Bellowhead: Broadside – The New Album!

It’s the one you’ve been waiting for folks! Bellowhead‘s brand new album Broadside is due for release on the 15th October 2012 via Navigator Records.

***Newsflash*** Bellowhead’s Broadside is currently no 10 in the mid-week Official Charts, published 17th Oct 2012***

Broadside is a positive spectacular, taking some of the wildest, most joyous and iconic songs in the richly colourful canon of the folk song tradition… and turning them upside down and inside out with the unique sense of drama and theatre, instrumental virtuosity, verve, humour and blind cheek that has seen them spearhead the new folk boom. Their third album Hedonism was the highest-selling independently released traditional folk album of all time, yet Broadside (a title that rather cunningly melds an early form of printed song sharing with an appropriate nautical reference to firepower) is surely set to eclipse it with its thrilling arrangements and non-stop party spirit.

Like their previous album, Broadside is produced by the great John Leckie, who’s previously done wonderful things with the Stone Roses and Radiohead; and he’s now effectively captured all the explosiveness that has established Bellowhead’s undisputed reputation as one of the planet’s most exciting live bands and replicated it in the studio. In this case that studio is Rockfield, where Freddie Mercury once held court.

Jon Boden: “One of the marked differences of the new album is that we’ve started using a lot more backing vocals. This was a feature of the new arrangements long before Rockfield was decided upon, but somehow standing in that room, layering up massive vocal sections, often with very high male falsetto, I couldn’t help feeling that Freddie Mercury might have been looking on approvingly.”

A couple of the tracks are based on songs that initially found common currency in the form of those printed broadsides – the gruesome romp Black Beetle Pies for one and the spooky ballad The Wife Of Usher’s Well – all death, ghosts and “earthly flesh and blood” – for another. Weirdness also abounds with Betsy Baker, a vigorous tale of unrequited love, while some of the most venerated songs of the folk revival – Northumbrian mining song Byker Hill, the Copper Family classic Thousands Or More, the rocking sea shanty Go My Way and The Old Dun Cow – the knockabout tale of being trapped inside a burning pub – are revived in startling ways. They may be familiar, but they’ve never sounded like this before. There’s even an irresistibly bonkers take on Lillibulero, a satirical song set to a tune attributed to Henry Purcell, on which the band flex their considerable muscles and gleefully explore their seemingly bottomless box of magic tricks, emerging with storming vocals, blitzing percussion, rampaging strings and mad, bad brass.

The album will be accompanied by the band’s biggest ever UK tour (6th – 24th Nov 2012), see dates below and visit www.gigantic.com for tickets.

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