 and the cusp of the 2020s, the Band Of Holy Joy proceeded to put out no fewer than twenty-six releases in total : comprising albums, singles, mini albums, EPs, download-only releases as well as many super-limited run double CD-Rs self-issued in quick succession as complementary items to the annual (sometimes twice annual) official releases. It really was a quite astonishingly prolific period. Even this author lost track of quite how many of the latter CD-Rs were being made available at short notice via their own Bandcamp page, and inevitably, I could not procure them all.

This period also coincided with the arrival in the Band Of Holy Joy camp of new band member James Stephen Finn, who linked up with Johny and the group’s then mainstays Andy Astle, Chris Brierley, William J. Lewington and Inga Tillere. Finn’s invaluable contributions to the band’s new sound and artistic vision are nothing short of transformational. A multi-instrumentalist possessing a completely intuitive and almost telepathic synergy with Johny’s own creativity: instilling a radical – and also very much symbiotic – approach to all future aspects of the band’s songwriting.

The endless label-hopping also continued apace, in addition to their releases on their own Radio Joy label they also hooked up with Exotic Pylon Records which proceeded to issue a couple of albums and a limited double cassette-only package, before an album apiece released on Moloko Plus and Stereogram Records, followed by a limited triple vinyl boxed set collection on specialist German label Vinyl-On-Demand.

The first new release of this was How To Kill A Butterfly (2011) on Exotic Pylon, a concept album of sorts and an artefact whose CD came in a beautifully-designed package by Inga Tillere, simulating an old cloth-bound vintage book with browned pages inside containing a mixture of anatomical diagrammatic illustrations, contrasted with a spread of old photos of rural villagers (which were revealed as Inga’s Latvian relatives). It’s an appropriately fitting framework and canvas upon which the restlessly creative band now paint a substantially broadened palette – sonically and lyrically – exploring the human psyche and its relationship with the landscapes that have shaped and nurtured its very existence for both good and bad ends.

Every track is a slow-burner of sorts, steeped in atmospherics and sympathetic playing courtesy of the backing quartet of Andy Astle’s guitar, Chris Brierley’s violin, James Stephen Finn’s deftness on bass and electronic touches and William Lewington’s subtle and never once overpowering percussion: there are no jarringly intense musical interludes here. The sound is warm and pastoral and truly evocative throughout.

It’s no longer just fixated lyrically with urban settings either, but on a windswept old Northern English hinterland (both imagined and real) and ruminations lamenting on sadness, longing, traditions, customs and rituals lost, the decline of once-proud industrial towns and a need – nay desperation – to seek refuge or sanctuary in the remoteness of the vast open spaces in order to re-connect with nature, for the fear that one day, it could all be gone forever.

Such (socio-geopolitical?) themes loom large on many of the exquisitely arranged tracks of this album, and nowhere is this more apparent than on the opener Go Break The Ice which begins in relatively quiet and understated fashion but slowly builds in instrumentation and intensity as Johny urges the listener to grapple with their inertia: ‘Now that winter has gotten too much / I’m calling on you / You got the healing touch / I can’t wait for things to flow’ at which point he emphatically repeats the title as if it’s a mantra. The leisurely folk-stroll of Oh What A Thing This Heart Of Man emerges like the album’s most obvious single – it’s a similarly resolute message from Johny as its predecessor: couched in the obvious understanding that the here and now is all we have and that we should never take everything simply for granted…..anchored by the refrain ‘I say we strike out now!’

 

These Men Underground touches upon the great coal mining and dock communities of Johny’s North East upbringing – alternately lamenting and then celebrating their legacy and expressing hopes that these forgotten lives will one day once again bask in glory: the fact the song shifts tempo alternately between slow and brisk passages reinforces that feeling of heartfelt drive and desire. It offers up a rare moment of genuine optimism for a better future (‘one day we’ll rise so high …. one day you will see us fly’). A similar sense of bittersweet romanticism tempered by nostalgia (and also with alternating tempos) crops up on later track Northern, which can be seen as a companion piece, although the sheer strength of the author’s yearning for simpler, more innocent times makes this track particularly affecting. Intriguingly, it’s in this track too that the seeds for the title for the next Holy Joy album The North Is Another Land were possibly sown.

As alluded to earlier, mother nature, the desire to be at one with it, and the distant heavens dominates the themes here (example: streams, forests, meadows, mountains, valleys and seas, as well as stars and constellations, figure prominently in the almost carnal love poem that is Between A Nightingale’s Song And Now, itself set to a pleasingly Hispanic arrangement) whilst a truly evocative instrumental such as Sadness, Ignorance, Longing serves as a brief moment of repose following on directly from the abrupt ending of the preceding track and effectively divides the album into two distinct halves that now serve as perfect song-cycles.

