I certainly don’t want anyone who likes my music drinking poison.
If there were any justice in the music world, Peter Bruntnell would be selling records by the pound, although the so-called cult hero’s stock has been increasing as the years and albums go by. His thirteenth or fourteenth, depending upon who’s counting, has landed like a punch from Oleksandr Usyk, the Ukrainian boxer who defeated Britain’s Tyson Fury to win the heavyweight title. The songs he’s written over 30-plus years beginning with the band Milkwood, then the Peter Bruntnell Combination are exceptional in so many ways. It’s a body of work that can stand up to any other artist, whether alt-country, pop or whatever term you would hang on him. Eclecticism is his calling card. His songs are richly melodic and superbly lyrical, ingenious to be frank thanks in part to his partnership with Bill Ritchie, whom he met while living for a time in Vancouver, British Columbia. The two men forged a formidable partnership that has turned out so many wonderful songs, cobbled together by sending snippets of melodies and lyrics back and forth over the Internet. The melodies are pure yet developed whereas the lyrics, though sometimes obtuse, reflect a particular narrative, one that asks the listeners to use their brain as well as their ears to fathom. A good example would be ‘Jurassic Parking Lot’ from Bruntnell’s innovative “Normal for Bridgewater” album a quarter century ago. In this song, city planners are using dynamite to take down the little piece of yesterday that managed to remain as the mayor and assorted celebrities light cigars to celebrate the demolition of history.
His acerbic wit was also on full display in the “King of Madrid” album. On ‘By the Time My Head Gets to Phoenix’ his characters have extrapolated on the gains in medicine allowing for the reviving of the dead. The plan is to Fed-X a severed head to a cryogenics firm in Arizona for safekeeping in the deep freeze, much like in the Prime series “Upload” where those facing mortality buy a ticket to the digital afterlife. Never has creepy been so much fun.
Not to take away from these albums or any of the others that followed, but he’s issued a worthy contender for NFB’s excellence in “Houdini and the Sucker Punch,” offering ten tunes that are elegant and expressive. This is one album that should be in everyone’s collection of CDs or LPs or Spotified if you must. He’s gathered together his long time bandmates, Mick Clews, Peter Noone and Dave Little, while adding three players from Son Volt and guitarist James Walbourne of the Pretenders. ‘Yellow Gold’ is where Waldbourne shows his mettle on a tune whose genesis came from a drive Bruntnell took after the conclusion of a tour in America with Son Volt, amazed at the wide-open spaces of Wyoming and Montana. He stopped to buy a book on trappers and the gold rush. You can almost hear the cries of “Pikes Peak or Bust” from the 59ers going for the gold in the Rocky Mountains when he intones: Over the mountains I have roamed A jar and a pick axe in my hand.
In 2012 Bruntnell recorded an album of misfit toys, so to speak, an assortment of songs that were incongruous hence never officially released. Its title was a dedication to his cat, “Ringo Woz Ere.” One of the songs from it at last found its way onto Houdini. ‘Stamps of the World’ represents all the places the narrator wishes he’d be after breaking off with his girlfriend and is a showcase for Eric Heyward’s pedal steel. Stamps of the world A time that we had That’s never returning. Fortunately for those of us who absolutely adore Bruntnell’s songcraft, he has returned with another gem. He talks about his new record, some of those from the past, life in Vancouver, playing in a cover band, learning the bouzouki and a few other odds and ends in the following interview.
Hello, Peter Bruntnell. So, you’re home on a Saturday evening?
Well, it’s only six o’clock, but I’m going to go out and have a pint with my son in a bit. I’ve just been watching him play football, but it’s a quiet night tonight.
Well, we can imagine you being booked. What would you say was your best gig ever?
Probably the one I played at the Albert Hall in London supporting Squeeze years ago because my mom and dad got to see me play there. Or, the first time me and James Walbourne played a series of gigs in the nineties, one at the New Daisy Theatre in Memphis, and then we played Mississippi Nights club in St. Louis for two nights.
