‘Bats Feet For A Widow’: smashing crucifixes and expectations with Bingo Fury
My first impression of Bingo Fury comes around a month before our arranged interview time. “I met Bingo Fury outside Head of Steam in Headingley once,” my boyfriend informs me while I’m reviewing Bats Feet For A Widow, the debut record from the Bristol-born experimentalist, “He was very nice and very ginger”. It’s a description he lives up to when he greets me at the door of Leeds’ beloved Belgrave Music Hall with a hug and a “How are you?”
It’s a scramble to find a quiet place to answer his question. It’s a Friday night, and Folly Group are headlining. The rooftop is spilling over with smokers despite the cold mid-March weather, DJs have already staked their claim downstairs, and Pop Vulture are gearing up for their own soundcheck in the gig room. We settle into the sofas of their shared green room to the muffled sounds of their kickdrums and krautrock, quickly finding common ground over the fact that we both know their frontman.
It’s no surprise that Fury is already familiar with Leeds’ local scene. Though he’s Bristol born-and-bred, a product of the experimentalism the south-western city consistently spawns, he’s also toured the country as a sound engineer. Now, he’s just hours away from taking to the stage himself, but he admits that he still prefers creating over performing.
“It’s not necessarily the performing part of it that I get the most out of,” he explains, “It’s just making something.” It’s a humility that comes from his earliest ventures into songwriting, which were born out of necessity. Fury wasn’t always a frontman. He sat behind the drums in one of the first bands he played in, but he also took up lyric-writing duties when the vocalist was reluctant to do so.
“I was playing drums and not singing but writing lyrics for the singer because someone had to,” he remembers, “They were horrible, terrible lyrics, but that broke the initial imposter syndrome and got me into the routine of practising, so it felt like quite a natural thing going into writing songs. I’ve been doing it even before I was singing. I just got in a situation where I had to do it.”
He’s honed a particularly distinctive lyrical style since then, borrowing from conversations and mishearings to chart the specific and the universal in equal measure. On Bats Feet For A Widow, his songwriting marries the influences that made him from experimentalism to religion. References to road names and superheroes are afforded just as much gravitas and sincerity as questions about faith and love as Fury sets out to romanticise his experiences over experimental jazz.
Fury may be the driving force behind their sound, but the bandmates he’s kept ahold of since his mid-teens are just as instrumental to the realisation of it. While multi-instrumentalist Rafi Cohen and cornet player Harry Furniss are slightly more recent recruits, Fury has been playing in bands with bassist Megan Jenkins and drummer Henry Terrett since they were 15.
“At this point, I feel like I have a good understanding of what they can bring and their idiosyncrasies,” Fury explains, “I generally have the initial idea, the lyric, the idea for the structure and what I want from the song, but I always write with room for them to take it somewhere that I couldn’t take it by myself.”
On Bats Feet For A Widow, they take his vision into slightly more melodic territory. There is a retention of their experimentalist roots, the dissonance and atonality that Bingo Fury describes as his “base level”. Still, there’s also a real catchiness and accessibility to the record. Refusing to bend to the expectations of their previous experimentalism, they give into harmonious melodies and become all the more unpredictable for it.
Amidst harsh horns and uneasy whirrs, certain lines are almost guaranteed to get stuck in your head. “It feels like such a win hearing you say that,” Fury sighs, “My mum will be proud”. It’s a direction he was particularly keen to take with the record, juxtaposing his admiration for coherent, melodic music with the enduring influence of the “jarring as fuck” music he loved in his angst-ridden youth.
“I’m trying to broaden the palette rather than being this one specific kind of intensity,” he explains, “trying to draw and create something emotive and intense through different means. So, I’m slowly trying to creep away from that dissonance, which is kind of my starting point. Trying to make something catchy but also unpredictable is in itself an oxymoron. It’s a fun challenge to try and untangle.”
Fury was forged by Bristol’s experimental scene, but he was also steered by religion, a theme that consistently crops up throughout his songwriting. When he came to record Bats Feet For A Widow, he honoured both of those influences by recording in the church his parents attend. “There’s a particularly heavy atmosphere in a church,” he explains, “We recorded most of it in winter, so it was mostly just dark and candlelit and cold.”
“There’s a vibe to that that you don’t get in a sterile recording environment,” he continues, “which I think comes through on the album.” The spirituality of those surroundings certainly seeps into the music. There’s drama in the depth of Fury’s voice and weight in the warmth of the instrumentation that surrounds it.
The candlelit church played host to some of Bingo Fury’s best sonic experimentation yet, which involved throwing house keys and slowly sipping on glasses of wine to change the pitch they created when recorded into a four-track cassette. “I don’t use pedals, and I don’t do any processing on the computer,” Fury explains, “so I like finding ways of creating textures using quite rudimentary, hands-on methods”.
But perhaps the most striking moment of their recording sessions came during the making of ‘I’ll Be Mountains’. While bringing up the volume of Jenkins’ bass amp until the whole room was shaking, producer Joe Jones heard a smash. After walking up and down the church, trying to locate the victim of her “deafeningly loud” bass, they stumbled upon a shattered crucifix. “Metal as fuck,” Fury nods.
“We were like, ‘Fuck, is something bad gonna happen to us now?’” Fury recalls, “On holy ground, shattering a crucifix, I don’t know, there’s probably something in Revelation about that.” Despite their concerns, they opted to keep the sound in the song, crediting Jenkins with both bass guitar and crucifix.
Though he may be down a crucifix, the church’s vicar is already a firm fan of Bats Feet For A Widow, as Fury tells me he recently played ‘Power Drill’ through the PA after a service. “He’s a legend,” he quips.
Fury is full of compliments for those who helped him to realise Bats Feet For A Widow, including multimedia artist Peter Eason-Daniels, who he dubs “my king”. The Glasgow-based creative took his first steps into music video-making with a one-shot accompaniment for a Mount Kimbie song. Now, he helms the new video for the penultimate track from Fury’s debut, ‘My Cup Overflows’, which pairs pulsing percussion with lyrics as carefully considered as the shadows within them.
Mirroring the fluidity of the song title, Eason-Daniels’ video finds Fury in a swimming pool, floating in black and white as he delivers the song’s dramatic words. With a box and a perfectly angled mirror, he could submerge the shot in the pool to create the image of Fury half underwater, half above. “He makes me think about music differently even though that’s not the format we collaborate in,” Fury enthuses.
As Fury swims around, repeating the words, “My cup overflows,” the statement seems to ring true. Fury’s cup overflows with experimentalism, with collaborators, and, hopefully, with opportunity.
Watch the music video for ‘My Cup Overflows’ by Bingo Fury below.