The second half is dominated by spoken narratives set to music, of which two sit side by side on the album: they could not be any more different or contrasting. The first – The Observers Guide To Birds Eggs – is a gorgeously heartwarming real life narrative of Johny’s childhood avian-related obsession. Combined with a beautiful piano and violin arrangement, the tone poem conjures up a truly nostalgic sense of childlike awe, wonder and unfettered excitement – like the first time spent gazing into a warm crackling fire on the hearth (the ending of the track actually simulates this!). It’s one of their most poignantly affecting pieces of music yet.

Its complete antithesis The Repentant follows: an unashamedly graphic and grotesque, self-lambasting diatribe and almost a metaphor for the sheer ugliness of some aspects of human nature and how we should do well to consider our place on the planet before the inevitable day of reckoning dawns and it’s too late to salvage what is left. With a mixture of barely disguised revulsion and disgust in Johny’s lurching enunciation, he paints a truly disturbing portrait of a ravaged body in progressive decline and physical putrefaction from years of hedonistic abuse and lack of self respect, as a perfect analogy to what mankind are doing to the planet – and to each other – with seeming impunity and no sense of realisation or remorse. It’s bleakly arresting and effective but also possesses a sense of tragi-comic absurdity through the caricature that is being portrayed.

The ensuing Shake The Dust Off Your Feet is a simple entreaty to forget about trying to change what cannot be changed and to just revel in what the here and now have to offer by seeking salvation and refuge in an Eden of your own making, whilst the closing A Clear Night, A Shooting Star, A Song For Boo takes things even further: it’s an epic and almost impassioned plea from the narrator, weary of the relentlessness of modern life, to sidestep the all controlling Dystopia we have all created, longing for us to switch off the street lights, transmitters and receivers, televisions and computer screens, even the shopping malls and everything else that modern life is dependent on and controlled by … just to enable him to revel in the simplicity and respite that silence and nothingness can bring. In other hands such sentiments can be dismissed as trite, idealist and even naive but it’s hard to not feel moved and roused by the manner in which the character portrayed by Johny longs for total escapism here – you actually feel compelled to join him. And when he says right at the end when a mobile phone sounds off, ‘Ah. Let it ring.‘, it’s the very least that you want to do.

I have lived with this record for a great many years now and I still feel that, in so many ways that I could never have imagined before, it really speaks to me about where exactly I and maybe others could be heading if we didn’t stop, pause and took stock of the bigger picture. Granted, I am not quite as enslaved by the modern trappings of today as most other people are, and always try my best to avoid (or vehemently resist – smartphones, smart speakers and smart meters, you can fuck right off!) being sucked into the big bad world of technology over all else. But there is a really pertinent message evident here in all of How To Kill A Butterfly and each time I feel angry and pissed off (sadly more and more frequently the older I get) and at the edge of despair, I return to this album, stick it on and treat it as my soothing therapeutic balm. And you know something? It works every time.

Listen to and purchase How To Kill A Butterfly here:
https://bandofholyjoy.bandcamp.com/album/how-to-kill-a-butterfly

 

The following year, just months later, the same core Holy Joy sextet delivered the equally alluring mini-album The North Is Another Land (2012) on a German independent label Moloko Plus, again packaged by Inga Tillere in truly impressive and superlative fashion as a large air-mail envelope wallet housing eight individual postcards with the lyrics on the reverse. Such is the attention to detail, it would be remiss and churlish of anybody to dismiss these exquisitely-wrapped instalments as more style over substance. Not a bit of it. As expected, the band continue where they left off, in their ongoing rich vein of form.

Running at just over 30 minutes, and actually derived from another radio play the ever-productive Band Of Holy Joy had written and produced, in six parts this time, it’s a comparatively brief set compared to the last two albums, consisting of five songs proper and three short instrumental interludes. On The Ground Where John Wesley Walked (also released as a single in a different mix*) is an elegantly slow-paced ballad driven by guest musician Clive Bell’s trilling flute passages and saunters along beautifully. However, the song’s placid proceedings belie a narrative where the setting also takes in that of a post-Mad Cow Disease landscape in which fields are closed to the public because of the fear of contamination (‘after the slaughter / the fields stood silent’), in addition to ‘clawing at frost ridden soils’ and ‘midnight walks on moonlit fells’.

*This edited single version was issued in 2011 as a download only but also featured an exclusive extended 5 minute mix where the song concluded by veering into a pleasant jazzy flute-driven coda that brought a truly uplifting and almost beatific finale to what is already a quite spiritual song.

 

Themes of nostalgia and reflection also play a major role in Ours Is A Life – the lengthiest track here – another heart-rending parable on a life once lived to the full sung by Johny in earnest manner amid a suitably cinematic instrumental backing, and when the song swells around the five minute mark you’re left in no doubt as to his emotional sincerity as he makes those heartfelt reminiscences, which are all the more poignant on discovering that his yearning is a result of personal loss and grieving for his dearly departed loved one.