Reading from the various albums’ liner notes, you have a recurring lineup of band members that have been with you for a while, some of the regulars are on your new album – Peter Noone, Mick Clews and David Little – along with some added support from members of Son Volt – Jay Farrar and Mark Spencer – not to forget James Walbourne of the Pretenders.
Yeah. They are all good players, the regular crew, and have become like family to me. There’s another bass player that we sometimes use, Danny Williams, but mostly the core of the band, the drums and bass have been the same for quite a few years, even dating back to “Normal for Bridgewater.”
I nearly forgot you used Eric Heyward, too, also of Son Volt, with his melancholic pedal steel.
You see, I needed a pedal steel player and didn’t have one here that could fit in. He was up for doing it so I sent him three songs because you don’t want to overegg it. It worked out really well on the song, ‘Houdini and the Sucker Punch’ because it has that jangly feel to it.
From what I’ve learned, you wrote that song on the bouzouki.
I also wrote ‘The Flying Monk,’ and ‘Yellow Gold’ and ‘Sharks’ on the bouzouki. Those songs are slightly folky but ended up differently with the pedal steel.
You used Heyward first on the “Normal for Bridgewater” album, over a quarter century ago.
Yes, and he’s quite an amazing player, surely one of the best that’s been on my records.
Let’s continue with your new album, “Houdini and the Sucker Punch.” It differs very much from your previous, “Journey to the Sun.”
Well, the last was acoustic, I guess electro-acoustic. This one is not very Americana, to be accurate. It’s more sort of poppy stuff. For instance, I’m a huge Smiths fan. I was trying to make some of the chord progressions a little bit more like theirs rather than Neil Young-like. Although Neil Young is a massive influence, so he’ll always creep in there somewhere. But so is Nick Drake. So, I’m trying to keep it a bit more English, just where I’m from, and I like a lot of English music as well as the American.
Would you say your music tends to be more popular in England than America?
I don’t really know with statistics and all. I guess so, because I’m here, I think I’ve sold more records in America overall just because the “Normal to Bridgewater” album sold quite well there. It had a really good promotion on Rykodisc at the time.
You say more of a pop flavour?
Even though there’s pedal steel on three songs, they’re not necessarily country. Americana is such a hard term to describe anyway. It seems to encompass just about anything these days. I mean, in the UK they’re even calling Richard Thompson Americana, which doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe it should be called Britannica instead of Americana in the UK?
There’s a thought.
You’ve released the first single off the new record. Why did you choose ‘Out of the Pines’?
It was probably because I thought that it was the most radio friendly, commercial sounding song on the record. And I like that song a lot. It’s basically when I first left school, I was an engineer for four years for the Telecomm company. Only I was not very good at getting up and going to work, so I wrote a song about how it was difficult. I’m not so bad these days. I don’t go socializing quite as much as I used to, but I’ve never been much good at getting up in the morning. It’s antisocial really, isn’t it? Work getting in the way of life. There was just a bit of a poke at that.
You have a second single planned before the album is released. Which one would that be?
You’re going to ask me now, aren’t you? What it is? I think it’s one called ‘The Flying Monk,’ which is a song I wrote just after the Christmas before last, 2022.
That’s not an answer to the old TV sitcom, “The Flying Nun,” with Sally Field as the airborne sister?
I should say not. That Christmas I stayed in Gloucestershire near a place called Marbury in the countryside. There was a monk at Marbury Abbey in the 11th century that made some wings and a tail and leapt from the top of the tower. He went about a hundred yards and then broke both his arms and legs. He was our first aviator, so I thought I should write a song for him. That was a bit more REM inspired music wise. I’m not trying to sound like REM, but I really like their album “Life’s Rich Pageant.” So, my album was a bit REM-ish, though it doesn’t sound like them at all.
I don’t think you could sound like Michael Stipe.
Of course not, with my voice.
Apart from the two singles, which song on the record resonates with you the best?
