Billy Nomates on her MS diagnosis, nearly quitting music and why online trolls only make her stronger

Life has hit Tor Maries hard over the last couple of years. Better known by her stage name Billy Nomates, the Leicester-raised, Bristol-based post-punk singer and songwriter came close to quitting music after being targeted with vicious online abuse following a performance at Glastonbury in June 2023. Some months later, she lost her father to Parkinson’s disease.

She somehow rallied from both blows to make Metalhorse, a thrilling album about life’s wild ride framed in the imagery of a crumbling fairground. It features some of Maries’ strongest songs to date, including a showstopping duet with her hero Hugh Cornwell from The Stranglers. Then, six months ago, she was sucker-punched again, this time with a multiple sclerosis diagnosis.

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“Yeah, it’s a bit of a shit hand,” says Maries with a smile and a moment of disarming levity, after I remark that it seems to take a lot to knock her down. “I’m still a mule,” she adds. Speaking over Zoom from her Bristol kitchen, she’s fierce, funny, determined and resilient, with hair almost as big as her energy. The toughest of times can reveal the greatest moments of clarity. For Maries, it left her certain that she is on the right path as a musician, no matter how hard events beyond her control might have threatened to push her off it.

Out of a period of depression, she was first inspired to start writing and performing in her 20s after seeing a gig by Sleaford Mods (with whom she later collaborated, on the Nottingham duo’s 2021 single Mork n Mindy). Her nom-de-plume Billy Nomates derived from an insult thrown at her when she turned up at a gig on her own. It captures a fiercely independent streak that runs through everything she does. Especially her live shows, which she performs alone, with only a pre-recorded backing track for company. Maries likens it to a “base jump”, because it can be so daunting and exhilarating.

Released by Invada Records in 2020, the label run by Geoff Barrow from Bristol trip-hop legends Portishead, Billy Nomates’ self-titled debut album of sparse, caustic post-punk songs delivered in a deadpan speak-sung vocal was critically acclaimed, as was its follow-up, 2023’s Cacti. Then everything started to go wrong. 

It’s unclear exactly what incensed internet trolls so much about Maries’ performance at Glastonbury when it was broadcast to millions via the BBC, that they felt compelled to react with appalling slurs on social media, some of them violently misogynistic. Something about a raw and unfiltered female singer bounding around barefoot, boldly owning a huge stage single-handed, seemed too much for tiny minds to bear.

The insults were absurd, yet the experience wounded Maries deeply, to the extent that she made the BBC take the footage off iPlayer and vowed never to perform live again. “You wouldn’t stay in a workplace that did this to you,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. “Why should I.”

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The hurt has receded, but anger remains. “This is my job,” Maries reasons. “The idea of walking into an office and for somebody to be like, ‘Somebody shoot this white trash’ and broadcast it around the world with your picture. I mean, you’d fucking lose your job on the spot. But we’ve normalised it. We go ‘Oh, you signed up for this.’ And you’re like, ‘Nah, I don’t know that I did.’”

She downed tools completely for a while, not knowing if she’d ever pick them up again. “I looked at doing a horticulture course,” she reveals. “I was very serious about it. I always wanted an outdoor job.

“But interestingly enough,” she recalls, “as soon as I told myself that I wasn’t going to do it any more, I started writing, because it was almost like the pressure was off.” 

The episode overlapped cruelly with her father’s final months in a care home. In her lowest ebb, music was a friend to her. “It’s my therapist, it’s my parent, it’s my companion,” she says. “I’ve always felt that way about it. I’ve always felt like a bit of a natural loner. It’s comforting to turn to because it’s always there.”

Last summer, days after her dad died, Maries returned to Glastonbury by invitation of one her most famous fans, protest singer Billy Bragg, to headline his Left Field stage as well as duet with the man himself. “I got really pissed up with him,” she laughs. “It was so wicked. Him and his whole family run that stage and they were absolutely beautiful.”

On her next record, Maries vowed to do things differently. For the first time she recruited a live band. “I needed other people in this process,” she explains. “I just thought ‘this is going to be a hard couple of years, and I need some people along for this ride’.” In bassist Mandy Clarke (KT Tunstall, The Go! Team) and drummer Liam Chapman (Rozi Plain, BMX Bandits) she found the perfect creative foils. 

Together with producer James Trevascus they made Metalhorse, mainly at Paco Loco studio in Seville. Mixing signature electronic power pop bangers with sparser, more nuanced blues and folk, the album runs the gamut of emotions from ecstasy to despair. It doesn’t pretend to offer easy answers to life’s hardest questions, merely a voice of experience. “It’s how I feel about the music industry,” says Maries. “It’s how I feel about everything. It’s all just this strange, crumbling, fairground to me. It’s hard to find your place within that.”

Another of life’s unpredictable twists put Hugh Cornwell at Paco Loco while Maries was there. Her father had been an enormous fan of his band, baroque punk hitmakers The Stranglers (their biggest hit “Golden Brown” was played at his funeral). He passed the love on to his daughter. “He was the voice of my childhood,” says Maries. One conversation led to another, and before she knew it, Cornwell was laying down a moody vocal for Metalhorse’s brooding centrepiece “Dark Horse Friend”. “My dad wouldn’t have believed it,” she beams

Her MS diagnosis remains such a recent shock that she’s still processing and adapting. “I’m so lucky to have the diagnosis,” she reflects. “I could have gone years not knowing, and that’s where the damage can be really done. I’m lucky that I have intervention coming and medication that can help. 

“I have no intention of being knocked down,” she adds. “I am quite stubborn.”

Billy Nomates tours the UK, beginning at Electric Bristol on 24 September. 

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