The instrumentals appropriately open, bisect and close the album: Dreaming Appleby Horse Fair, Accordion Latgalite Flea Market, and Daybreak Port Of Arkhangelsk – each create suitably effective backdrops and evoke atmospheric scenes of distant landscapes both rural and urban, but re-played almost as if through a slightly fogged lens. Overlaying the instruments with sounds as varied as passing trains, foghorns, fireworks and short wave transmitter crackle, they serve as timely interludes and perfectly demonstrate multi-instrumentalist Finn’s true versatility and deft skill at evocative soundtrack composition.

A surprising inclusion of a cover of Lindisfarne’s evergreen classic Meet Me On The Corner (a little confession: I still have the original 7″ single with the pic sleeve, purchased with my own pocket money in early 1972!) gets a faithful folk-tinged rendition and it sounds utterly divine – played with a genuine sense of love and reverence for the original – obviously given Johny’s own Tyneside roots – and is actually the very first time that Band Of Holy Joy have covered another established north eastern-based UK artist’s staple on any of their official albums (I guess Sting or Bryan Ferry will have to wait a little while longer!).

Of the concluding pair of songs The Black Middens is more uptempo and swings along at a breezy pace driven once more by Astle’s guitar and Clive Bell’s flute and revisits again more nautical themes, sounding a bit like another updated take on their 1980s sea-shanties. This then flows directly into It Is Written On The Wind: effectively a rambler’s tale captured in song, albeit one where it appears the narrator is searching for redemption after loss and seeks solace and comfort in walking the great expanses of the countryside in the hope that they can feel the spirit of their lost love accompanying them. It’s a touching end to the album – and the closing instrumental drone acts as an effective coda on which to finish.

 

Exhuming the past, and marrying it with the present

Whilst those two above albums served as neat twin bookends birthed from a similar – more sonically-restrained – tapestry, Band Of Holy Joy were so wildly prolific by this point that no sooner than the ink had dried on those two missives so to speak, they were already making more new prints and impressions with another new project: this time returning to the lure of the cruel, harsh, unforgiving and diseased Big City for the next twin-pronged assault on our senses.

Deciding on a volte face, they realised that so much old archive material from their very earliest incarnations (1984-85) remained mothballed and almost forgotten from view that the only logical thing was to resurrect them and bring them – or drag them, kicking and screaming – back into the present. But, in addition, by way of a complimentary measure, exhibit these older, more defiantly experimental and confrontational recordings alongside a clutch of new compositions recorded some three decades later with the current line up of the band, thus providing a neat compare and contrast to proceedings.

Thus was birthed City Of Tales, Volumes 1 & 2 (2013). A double cassette compilation released in direct homage to their very earliest chosen format (of tape only) and made available through Exotic Pylon Records as a very limited edition of 100 copies. The first cassette Volume 1 comprises material recorded in 1985 with the band’s earliest line up of founder members Johny Brown, Brett Turnbull (now a reputed film maker), ‘Big John’ Jenkins, Max Davis and Martine Thoquenne, and shows the band at their most jarring and uncategorisable: art house experimental soundscapes, with smatterings of musique concrète, played on a mixture of glockenspiels, harmoniums, primitive drum machines, analogue oscillator synths, junk shop instruments and cheap Casio keyboards (and not a single guitar or bass instrument in earshot), all overlaid with Johny’s fractured poetry and sometimes harrowing narrations chronicling lust, hedonism, suffering, despair, torment, urban breakdown, paranoia, mental collapse, and other subject matter that is as far removed from daytime radio fare as it’s possible to get.

The strange child-like melodies are there – albeit exist as a foil to the raging, seething, spitting and wildly off-piste and detuned sonic detritus that crashes around some of the tracks like a deranged lunatic letting rip and running riot around the room. This of course perfectly encapsulates the often violent, frightening, maniacal and unhinged nature of some of the tracks here: it’s simmering beneath the surface on the opening Vanish Everybody And Leave The Child Alone, which deceives with its glockenspiel-imitating-music-box nursery sound and ticking clock introduction as the track slowly becomes more ominous as further intrusive elements (doors slamming, footsteps, organs, disembodied voices, etc) make their presence known and Johny starts wailing out of control towards its conclusion.

The menace also manifests itself on a fair few other similar skeletal sounding numbers here (the sinister synth and drum machine driven instrumental I’ll Catch You After Dark, the sleazy, off kilter monologue of casual sex in A Shabby Affair, the strange wheezes, rattles and sinewy slithering that peppers the chaotic half-indecipherable voices on Ill Gotten Gain), and you get that distinct unnerving feeling that things could erupt or veer out of control at any given moment – and occasionally does (witness the distant screaming in A Shabby Affair). In places it’s comparable to trying to keep an uneasy peace when you’re being held captive by a psychopath holding a blade to your throat…and it’s no less compelling for that – how the band can conjure up atmospheres so intimidating by utilising a combination of innocent child-like toy instruments and sinister electronics played *just so* to contrive or fabricate that creeping sense of disquiet and terror.