That would be a song called ‘Let There Be a Scar.’ I don’t think it’ll be a single, but the song itself has a double harmony nearly all the way through, and it bears a close resemblance to ‘Let It Be Me’ by the Everly Brothers in the sense of the structure and melody perhaps, but not lyrically. The way that I’ve produced it, it’s kind of mellow and spacious in the verses, and then the chorus goes a bit grungy. I’m really pleased the way it came out.
So, Everly Brothers in structure but what’s it about on the lyrical side?
It’s about a relationship and let there be a scar, meaning that if this relationship ever got back together, let there be a scar so that maybe you wouldn’t make that mistake again.
I read in an old issue of “Mojo” that you are considered a cult artist. That term always caused me to wonder if the artist is leading a coterie of cultists who follow him around and, in the end, drink some poisonous concoction.
Some do like calling me a cult artist. I think “The Guardian” was one. I don’t see myself as a cult figure and certainly don’t want anyone who likes my music drinking poison. Seems they would do that if they didn’t like my music.
Some albums today are released on digital, streaming and vinyl, but no longer CDs. What’s your preference for listening to an album?
Why, CD is my choice. I’m just frustrated that all the motor cars that are being made now have no CD player. Yeah, I had a Rover 75, actually two Rover 75s, and they both had cassette players in them. Fantastic. And you could buy loads of cassettes. So, I’d go into thrift stores and buy loads of old cassette albums and listen to them. It was great. But unfortunately, the car didn’t last.
When streaming takes over that will give me the approval to stop buying new music and just listen to what’s on the shelves at home. If you were to go back to the early days, who did you listen to?
Neil Young and Nick Drake. They were the main two I listened to. And then before that I was into soul music and jazz funk, Marvin Gaye and Donald Byrd and the like. My sisters had the Beatles records, so I heard those, but I wasn’t really a Beatles fan until probably the 2000 era, and then I suddenly got big time interested. I liked the Kinks a lot as well, but the two main influences would’ve been Nick Drake and Neil Young.
You categorized “Journey to the Sun” as your pandemic album. Did you livestream that at all? It seems to me I saw videos somewhere of that.
I was doing a livestream every Thursday during the pandemic, and I was playing songs from that album and previous albums. Then I’d play a Tim Hardin song, or some Nick Drake, a Smiths song maybe. Mixing covers with the originals. A lot of that record was written on the bouzouki.
Had you previously played bouzouki on record? It seems as if I would have noticed.
No, I hadn’t. I bought it in lockdown and learned to play one. Bought it in Germany actually. You can hear it on the new album’s final track, ‘Jimmy Mac,’ with Laura Anstee adding some beautiful cello.
‘Dharma Liar’ is a terrific track on Journey. After all the squeaks and other noises opening, there is some nice strumming and pedal steel guitar during the long, melancholic song. It reminds me of what Brian Wilson was doing on “Pet Sounds.”
I used the bouzouki on the opening to ‘Dandelion’ as well.
Yes, there was the contrast between the pleasant meadow and dandelions with all the blindfolded angels.
There’s a riff on it and it took me ages to get a riff that was mine enough, but it had that essence. There was a song, ‘New Mama,’ I think off the Stills-Young album that it resembled.
Brian Wilson probably would have done quite well during the pandemic, holed up in his house with a piano and some crumpled sheet music scattered around on the floor. How did the pandemic go for you?
Oh, it wasn’t so bad for me because I was living in my house and it was right on the top of the cliff. We could walk down to the beach, and there was nobody around, so we had lots of space. We weren’t cooped up in a city environment and not able to get out. It was still pretty claustrophobic, however, not being able to move around.
You were literally close to a cliff, like one in the TV town of “Broadchurch?”
Nothing that dramatic. We were on the coast, basically, and the beach is just a walk down there, so I could go fishing and do a bonfire on the beach, barbecue with the kids and stuff. It was better than being stuck indoors.
On “The King of Madrid,” Bill Ritchie co-wrote some of the songs. How did you happen to meet him?
He’s from Vancouver. I met him when I was living there, well, actually I tried to live there for three months, twice. I was single at the time and just liked it there.
Well, the city has one thing in common with England, plenty of rain.
