You’re hurrying home. Maybe it’s raining slightly. Maybe you’ve been at work. Against the darkening sky, you start to notice the lights from residential windows scattered in squares up the sides of the tall buildings you trudge between, like some anarchic deconstructed chessboard. You notice people moving in their apartments. Maybe a couple is silently arguing, maybe a newborn child is silently wailing against the attempts of its caregivers to get it down for the night. An old man sits in silence. You can’t help but conjure a narrative from your witnessed snatches of these other people’s lives. Maybe this week it’s a colorful soap opera, or maybe this week it’s a cooler affair, more akin to the exaggerated aloofness of some 70s French art house film you watch in silence at an afters than a telenovela you hear through your walls.
Debut long play Bats Feet For A Widow from Bristol based jazz-infused no-wave act Bingo Fury seems to exist in both of the states described above. Across its length you’re seemingly invited in but simultaneously kept distant, as if to observe but not participate. It’s not immediately clear if the listener briefly observes the band in operation, like some beautiful unknowable clockwork, or if the band’s operation is itself fed by the glimpses it gets of its listeners. Perhaps it’s both, and Bats Feet displays some kind of feedback loop of observation and alienation – the people in the windows and the protagonist in the street united in symbiosis.
This feeling is fed by a decidedly noir-leaning musical palette. Thick pianos, mournful cornet wails, vocals almost lethargic but somehow still bursting with life and personality – it all sums to a mental image of neon signs reflecting in rain-slicked streets, shuffling trenchcoated figures, gin-soaked detectives smoking indoors at midnight. The record hints at a nocturnal sensibility in the sparser arrangements – brief and restless opener ‘Carolina’s Theme’ and mid-point palette cleansing instrumental ‘Never Gonna Be A Dead Man’ come to mind here – but inhabits a more frenzied, decidedly urban state in the kinetic density of ‘Power Drill’ and ‘I’ll Be Mountains’, the rising screeches and cacophonous brass in the latter implying the shriek of underground trains and the blaring horns of immobile traffic.
Where the true cinema implied by a term like “noirish” enters the frame is in the record’s mysterious lyricism. Opaque but not impenetrable, you’re invited to speculate but given little direction as to any universal truth. “Deceit rings out over digitised mountains”, “I chase myself through perverted crosshairs”, “I left the fire burning to meet you at Jaguar Shoes”, “the full-contact smoker’s lounge” – a rich and surreal world is suggested, the power of the imagery at face value enough to compose images in the mind’s eye arresting enough to linger.. The more unreal aspect is tempered and reified by a fondness for street names, adding to a whiplash juxtaposition of the recognisable and the bizarre and perhaps the keenest example of the push-pull effect described above.
This unsettling feeling of observing and of being observed, the polarity unclear and unimportant, radiates from the Hopper-esque near-voyeurism of the album’s sleeve like the astigmatic aura of passing car headlights. Bandleader Jack Ogborne, deep in thought, the only one at a table set for eight, captured at night from the other side of a window. When Bats Feet For A Widow ends, the mild unreality with which it conducted itself remains for a while, to linger like the curl of smoke and the burning smell a candle leaves for a minute or two after it’s been extinguished. The carefully managed tension between the chaos and order of its melodies, transmitted by the spirit of its experimentation and invention, shimmers for a while like streetlights in the fog.
I caught up with Jack as he made his way to six-a-side one evening to have a quick chat about the record’s production and the band’s next steps.
Debut single 2021, EP 2022, record this year, with a tour or two and sets at End of the Road and Green Man, radio support from 6 Music – it’s been quite the three years. Has it felt like a gradual progression or did it all seem to happen at once?
It’s kind of a funny one. Bingo Fury is fronted by me, but I’ve been in a band with Meg and Henry (who play bass and drums in the live band) since we were about 15 so Bingo Fury is in a way a progression of that same band, just with revolving members surrounding that core.
It feels like we’ve been doing this band for 10 years so in that way it feels like a gradual thing, but obviously it doesn’t come across like that to other people because the name is a couple of years old and the songs are new. To me it feels like the project that all previous projects have led up to.
A culmination of a gestation, to use two words that are very pretentious in this context.
Yeah.
Your 2022 EP, Mercy’s Cut, felt almost consciously un-melodic, but the record seems to have shifted into more melodic climes. What do you think it was that prompted the development in this direction?
I still enjoy dissonant atonal music, but it particularly resonated with me when I was making music throughout my late teens and right at the start of my twenties. I think it resonated with my general internal state a little bit more. It doesn’t feel like I’ve thought about it too hard. Certain sounds are pleasing to you, and before, dissonance was more pleasing. Now I guess it feels like I’m trying to provoke intense feelings in the same way that dissonant and angular music does quite immediately, but using different means and that being a challenge to myself.
I often feel like you’re more rewarded for the thought that you put into creating that immediate feeling without just going straight for dissonance. It has more staying power as well.
Yeah, I’d agree with that. I mean, it was definitely a conscious thing with this album. Thinking about experimental music as a whole and just finding dissonance and atonality is almost a bit of a cop out for trying to provoke a reaction. It’s something a lot of people do, and some people work in those terms and do it incredibly mindfully and skillfully. But a lot of the time as well people do it in a way that feels just a bit flat. I don’t know.
It’s very zeitgeisty at the moment as well.
Yeah. I hadn’t really thought about that so much, but that is true. It just felt like while I was drawing from experimental music for this record, I also sought something kind of joyful and beautiful. I don’t know. I was listening to a lot of Laurie Anderson and Robert Wyatt, and I think they both do a really good job making me feel pushed and like they’re throwing me into a very unusual landscape, but doing so with quite uplifting and empowering means.