A brief but curious fairground barrel organ interlude And I’ve Drank From Some Dirty Glasses In My Time gives way to the title track City Of Tales which is just unearthly and bizarre: a spoken voice (possibly that of Martine Thoquenne) intones in French against organ and a muffled bricolage of people laughing and yelping before the excitement – or panic – levels build up to a suitably nightmarish melee of terrified screams and also someone else being given a right roughing up, amid a mesh of oscillators imitating swirling helicopter blades and intrusive electronic dissonance. It’s not the sort of thing you would want to send you to sleep, that’s for certain.

Drug Virgin (early drumless demo version from [More] Favourite Fairy Tales):

The relatively brief And Things That Speak In Tongues sounds positively possessed – like the mutterings of a deranged psychopath whispering into your ear and threatening to cut your face off as all kinds of sinister echoed rattlings, moaning and shaking noises conjure up a suitably chilling backdrop.  By far the most unsettling track here, Drug Virgin, is like a bad trip and head-splitting migraine rolled into one – a merciless throbbing drum machine beat and a two note siren that saws your ears in half make up a suitably discordant and truly perturbing backdrop to Johny’s disembodied and anguished ghostly wails, overlaid with equally intimidating whispered words. It really is the nightmarish descent into hell that it seems to hint at being and is impressively fucking scary stuff, especially when it culminates in what sounds like pure carnage recorded directly from a massacre scene in a Tobe Hooper slasher movie!

Among all of the impressively hair-raising moments collected here – a fair few are instrumentals that are heavy on the synths as well as all manner of found sounds – are five tracks that would find themselves re-recorded as singles and album tracks for their 1985-1987 Flim Flam output: A Great Binge, Rosemary Smith, Fishwives, The Tide Of Life and Nylon Rose. They sound far rougher and unrealised here but then that is to be entirely expected (Nylon Rose misses half of the extra loud bangs and crashes, the industrial drums and Johny’s narrative added to the later mix). Despite this, they still possess that unmistakable keening allure that makes them so compelling and arresting even on first listen – the early version of The Tide Of Life on here is particularly powerful in its sheer devastating emotional rawness.

Volume 2 sees an updated – more current – incarnation of the Band of Holy Joy refine their tendency for almost filmic-style snapshots deploying electronics as well as traditional instruments such as guitars, pianos and violins but the sense of claustrophobia and unease contained within these newer compositions are just as visceral and intense.

The opener, Empty Purse Found In Hotel Lobby, is a grim urban vignette detailing a woman’s inexplicable disappearance, Johny’s initially passionless but increasingly desperate mantra of ‘sordid vicious world, violent drunken strangers, seedy care-worn rooms, full personal service…‘ emphasises the drama that is going on here before he breaks into startling howls and screams as the track climaxes. The screaming falls off a cliff straight into the following track in a dramatic segue: with its unwieldly newspaper-headline title Actress Puts The Accent On Authenticity For Role In London Girl Gang Thriller, it’s a similarly forbidding track with feedbacking electric guitar screes atop an unyielding drum machine, guitar and keyboard chassis and Johny’s insistent call-and-response haranguing of ‘dirty!’ and ‘beautiful’ taking up much of the lyrical content, giving us another harrowing ride into the dark recesses of a crime-filled city underworld. It continues hammering at your cranium for an unrelenting nine minutes before running out of steam, fading into the distance among smothered echoes and sinister Quatermass-esque electronic effects.

 

Respite arrives in the form of the comparatively conventional third number I Have Travelled On The Buses Late At Night – a beautiful and melancholy guitar ballad about observing the nocturnal rituals in the small hours and the social inequality of city dwellers, Johny lamenting on how it can be an unforgiving place (‘One thing they learn for sure / this city is a bitch!’), before the spoken word / drum machine / synth experiments resume with Traders Losses Double To 4.4.BN….. Johny repeating the same mantra ‘hard. fat. rude. loud. skinny. vain. thick. nasty.’ in robotic fashion as the cyclical track builds and gets progressively more discordant as extra voices weigh in before finally a third, and more desperate, voice starts to emerge: wailing ‘There are no winners here!’ and the track ends. Easy listening this most certainly isn’t.

He Ordered Her To Spit Like A Porn Star rides on mournful piano and violin amid Johny’s desolate and tragic tale of a man of the law’s grim experiences with some of the gruesome cases he has had to deal with and leaves nothing to the imagination as to how thankless a life he must lead. Scattered liberally elsewhere throughout this second anthology, the drum machines, neo-industrial noises and random ambient sound textures serve to create what is ostensibly a 21st-century take on their earlier musique concrète compositions and if anything fully demonstrate how adept Band Of Holy Joy are at sculpting these intriguing and fascinatingly bleak urban soundscapes.