I didn’t have a work visa, so I couldn’t work, even though I did find one job, but it didn’t last, unfortunately. I was just busking and playing gigs wherever I could to make ends meet. And if I could have worked, I may have stayed there, but I couldn’t earn enough money to really live comfortably enough. I had a friend in Vancouver. I think what happened was I decided to go travelling on my own in the US the evening before the first Gulf War started. So, when I landed in New York, since the only person I knew in the whole of North America was in Vancouver, I got a Greyhound bus from New York to Seattle up to Vancouver, and I stayed there. I never went down to America after that; I just stayed in Vancouver for three months and then came back. I don’t know why, maybe because I was freaked out about what was going to happen with the Gulf War.
But I just enjoyed it so much. I ended up going back to Vancouver about a year later to do the same thing, just to hang out there. I met Bill Ritchie the first time I was in Vancouver, and we were just sort of friends then. We didn’t know that we were going to end up writing songs together. I didn’t know that he was clever like that. But then at some point, we started messing around writing jokey songs. I thought, wow, this guy’s really good at writing lyrics., so we started a partnership.
One of the best songs on Madrid is ‘Waiting for Clive.’ There’s a book called “The Foot of Clive” by John Berger. It’s about English Society as portrayed in a hospital ward, and then a murderer came into the ward. Tell me about your song since there is no hospital ward in it.
I was playing my acoustic 12 string guitar and came up with those chords. It just popped into my head waiting for a download. And then I thought of all the things that you have to wait for, and the song is just a list of those things. It was a pretty straightforward process.
Your 2016 album, “Nos Da Comrade”, what language is that?
It’s Welsh. I have a friend called Di, who’s from Swansea in Wales. You do a “Cheers” when you’re having a drink, but he says, “Nos da”, it means good night. I liked the sound of it, and as I am Welsh myself, I wanted to reflect that. Another one of the songs on the record is about Yuri Gagarin. He is Russian, a comrade. I just liked the way that Nos da and Comrade put together sounded. And that’s why the record is called that. There’s no song on there called Nos da Comrade. I’m very patriotic when it comes to rugby. I’ve got lots of friends in Swansea and we’re playing there in a couple of weeks. I’m really looking forward to it as I haven’t been there for a while now.
On ‘Yuri Gagarin’ you take that extended guitar solo that finishes the song.
That just happened in the studio. We were in our village hall in Mortehoe in North Devon, doing some recording, just me and the drummer and the bass player, Mick (Clews) and Pete (Noone). We were laying the basic tracks down, and then we got to that one, and we didn’t really know how long that section was going to be. I started playing the solo, didn’t have it rehearsed or anything, and it just came out really well. We sort of jammed and when we finished it, we were like, shit, that’s it. We’ve just done it in one take. First take. That was that.
‘Mr. Sunshine,’ also on “Nos da Comrade” is about Donald Trump of course. That was back in 2016 when he first came down the escalator and changed the course of American politics. So now Mr. Trump is back, Mr. Sunshine.
Well, I wrote that song about Donald Trump though it wasn’t anything to do with his politics. It was to do with the fact that he wanted to build a golf course in Scotland in this beautiful area. There were people that lived there, and he basically couldn’t go ahead with the golf course because people had been living there for generations. The Scottish government said, sorry, you can’t do that. Then somehow a couple of the Scottish politicians suddenly changed their mind. I don’t know why. Probably they got some nice gifts from Donald.
That story sounds a lot like the script from a British movie in the 1980s. “Local Hero” was directed by Bill Forsyth. Peter Riegert and Burt Lancaster starred. An American oil company rep is sent to this fishing village in Scotland to buy the town for the company. I believe Mark Knopfler wrote the music score.
I can see the parallels. Anyway, the next minute these people were being evicted out of their family homes that had been lived in for generations. So, he got to build the golf course. It was a protest about the fact that Donald Trump had come over and muscled his way into Scotland, built this golf course. That was the crux. There’s a documentary on YouTube all about it that I watched, and that was the source of the song.
I must say that is the first song I’ve heard about Donald Trump that isn’t political. But “Where the Snakes Hang Out” actually is political, right?
