Billy Mahonie is one of the great post-rock bands. The instrumental four-piece, whose intense, surprising improvisational variations make their live shows among the most musically spectacular around, returned last year with Field Of Heads, their first new LP since 2009 – and their first with the original line-up since What Becomes Before in 2001.
It was worth the wait. Gavin Baker, Howard Monk, Hywell Dinsdale and Kevin Penney might live in disparate countries these days, but they’ve found a way to make new music and carve out time to head out on tour. No mean feat for a band that lives in Norway, Denmark and across the UK.
New album Field of Heads was recorded at Church Studios, owned by top producer Paul Epworth. The Oscar, Grammy and Brit Award-winning producer and songwriter, who has worked with everyone from Adele to U2, Stormzy to the Stone Roses, Coldplay and Paul McCartney to The Futureheads and Florence and The Machine, has a long history with the band, having first clambered aboard their tour van and done their live sound back in 1999. “Their ideas and chemistry haven’t diminished one iota,” says Epworth.
And Billy Mahonie are returning to a different musical world. This is now a world in which their post-rock contemporaries, Mogwai, have No. 1 albums. So hopes are high as they set out on the road. Here’s the inside story of their unlikely comeback…
When you started out, did you feel part of a scene?
Gavin Baker: There were bands in London when we started, not all of them post-rock, but there was a scene of friends in bands. We would watch each other play: Rothko, Seafood, The Clientele, Tiny Too, Peachfuzz, Geiger Counter, Econoline. Mostly relatively small bands, but it was a friendly, supportive scene. We obviously listened to and were influenced by bigger post-rock bands. But people liked us, it was a lovely time.
Howard Monk: I played in The Clientele also (and had to leave them too), and there was a bit of a north/east London post-rock scene alongside that Camden Indie scene. It was all kind of around Fierce Panda.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertisement
Kevin Penney: We were at the back end of Britpop at the time. I remember Mogwai had their ‘Blur are Shite’ t-shirts. We were very different bands, the main thing we had in common was that it was guitar, bass and drums and we were instrumental. They were about the long, slow build, and we were a bit more angular.
What are your main memories of the band’s first incarnation and arriving at your sound?
GB: When the four of us came together, it was a joy. Howard and I formed the band in mid-1997. I had a few riffs that I wanted to play in an instrumental band, and they found no outlet in the band I was then playing in. But when we started working on these ideas with Kev and Hywell, it gelled immediately. Not being compelled to make music that would work for vocalists enabled us to pretty much do what we wanted.
HM: We’d been looking to find a singer then Gav made me this tape with Tortoise on one side and Rachel’s Handwriting LP on the other. I called him and said we don’t need to find a singer.
KP: Gavin made me the most amazing compilation tape, too. When you’re a huge music fan and someone makes you a tape full of stuff you’ve never heard, it’s the best. All the Chicago stuff – bands like Tortoise and The Denison/Kimball Trio and Bundy K Brown. Then we started playing in the usual haunts – the Barfly, the Dublin Castle, the Bull and Gate – all of the great independent venues. We started to get some interest and met Simon Williams from Fierce Panda. He was an omnipresent figure in Camden.
Paul Epworth: I first met the Billy Mahonie guys in 1999 when I was doing sound for another band called Geiger Counter, whose album was the first thing I ever produced back in 1994. They were super instrumental math rock and were supporting Billy Mahonie at Brighton Pavilion. Billy Mahonie were a much deeper and more atmospheric band and I was into many of their references. They contacted me months later to ask if I could fill in for their sound man for a few dates, but we ended up touring for a couple of years on and off. Some of my best memories are in the back of a splitter van, doing 11 countries in 28 days with them.
Billy Mahonie in a very rare rehearsal. Image: Billy Mahonie
KP: We were playing most nights. But in the middle of one tour, we had a week hanging out with Mouse on Mars at their studio in Düsseldorf and spent a week recording. We had this tune we’d been working on that was a four-to-the-floor disco tune. We didn’t have a title for it. It became Dusseldorf. It was angular and clever – but not too clever, you know? Then people started latching on to it live. That felt like a breakthrough. Then we got signed to Too Pure and recorded our debut album.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
PE: Their songs were so intricate and carefully put together without it ever feeling over constructed. There was a lot of improvisation amongst the detail and Gav particularly could switch from professorial to wild guitar in the space of a middle eight. We all had a shared love of Slint, Miles Davis and Captain Beefheart.
What happened in the end?
KP: So 2002 was the last time we made music together with this lineup, yeah and but we played odd shows.