Interestingly, among the more wilfully experimental tone poems and narratives here are a couple of songs that would appear on their next full studio album, On The Buses Late At Night being one, and the short extract of Will These Things See You Right (which would be developed into a full length song) being another. In fact the narrative that precedes this track, here titled Met Police Tried To Hide PC’s Disciplinary Record, forms the basis for a third song which would be titled There Was A Fall / The Fall.

Young Man Invests Faith In Flight can be seen as a bit of a companion piece to Spit Like A Porn Star in that an innocuously pleasant melody played out on piano and strings forms an incongruous backdrop to another unsettling and graphic tale of a would-be assassin’s murderous spree meeting a sticky end. The unnerving scream right at the end slams directly into penultimate track It Just Beats Up Their Heart, He Said, where the tension continues unabated: the paranoia and terror quotient racked up to near psychotic levels. Opening with dramatic military drum tattoo and the sounds of disembodied phones and piano tinklings together with ominous cello and synth drones, Johny recounts the forensic tale of another city casualty found drowned in the bath, and the drugs that were found in her bloodstream. As the track progresses the strings, piano, drums and other intrusive sounds – an insistent ringing telephone enters the fray – become more frenzied as Johny’s voice starts to rise to complete unintelligible hysteria and total cacophony ensues.

 

The final track Be A Stranger is a welcome comedown after the preceding tumult leaves one totally spent and reeling: an uptempo song with marimba, cello, synth and drum machine which is the closest thing to a conventional number on this most beguiling and abstract of collections, but even here it wrong-foots the listener as it features a truly startling concluding coda at the end, abruptly veering into almost post-rave territory for the final few seconds.

True to the Band Of Holy Joy’s predilection for attaching visuals to their music, several of the tracks from this second volume were also imagined as video films that were shared on various platforms: some of them featured among the cast the Scottish actor/artist and former punk renegade Tam Dean Burn who starred in their song-play productions of the late 2000s, and with whom Johny Brown and the Band Of Holy Joy had already forged a fruitful creative/artistic relationship from the late 1990s to the present.

 

A sad untimely loss: Karel Van Bergen (1956-2013)

Amid all of this new activity from the Band Of Holy Joy, there was, however, one bit of very sad news which I only found out about a couple of years afterwards: that of the passing in late August 2013 of their stoically charismatic violinist, Karel Van Bergen. A New Zealander originally, he’d played with various post-punk outfits (The Primmers, Features, SPK) before relocating to the UK in the early 1980s, along with fellow Aucklander ‘Big John’ Jenkins, and hooked up with the band between the mid 1980s to the early 1990s becoming a key contributor to the collective’s songwriting.  He left the group in 1991 prior to their Tracksuit Vendetta album – after which Holy Joy went on a decade-long hiatus – and by the turn of the 2000s relocated to Germany and effectively disappeared off the radar. But unknown to many of us he was also fighting cancer towards the end of his life. His beautiful playing on a lot of those seminal 1980s Holy Joy recordings (Leaves That Fall In Spring and Nightjars being two of the most outstanding examples among many) will always be treasured.

 

Easy Listening to The Land Of Holy Joy … and further points beyond

From this point, the Band Of Holy Joy were effectively on a creative roll and the momentum continued to gather pace. Still with Exotic Pylon Records, their next offering in early 2014 was another full album of original compositions – plus one cover, but it was however prefaced with a single Wyrd Beautiful Thyme (which was formerly stand-alone, and released a year previous in 2012), a rousing upbeat string and brass-driven number co-written by Brown with drummer William J. Lewington that harks back to the more accessible glory pop of their 1990s and Love Never Fails period.  With its similarly immediate b-side Clean White Shirt (a co-write with Andy Astle), it’s reassuring to know that they were still able to come up with shamelessly great pop singles like this as well as the more cerebral and esoteric material whenever they so desired.

With an album title such as Easy Listening (2014), it’s simple to make assumptions about what exactly that would entail. Perhaps, when succeeding the two-volume and more consciously experimental ventures of City Of Tales, anything would be ‘easy listening’ by comparison, but when proceedings begin with the relatively calm and peaceful Will These Things See You Right (now a full length song instead of the incomplete sketch on City Of Tales), a slow burner that rises to the almost persuasive chorus of the title, you sense that on this album, melodies are once again more in abundance, even if subject matters remain resolutely bleak.

It’s also their first album after the departure of former key guitarist and songwriter Andy Astle, now superseded in that area by the multi-instrumental nous of James Stephen Finn, who has since commanded an increasing ratio of the songwriting and arrangement duties. Other new members Conor Harrington (bass), Kacper Ziemianin (electronics) and Peter Smith (organ, sax, percussion) now augment the core line up.

 

The beautiful lament I Have Travelled On The Buses Late At Night (one of the few proper songs on previous release City Of Tales) is now in a more fleshed-out widescreen version with added drums, piano and strings but loses none of its melancholy gravitas in this new incarnation. Two tracks in and we are witness to a more full band sound than even the previous two studio albums – lush though they undoubtedly were.