Well, the snake is, in this case, Tony Blair, our Labor Prime Minister. It’s aimed at politicians in general, but I had Tony Blair in mind. It’s hard to remember it all when you’ve done as many albums as I have.
On your press release, I’ve read you’ve made 13 or 14 albums. Why the uncertainty? Is it the retrospective you’re not counting?
It’s because of “Ringo Woz Ere.” It was a record that I recorded at some point (2012), and I didn’t feel like it was a record that could be released commercially. So, I decided just to make some copies and sell ’em at gigs. I think that’s why it’s 13 or 14, because it could be, if you included “Ringo Woz Ere,” then it would be 14 albums. I can burn one for you if you like. It had a picture of my cat, because Ringo was my cat. So, there was a photograph of Ringo on the cover, but unfortunately Ringo died, so it was a little tribute to him.
So, it’s an extra album. What about songs? Do you write extra songs that don’t make it on a record?
There’s a song on this new record, which didn’t make it on “King of Madrid,” but it’s made it on this new record because I really liked the song, but I just didn’t feel that it fit on the other. The song is called ‘No Place Like Home,’ which is a rip off of a Byrds’ song, and I can’t remember which one, but melody-wise, the beginning bit is anyway, and then I change it. I knew it was going to make a record at some point, or I hoped it would, and it couldn’t make “Journey to the Sun.” That was too English pastoral, and it is a bit of Americana sounding, actually, come to think of it.
Were there songs that failed to make the cut on Houdini?
There are always extra songs. I also did a cover of “That Lucky Old Sun,” which in the end didn’t make the cut because this would’ve made the record too long and I was worried about copyright entanglements. I played it on the electric guitar only with a vocal, and I did it pretty much like Jeff Buckley would’ve done it, with a bit of tremolo running through a clean Fender deluxe. I played it pretty softly, finger-picked I think, and tried to get it really loose. I did it after I’d come back from the pub. I set the studio up, went out for an evening, came back after a few pints and hit record. I think I did it about three times, and then went to bed. Got up and listened the next day to see what the guitar part was like. Settled on one take and re-sang it.
There’s a guitar player that I’ve only just started playing with this year, a chap called Robbie MacIntosh, who used to play in the Pretenders back in the eighties and nineties, and then played with Paul McCartney for quite a few years. He’s a friend of the drummer and bass player in another band that I play in, a covers band. Robbie started playing with us, so I got him to put some slide guitar on Lucky.
Hold on a minute. You play in a covers band? What’s it called?
Now we’re the Cousins. It used to be 14 Cousins but unfortunately our guitar player died.
What sort of songs does the band play?
I really like Alex Chilton, so we do some of his, ‘Hook Me Up’ by Johnny Guitar Watson, ‘Never Found Me A Girl’ by Eddie Floyd. We do a song by Bobby Blue Bland called ‘Wouldn’t Treat a Dog.’ They’re the kind of more bluesy ones. Then we do ‘Killing the Blues’ by Rowland Salley, the bass player from Chris Isaak’s band. We do a Wilco song called ‘Passenger Side’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Sparklehorse. Then some Neil Young songs, ‘The Loner,’ ‘Powderfinger,’ ‘Ohio,’ ‘Cinnamon Girl.’ What else? We do some George Jones, ‘White Lightning’ for one. There’s a couple of other country songs by a guy called, what’s his name? Jay Farrar put me onto him. Joe Carson and the Lost. I don’t remember, but Joe Carson. One of his songs is called ‘I Got to Get Drunk’ and the other is called ‘Don’t Enter,’ which is really old-time country. I love that.
Tell me about this Reginald Perrin character.
I read the book when I was on tour once. It’s “The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin.” It’s a book by David Hobbs, and then it was a TV series in the UK. It’s absolutely genius. Basically what happens is he has a midlife crisis, and he goes to the coast, takes all his clothes off, walks into the sea, swims down the road, gets out and assumes a new identity. When I was writing this song with Bill, it wasn’t called the Reginald Perrin song. It was just a song about somebody that was not doing well mentally and struggling and wanting to disappear. Once the song had been written, I looked at it and thought, that’s the Reginald Perrin story.