How tense was the relationship between improvisation and more rigid composition?
I think it’s interesting. I see why people pick out the improvisation thing. I guess Harry Furniss in particular contributes to that element of the sound because his cornet playing is off-the-cuff and not premeditated.
My main interest is in the craft and the skill of songwriting. In taking things away at the right moment, or finding ways to make the listener vulnerable in some kind of way, or putting them in a kind of vulnerable place through the structure and the way the songs are formed.
I’m very conscious of where those moments happen and it’s a really powerful tool to be able to deploy members of the band in the right way. It’s finding the right moments to tee them up with a certain line or with a certain section of a song that comes out of nowhere and then you just let them do their thing. There’s a skill in knowing the best, most effective place to deploy that.
So you’re sort of guiding the improvisation with a sort of “invisible hand of the market” situation.
Yeah, there’s a structure to it. It’s considered where those improvised points happen and generally speaking, there is a confined length of time. It’s not like, “oh, okay, we’ll just jam this until it finishes”. Occasionally that’s the case, but more often than not I only want to hear that thing for a certain amount of time. So I will give whoever it is only a certain amount of time or only a section to improvise with so that the rest of the song makes sense. So I’ve always got that bigger picture view on it, for sure.
The album was recorded in a church and there’s no artificial reverbs, which I think is mental. It’s rich with all these acoustic experiments and like these Foley-esque bits of ear candy. Did you set out with the intention to experiment with this technique, or was this more of a reactive process rather than a proactive one?
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think in making a record, that instinctive reaction is such an important part of what shapes the individuality of a recording. If you’re reacting instinctively, then what gives something character is just a series of decisions you’ve made. Having a certain amount of unpredictability means that you’re able to react to the recording situation in real time and imprint those decisions which shape the character of it.
I think it’s important to keep it open, but there’s definitely a balance, because the preparation is important. You have to tee yourself up in a way where when you are in that situation, you have the space and the ability to make decisions on the fly but you have to have the means to make the decisions when you’re there, I guess. You have to bring certain things, or make certain decisions about what the arrangement’s going to be, or whatever, so that you are making decisions but it’s within a certain palette that you’ve already decided on. So, yeah, it’s kind of a bit of both.
You’re across the whole brief of the project, so you’re everywhere – in the composition and the performance and the engineering of the whole thing. Is limitation vital to your creative process as a whole, or are there areas where you’re more comfortable with accepting affordances?
Limitation’s kind of everything for me. I think such a huge part of the skill is working out or understanding where the most useful places to apply limitations are, because some limitations can be stupid and unpractical and unproductive, but some limitations can spark ideas that you wouldn’t have come up with otherwise.
An example is making the record in a church. That was in itself was a limitation, because you’re not in a studio, so you’re working with what you’ve got and with the space. You’re forced to explore this space that has never been explored before in a recording context.
I think that that’s what’s important for making a record exciting. You want to hear the exploration there.. With this one, we went in with the songs maybe 70 or 80% done, and I think you can hear us exploring these songs and try desperately to understand them while we’re putting them down. It adds this sense of urgency that’s almost subliminal. When I hear it, I can just hear us experimenting and trying to get our heads around ideas that feel larger than us. But yeah, I don’t know, I feel like I went off-piste there.
It’s accepted and encouraged, don’t you worry. The project is often described as “noirish”. How important is this kind of cinematic language in understanding your work?
I was thinking about this recently. I think it’s part of the reason why lyrics are such a huge thing for me and not just like my own work. When I listen to other music, even if I think the music’s amazing, if the lyrics are shit, I probably won’t listen to it. It’s like at least 70% of the enjoyment. If a song’s encouraging you to visualize something while you’re listening to it, it has added this extra plane of kind of stimulation and engagement and that makes the music so much more enjoyable.
The cinematic angle is important because songs are meant to encourage you to function and exist in some kind of romanticized environment or world, or to take you somewhere more interesting for a bit. They’re supposed to cherry pick those real, intense, special moments.
What are the ways in which you feel that your work engages with your religious background?
Only in the sense that I try to do a kind of balanced reflection of what my experience is. I try to incorporate variety into my subject matter, which are the things that I think about in my head, and I guess I think about religion a lot.
Someone was speaking to me recently about how everyone’s trying to connect to their childhood, and religion is something that was a huge part of my life until I was 15. Until more recently I wouldn’t read, so my main literary reference – the only book that I really knew – was the Bible. I guess that feeds into the lyrics. It’s not written, it’s not conscious, it’s just part of my DNA. So I guess by default, it comes through in the music, because I hope my songwriting is a reflection of my experience.
You’ve got this tour with Folly Group coming up. How do you feel about taking the record on the road?
Yeah, I feel good. Those are going to be fun shows. I really love the guys. I actually only know a couple of them, but they’re really sweet, so it’ll be fun to hang out with them. I’m trying to get some new songs together so we can play those and keep it fresh for us. I’m feeling good, excited to get back out. Yeah, man.
Where did the name Bingo Fury come from?
Well, the honest answer is that I just woke up with it on my phone this morning after going out the night before. It was a lyric in a song before the name of the project. But what I liked about it was that it was like a combination of Billy Fury and Bongo Fury, Bongo Fury being the Captain Beefheart & Frank Zappa album, and Billy Fury being the 50s crooner. I felt like the project’s kind of like a middle ground between those two things.
Words: Ed Hambly // Photos: Holly De Looze
‘Bats Feet For A Widow’ is out now via state51. Stream or download the album via Bandcamp.