There’s a song dedicated to the hard living (and hedonistic) legacy of football legend George Best – When A Gift Is A Curse, the appearance of previous 2012 single now re-titled simply as Weird Beautiful Time, and, in Open The Door To Your Heart, a faithfully rendered cover version of US R’n’B soul legend Darrell Banks’ 1967 classic. Its celebratory and decidedly uptempo Northern Soul stomp is a surprising diversion and a welcome injection of heartwarming spirituality, and if anything serves as a logical counterpoint to the similarly string-drenched Weird Beautiful Time and thus makes more sense of the latter’s inclusion on here.

The narrative of a unjustified fatality* that graces There Was A Fall / The Fall is now completely re-strung from its former incarnation on City Of Tales – instead now half spoken and mostly sung by Johny amid creeping guitar figures and rolling percussion, adding a modicum of tension to the story which duly explodes after three minutes into a massed climax of screams, percussive noise and free-form jazz chaos before the dust settles again.

*based on the true coroner’s report of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, who was victim of an unprovoked coshing by a Met Police officer who assumed he was a protestor at the G20 summit in 2009 (he wasn’t: he was an innocent who got caught up in the melee just walking home, and thus unlawfully killed by his head injury, inevitably leading to a cover-up from the fuzz).

Two eight-and-a-half minute epics close each half. The first, Voyage And Disease, Luck And Mystery – co-written with new bassist Conor Harrington – is effectively a story of lives spent living on the edge condensed into song, which could of course be autobiographical and self-referencing. The second, the beautifully reflective A Train Ride To Another Place (the second Finn/Brown co-write after Buses Late At Night) seems to adopt another mode of transport as a backdrop to an understated and truly touching ode of love and aching desire (once again it could be about the author and his own partner), but also laced with undercurrents of sadness, something which perhaps only Jarvis Cocker could pull off with similar style and aplomb.

Nevertheless, Johny’s unexpected holler of ‘the train’s leaving now so COME ON!’ adds a touch of romantic humour towards the song’s excited conclusion and you’re left contemplating that once again, the Band Of Holy Joy have delivered another exceptionally affecting clutch of new songs that are more than a match for the already astonishing accomplishments that they have thus far managed.

 

Later in 2014 – towards the end of September – the Band Of Holy Joy made a welcome return to live action including a date in Manchester, and this author was all too eager to rekindle his connections with them and Johny after more than 22 years’ absence. The review of the show they played at the Tiger Lounge in the city was my first ever written contribution for Louder Than War (how time flies when you’re having fun eh?) and can be read here.

Two years on in October 2016, the Band Of Holy Joy returned again, this time as part of a nifty four-band ‘Death To Trad Rock’ package at the city’s Soup Kitchen venue, featuring Eton Crop, Minny Pops and headlined by their current Tiny Global Productions labelmates, Birmingham’s equally venerable and legendary Nightingales. Both shows were of course ecstatically received by the faithful and felt like celebrations of past and present. LTW comrade John Robb’s account of that star-studded night can be found here.

 

A further slight shift in band personnel beckoned as Conor Harrington was replaced by Mark Beazley (of the ambient instrumental band Rothko) on bass, Chris Brierley was also now a contributing member instead of full time, whilst Kacper Ziemianin’s place was now taken by Howard Jacques on melodica.

Prefaced and supported by two download only singles The Land Of Holy Joy and A Place Called Home, the twelfth Band of Holy Joy studio album (counting mini-albums, but not compilations or unofficial releases) arrived the following year, but with the new recordings now issued on Edinburgh-based indie label Stereogram records. As a measure of just how quirky and idiosyncratic the group’s modus operandi is, the full album title is actually revealed as A Night Of Word And Blood Sparked Under Fire And Stars A Petrol Smear The Concrete Tear Fuck Yeah Brutalism Still Dreaming In The Land Of Holy Joy.

As with previous ventures (it follows on directly from the trajectory mapped out by How To Kill A Butterfly, The North Is Another Land and Easy Listening – in particular the darker subjects on the latter), The Land Of Holy Joy (2015) once again delves into the nitty gritty of this current dysfunctional messed up nation and its increasingly disheartening slide towards a socially-engineered Dystopia, overseen by narcissists and megalomaniacs and leaving the general populace fighting among themselves. Ironic or sardonic the album title may well be, but Johny’s songs always seem to hold a mirror to the minutiae of the despairing and suffering legions at large yet still have the wherewithal and strength of spirit and resolve to ultimately rise above all the maudlin piteousness and find release in hedonistic celebration and just letting oneself go despite everything (the latter scenario best encapsulated here on the epic album closer I’m Crass Harry).