There’s a bit more psychedelic on that record, “The Black Mountain UFO” album. The title track was acoustic, but it had to do with UFO sightings. Again, it just came into my head, but I wanted to write some alien abduction songs. There’s two songs on that album. One is ‘Bruise on the Sky,’ and then the other one is ‘Black Mountain UFO,’ because I had this book called “Alien Abduction,” and it was written by an American doctor who treated lots of people who believed they’d been abducted by aliens. As I was reading this book, and I was about halfway through it, it was so convincing that I started thinking that the landing light was an alien spaceship, so I had to stop reading the book. It was freaking me out. That’s why it was in my head.
At some point was Peter & The Murder of Crows an actual band?
I wanted to change my name from Peter Bruntnell to Peter and the Murder of Crows. I was fed up with going by the name Peter Bruntnell. But my record company didn’t want to do that because they said it would just make it really difficult. It’ll break the continuity you have already, that I was known even though not really that widely known. They talked me out of it essentially.
There wasn’t a lot of effort put into the record jacket, was there?
Really? I quite liked that album cover.
Your version of the “White Album?”
It could be.
Why all black?
Well, it’s dark blue, isn’t it? I got my neighbour to do that; I really like it. She designs for “Mojo Magazine,” doing their covers on specials. I like to get different people that I know to do different things. And so that was done by Carol, my neighbour at the time. I really like that colour. I like the inside too. It’s the photograph of me with my surfboard, but then it’s photoshopped all psychedelic.
I don’t have a physical copy so have never seen the inside. You should start a remastered, reissued series for that one and “Camelot.” Certainly “Roz Woz Ere” as well.
I should but don’t have the time since I’m still making new records. Well, you know what? I did buy a Pogues one the other day. It was all four or five albums in one box, and I did the same thing with the Replacements. I got all of their albums in one folder for about 20 quid. No, not even that. Yeah, maybe we could do that one day.
On “The Ends of the Earth,” the opening track is , ‘Here Comes the Swells.’ In American, that’s a 1950s term for people with big heads, who think they’re better than the rest. Was that what you were thinking?
Yeah, it is. Where I was living, there was a disused reservoir, and they ended up filling the reservoir in and building a load of houses that nobody in the area could afford to buy. Oh, that’s why I wrote it, because it was basically for just the rich people, who could afford to buy properties.
So, that’s where you would have liked Donald Trump to build his golf course – the end of the earth?
Yeah. Opposite me, that would’ve been okay.
‘Murder in the Afternoon’ comes pretty close to how Dionne Warwick’s hit song begins. “If you see me down the street and I forget to smile.” Instead of “If you see me walking down the street, And I start to cry each time we meet.” But all similarities end there. The song is not your afternoon delight sort of track. Did the story come from a particular place?
Yeah, I was fantasizing about murdering my neighbour. She was a strange lady that used to knock on the wall if I was even playing acoustic guitar in the wrong room. She was very antisocial, not a very nice lady. So, I fantasized about murdering her and then made it real.
Is this a confession? It’s probably a cold case by now.
No, I didn’t. She’s probably still among the living. I hope so. Don’t know, though, because I moved.
“Tabloid Reporter” – once again you’re suggesting murder. “Take all your reasons for living this way, And with them I bury you without a trace. The song reminds me of Ricky Gervais’ character in the TV series “Afterlife.”
I’ve seen him in “The Office,” of course, and “Extras,” but not that one. That song was written for the journalists. There was a journalist that wrote for the “News of the World” newspaper in England, and he got a rugby player called Lawrence Dallaglio and did some cocaine with him. Lawrence did not know that there was a secret camera in the room. Basically, he set him up just so he could write a story and fuck his life up. I just thought that was really low. So, I wanted to write a song attacking him and his ilk.
I’ve always wanted to ask you: What’s considered normal for Bridgewater that wouldn’t be somewhere else?