GB: The lineup changed in 2002,and we were without Hywell and Kev. This changed the band – still good but different. Then I moved away from the UK. We took a pause but reunited for the odd show, but in the UK and in Norway, where I now live. Howard and I recorded another album in 2008. Kev joined Seafood. Hywell moved to Denmark. So, distance creates difficulties. But we never ‘stopped’ as such, just didn’t have time! We got older, had families, and played in other bands.
HM: It was stressful and emotional. It was not going the way each of us wanted it to, so I just threw in the towel in a way. We did carry on with a couple of other fine dudes, but I don’t think it’s inappropriate to say that the exciting lineup is the original four of us that are making music now. We never fell out. I had this romantic idea that we were like a family and would always be going. In a way, it is now. That’s really cool and a great privilege.
What was the catalyst for the comeback?
GB: We had the time and a generous offer of studio time from our old friend, hotshot producer Paul Epworth! It is always lovely to be with Howard, Kev and Hywell. We are best friends, we just pick up where we left off. We had some new ideas for new music and found it was possible.
HM: We had always been doing the very odd show, and they were always kind of Greatest Hits gigs. So we said we’d only do that again if it was new stuff. Gav and Kev started sending things around and we made part one over a weekend in 2019 and the other after Covid, so prob 2021.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
How did you manage to rehearse when you all live so far away?
GB: Ha! We don’t! We work individually and get familiar with the material, then come together for a day or two before a gig to make sure it works. Three of us have got together in Denmark and rehearsed at Hywell’s house a few times to. We tried playing together online but then the latency was too much.
KP: The thing that surprised me is how intuitively we all just lock back in again. And I’ve never had that with any of the musicians I’ve ever played with. It’s like putting on an old jacket – but a dangerous jacket, where the sleeves might fall off at any moment.
And now an album and a new tour – exciting times for Billy Mahonie…
GB: We all agreed we wanted to make a new record. It felt like we had to put out new music in order to justify playing new shows. We were writing and it was good. Probably me and Kev pushed it forward most, I had demanded recording a new album by the time I was 50!
KP: The first time we heard a lot of these songs properly played as a band was the day we actually had to record them. We all knew our bits that we had to do, we had to bring to the room, and then we all got together, and then we played. And it would take us about four hours between first playing the song together as a continuous piece with everybody in the same room, to them being ready to go for takes.
GB: Parts developed over time, for instance, I might have an idea, I play that the Kev, he adds a guitar part, then I respond and change part of my initial idea and have something new which fits with his part. Gradually, a song would morph into being. Recording and releasing the new album felt wonderful, We was very proud.
KP: Gavin is a librarian not only by trade, but by nature. So he has recorded pretty much every rehearsal we’ve ever done and has everything filed, cataloged and named. When we were trying to think up a kind of like some new things to go through, he threw out a few brand new ideas, but also some recordings of jams from early 2000. He did us five CDs full of stuff we never did anything with. One that I latched on to heavily became Dry Season.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
PE: One of the reasons I wanted a studio like the Church was to be able to help make records for artists with great ideas that often don’t have access to a space like that or the equipment that’s in there. Giving that band a space to record in a bigger environment, all playing in the same room together, allowed them to flourish in ways they hadn’t before. Their ideas and chemistry haven’t diminished one iota. It’s a classic story that a band from the UK who might have reached seminal levels if only they had been from Chicago. Now is an opportunity to give them their dues and the credit they deserve.
HM: I like that it is a very unashamedly guitar album. Tim from Transgressive said it feels like a perfect follow on from What Becomes Before, which I like.
PE: Time hasn’t sanded the edges off their music, and I think that the individuality of indie artists who reached a certain level is suddenly more relevant than ever for the kids looking to dig around DSPs for inspiration.
HM: We have such fun live. Sometimes it gets too chaotic, but I have been feeling good about practising quite a lot more of the rudiments and specific parts. I hope not to be the one who is rubbish!
KP: I want to see where the new songs start to evolve when we play them live more. The record is a snapshot. And these songs have to have a life beyond that, you know?
Is this post-post rock?
GB: How do you define post-rock?! I always called instrumental rock music. If one thinks post-rock involves the deconstruction and then reconstruction of rock music to make something which isn’t standard rock music, then maybe!
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Billy Mahonie are on tour now – playing Sheffield (March 28), Atherton (March 29), Halifax (March 30), North Shields (March 31), Glasgow (April 1), Oxford (April 2), Brighton (April 3), Winchester (April 4), Frome (April 5), London (April 6). Billy Mahonie’s Peel Sessions from 1999 and 2001 are out this autumn on vinyl and CD.