Many songs now have a noticeably funkier undertow, thanks in part to main guitarist James Stephen Finn’s nifty parts, which range from pleasantly liquid phrases to a  Postcard-influenced clipped punk-funk jangle which gives songs a wonderful kick and bounce. The eastern motif that runs through the title track quickly becomes an earworm as Johny ruminates on a forbidding and unforgiving world, traversing cityscapes of ‘sleaze and scandal’, ‘love of hatred’ and ‘thrill of fear’, in his quest to find escapism through being in more hospitable surroundings and thus maybe seek a utopia at the end of it. In some ways it’s almost a summation of the themes that dominated much of How To Kill A Butterfly – this song could be that entire album in redux – but it can also equally be interpreted as coming from those who seek to settle in new countries (to escape war or adversity) only to be victim to all of the potential pitfalls and setbacks that the new ‘promised land’ may harbour in store.

Listen to The Land Of Holy Joy tracks on YouTube:

The lead single Isn’t That Just The Life brandishes a guitar intro that is almost a dead ringer for The Cure but it’s an upbeat sounding track that betrays its first person account (delivered from a battle-hardened female’s point of view) about staying resolute and tough despite all of the soul sapping shit that life has thrown at her. Various grim scenarios pepper the narrative: a teenager stabbed on a bus, a troll of Kate and Gerry McCann found dead in a hotel room, a mother spiking her daughters’ drinks with acid, but her defiance remains clear: she will valiantly fight on regardless, as survival and not giving in is clearly what matters.

Gender roles then switch to focus on the machismo of males and how so many of them are conditioned to rely on criminality, violence and hatred as a means to an end (Men Who Display A Different Kind Of Pain) whilst being sensitive is seen as effeminate, but then the narrator finds that rehabilitating oneself into learning how to be loving and tender becomes the biggest act of courage of them all. All this is played out against a pleasant Smiths-meets-Orange Juice post-punk shimmy with Finn’s languid guitar and unobtrusive organ from Smith making for perhaps one of the most ear-friendly melodies on the album.

The album’s two centrepieces follow next. Violent Drunken Strangers – a more fully formed realisation of the skeletal track that appeared on City Of Tales under the title Empty Purse Found In Hotel Lobby (thus creating a completely new track but with the same chordal undercarriage). Now the focus turns to the seedy world of sexual exploitation, enforced prostitution and the degradation and nastiness that entails, but again the backing is once more a leisurely uptempo punk-funk stroll that belies the sheer heaviness of the subject matter. Discredited Art Form takes a sardonic look at the preceding track and how it came to be, a cleverly scripted verse which culminates in a beautiful jazzy passage (with accordion and trombone) which bursts in straight after the surreal black humoured pay-off line about ‘waking up in A&E with both eyes missing’. There’s a real deft lightness of touch on all of the tracks so far in their execution – the music for once is more subtle and even sedate and never as viscerally punishing as on some previous albums.

The downtempo and almost relaxed A Place Called Home – the album’s other single* – similarly enchants with its yearning for tranquil domesticity, courtesy of angelic support from Morton Valence’s Anne Gilpin on backing vocals, and showcases another quite gorgeous trombone and violin break between the verses. Nevertheless, the song’s sentiments are once again built upon a bedrock of irony (finding a ‘place called home’ as per his wishes when the property market fuelled by mass gentrification has become unaffordable to most), and Johny imparts wise words of advice in a monologue halfway through about staying on the straight and narrow whilst doling out levity in his ‘I can soon switch to some bad attitude’ pay-off …. but then the words of the refrain ring out again and everything touches perfectly together: ‘A place called home / that I can call my own / where I can be alone / surrounded by millions of strangers.’ Tenderly performed, and yet concealing much righteous anger. Just sublime.

*albeit it was a slightly shorter as well as different recording and arrangement to this album version when released a couple of months earlier.

I’m Crass Harry closes the album on a defiant note – the tale of an old curmudgeon who’s seen better days but refuses to lie down quietly (‘I’m living proof of those who live in hope / whose spirit just won’t get broke’) and indignantly revels in his decrepitude, brandishing it as a valedictory ‘fuck you’ gesture to those who want to write him off. He dismissively cites the origin of his name as not even being a fan of Crass or even the Cockney Rejects, but declaring a partiality to Subway Sect instead. He may have beaten cancer but finally ends up in a residential support home yet still has that indomitable and irrepressible spirit to raise hell…. At this proclamation, the tempo suddenly lurches into top gear, the band fly out of the traps and the whole thing screams into a frenzied full throttle noisy climax that is as exhilarating as it is hilarious…..It’s clear that the old punk in Harry refuses to lie down so back he storms again!