It is referring to Bridgewater, which is in Somerset in England. Some friends lived there for a while, and they ran a pub. They told me how rough it was and how it was down to a bunch of different things, too much cider and too much inbreeding. They also told me that in the hospitals in Bridgewater, they would write NFB, just saying this is normal behaviour for people from Bridgewater. They’re fucked up, but this is normal for Bridgewater people. People have told me that that happens in other places, but they just call it normal form in those towns.
If you were to point to one record that has Americana all over it, NFB would be it. ‘Jurassic Park’ is sort of a western swing, honky-tonk tune, ‘Cosmea’ has the fiddle and banjo.
Well, that was because it was the third album. The first two albums I made, “Camelot in Smithereens” and “Cannibal” were a bit more kind of pop. At the time, I was really into Uncle Tupelo, and I just decided to not worry about the fact that I was English. I thought, well, I’m going to make a record that sounds like Uncle Tupelo. So that’s what I did. After that I became an alt-country fan. Lucky enough, I was doing a festival with them, and we became friends. That was all very fortunate for me.
‘By the Time My Head Gets to Phoenix’ from the brilliant “King of Madrid” album is a nod to the popular Glenn Campbell song title. What’s taking your character’s head so long to get to Phoenix?
I was watching a six o’clock news program. You see, there was a group of people in the UK that formed this pact that when the first one died, they were going to send their dead body to Phoenix, Arizona, where they had some cryogenic tanks. The idea was to have the body frozen until technology had advanced sufficiently so they can be brought back to life, which is all true. They couldn’t afford to send the whole dead body because it would be too heavy. So, they’re going to chop the head off the person that dies and send that to Phoenix. This is all on the news. So, I’m going to write a song about that. And of course, this is 25 years ago, but now Walt Disney’s head is in the cryogenic tank along with a bunch of other people that aren’t so well known. It’s actually happened, which is kind of crazy, isn’t it? As far as I know, they haven’t tried to revive anyone yet.
‘Handful of Stars’ is quite appealing in a morning after kind of way.
Again, that was me and Bill Ritchie in Vancouver where quite a few of the songs on the album were written. Bill’s parents had a cabin on Bowen Island, and we went out there for a few days and just drank beer and sat in the cabin, went swimming and wrote songs. I’m not sure what the song is about. It’s more of a feeling, I suppose.
We’ve talked about several of your albums but can’t get to them all. You’ve had and are still having a long and successful career. Is there any advice you’d share with younger people who are looking to become musicians?
If you’ve got a bunch of songs that you think are good, once you’ve recorded them, write another bunch of songs. Keep changing, keep evolving. And don’t be afraid to move your influences. Don’t keep writing the same record or the same bunch of songs.
Do you have a favourite decade for music, or a favourite generation, say from hippies to Gen-Z?
That’s a really good one, because I never would’ve said the eighties, but I think the eighties now. I never would’ve said that before, but I really like “After the Gold Rush” and “Harvest” I really like all the Nick Drake records., The Smiths, Prefab Sprout. I loved Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo, but I also really loved the sixties for the Beatles records and the Kinks records. It’s very difficult to choose, but at the moment, I like the eighties the most.
Is there anything at all you like about the twenties, either the Roaring Twenties last century or the Gen-Z Twenties of today?
I have an album by the Ink Spots that I like very much, and I cover one of their songs. What’s it called? ‘Me and My Shadow’ or ‘My Shadow and Me’? No, no, no. I’ll look it up. ‘My Shadow, My Echo and Me,’ in parenthesis. It’s called ‘We Three (My shadow, My Echo and Me)’ by the Ink Spots. It’s fantastic, but I’m not sure whether that was twenties or would’ve been forties.
My guess would be the forties, but I’ll look it up later.
I also like some of the industrial music like Throbbing Gristle. It’s very strange.
How did the pandemic affect the live music scene in London and the rest of England? Were some of the venues adversely impacted and unable to reopen?
We still have a good number of venues to play, but not as many as before the pandemic.
It has also changed the way people record music, but perhaps that has more to do with the ease of using the Internet. And you can’t count out the cost of gas.