And what a note to end the album on: just when you thought the relatively sedate and measured pace of everything was going to be the norm, the Band Of Holy Joy proceed to astonish and thrill with such reckless abandon just when you least expect it. Maybe, ultimately, whilst many of us long for that elusive Utopian ‘Land Of Holy Joy’ that we all dearly wish would exist, it always invariably lies tantalisingly out of reach, like chasing after rainbows or seeing those inverted mirages shimmering enticingly on the horizon…until we realise that (as Johny has astutely touched upon on so many occasions already) the only Utopia we will ever find is one that encompasses a sense of peace, tranquility and serenity found inside our own heads and hearts – ultimately untainted, undiminished and untrammelled by whatever the fuck real life hurls at it.

| “‘Land of Holy Joy’ is more adventurous musically than anything The Smiths have recorded, Brown’s humane, intelligent lyrics are far removed from the arrested adolescent petulance of Morrissey.” 
Gus Ironside, Is This Music? (BOHJ review 2015)

2016 did not see a new studio album as such but once again there was yet further Band Of Holy Joy output: this time another anthologised collection of all of the early cassette tape recordings that the band issued between 1983 and 1986 (with a whole slew of previously unheard extras and out-takes aplenty). This time around the decision was made to release them for the first time on vinyl only in an exquisitely luxuriant triple LP (and bonus 7″) hardbound box set complete with comprehensive 48-page book detailing the genesis of the band, the conception of these recordings and archival process of their restoration.

It was a true labour of love and the entire package was issued by a German independent label specialising in these box sets, Vinyl-On-Demand. Taking the title from one of the early cassettes (More) Favourite Fairy Tales For Juvenile Delinquents (2016), the box set was limited to just 333 copies and quickly sold out its initial run. All of these tracks were of course the work of the very earliest incarnation of the Band Of Holy Joy before their first official recordings were issued on Flim Flam Recordings, and a number of them were previously released as part of the double cassette package by Exotic Pylon (City Of Tales Volume 1).

This collection finally brings together all of these earliest recordings – numbering fifty tracks in total – showcasing the band at their most uncompromising, featuring alternative takes, early demos and different mixes of a few songs that appear more than once. Nevertheless, it is a truly fascinating and in depth document tracing the development of a nascent collective who even back then were a completely unique entity to everybody else that was around at the time.

A plethora of hand-made, self-released artefacts

Even allowing for the fact that the Band Of Holy Joy had now been extant for far longer than their initial 1983-1993 incarnation, I was still as pleasantly surprised as any to see that, after 2014’s Easy Listening and 2015’s The Land Of Holy Joy albums, they were as prolific and restless in their boundless creativity as ever – with all of those aforementioned extracurricular projects (twice weekly radio shows, song plays, art exhibitions, multi-media collaborations etc) coupled with a steady – if insanely prodigious – schedule of releases both official and self-financed.

These self-released items, usually limited to between 50 – 70 copies of each, all took the form of double CD-Rs with hand-made packaging from Johny Brown and were issued at regular intervals (often at least two releases a year – but sometimes even three or four appeared within the space of 12 months).  The first of these was An Atlas Of Spatial Practice (Jan 2016), which features on CD1 a series of experimental pieces and mostly instrumentals whilst CD2 was of more historic interest, being effectively a lost BOHJ album recorded in the period between Positively Spooked and Tracksuit Vendetta which was never previously heard or released, probably due to things being in a state of record label-less limbo (Rough Trade having collapsed by late 1991).

The second of these was Crime And Custom In Savage Society (Jun 2016) of which CD1 featured a live show recorded in Berlin and CD2 was various oddments and alternative unreleased versions of older songs. The third which followed just three months later, A Plain Cookerybook For The Working Classes, features on CD1 songs from the Tracksuit Vendetta era in different drum-machine driven incarnations and, on CD2, a new soundscape collage created by James Stephen Finn. A fourth release followed mere weeks later, Fruits And Flowers For Particular People – which had a new suite of orchestral compositions and cut-up sound collages on CD1 and an intense live performance recorded in 1987 in Paris on CD2.

Release number five followed in spring 2017, A Consumer’s Guide To Prescribed Magics, which featured on CD1 alternative recordings of Positively Spooked album tracks plus a few rare radio sessions, whilst CD2 contained alternative re-imaginings of tracks from Manic Magic Majestic. This was the only self-made release of 2017 as the Band Of Holy Joy were readying their next album for release later that year.

The main purpose of these self-released interim items was to finance the recording  of the main Band Of Holy Joy albums proper, and as such was a very astute bit of homegrown cottage-industry practice. With the band being so prolific and endlessly creative, this was a truly resourceful way of keeping the stream of new output flowing and sharing new music with fans at the earliest opportunity.

As it transpires, their next few releases will truly, emphatically, strengthen and solidify their status, and my unreserved opinion, as quite possibly one of the most superlatively original and downright exceptional groups we have ever been blessed with.

Part Four to follow next.   

all words written by Martin Gray

photo montages of How To Kill A Butterfly, The North Is Another Land and City Of Tales Vol. 1 & 2 taken from the author’s own CD collection

other articles by Martin can be found on his profile

 

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Band Of Holy Joy back catalogue is available on Bandcamp

A brand new solo album by JOHNY BROWN  Dream A Memory of Home was released by Skill on 24 December 2026