Well, you can’t beat the energy that comes from having the band all together in the same room, can you. But some of Houdini was done over the Internet, as you say. Eric and Peter and all the rest have home studios which makes working remotely an advantage.
Returning to the new album before we call it quits, we haven’t talked about some of the songs, for instance ‘Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. I’m uncertain where to put the emphasis or pause in pronouncing the title, but it has the air of psychedelia like ‘She’s A Rainbow’ from an old Stones record, Satanic Majesties or maybe The Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High.’
I had it in my head that I wanted to write something like the Beatles song ‘Rain.’ That was my intention anyway.
Ah, on the LSD exploring feelings of detachment. It seems a good place to close with the opener and title track of the new record, ‘Houdini and the Sucker Punch.’ The song packs quite a punch in, as you say, a jangly pop sort of way. You had some assistance composing that one.
I sent that song to my writing partner, Bill (Ritchie) and co-wrote the lyrics with him. I didn’t have a certain lyric in mind, so I sent him something where I’m mumbling over the music. It was an old tune I had hanging around from the “King of Madrid” album that I never liked enough. Then I went browsing around for something on my Dictaphone that could be useful and found that melody, so it was just a matter of adapting the lyrics to it. We went back and forth with ideas and eventually finished the song. He comes up with lyrics that would never have come to my mind.
Undoubtedly you put a lot of effort into this album, but it must have been joyful to turn up the volume and play fast and loose once again, especially with a familiar cast for your band supplemented by such talented guests.
Frankly, it was the hardest record I’ve ever made what with writing songs, producing, mixing, doing overdubs and going to work as well. But I’m pleased it’s out there. I hope people like it.
Perhaps this would be the appropriate time to invoke Peter Bruntnell’s own words taken from the press release for Houdini.
“In an uncertain number of years’ time, it will be acceptably cool to say that you first got into non-Grammy-winning artist Peter Bruntnell through his classic 2024 album “Houdini And The Sucker Punch,” before then going back and discovering his back catalogue of yet more “classics”. And you were there! You saw him live. You were one of those “10” people who saw him play in that modestly-sized room, almost 30 years into his career. So here we are again. Three years on, another album into Peter’s 13 or 14 album catalogue and shouldering the burden of even more sublime reviews. Every possible positive adjective has been called into play, although it must be noted that the word “sublime” can never be used enough.”
Peter Bruntnell’s “Houdini And The Sucker Punch” is out now on Domestico.
UK & France Tour 2024-25
Sat 14th Dec The Sound Lounge, Sutton.
Sun 15th Dec The Regency Rooms, St Leonards.
Tue 21st-Wed 22nd Jan AMA UK Festival, London.
Wed 29 Jan PARIS Life Is A Minestrone
Thu 30 Jan Clermount-Ferrand Les Deux Comptoirs.
Fri 31 Jan Hyères Médiathèque De Hyères.
Sat 01 Feb Toulon Life Is A Minestrone.
Sun 02 Feb Marseille Life Is A Minestrone.
Tue 04 Feb Dijon La Maison Perrichet.
Wed 05 Feb Paris Life Is A Minestrone.
Fri 14 Feb Hastings The Jenny Lind.
Thu 6th Mar The Chapel at The Angel Microbrewery, Nottingham.
Fri 7th Mar New Continental, Preston.
Sat 8th Mar The Central Bar, Gateshead.
Sun 9th Mar The Davenham Player’s Theatre, Northwich.
Tue 25th Mar The Old Market, Hove.*
Wed 26th Mar The Band On The Wall, Manchester.*
Thu 27th Mar City Varieties, Leeds.*
Sat 29th Mar Gosforth Civic Theatre, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.*
Mon 31st Mar Glee Club, Birmingham.*
Tue 1st Apr The Lantern, Bristol Beacon, Bristol.*
Wed 2nd Apr The 1865, Southampton.*
Thu 3rd Apr Union Chapel, London.*
Fri 9th May The Listening Room, Georgian Hotel, Coatbridge.
Sun 11th May Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh.
