We first stumbled upon Bleeding Heat Narrative while sheltering from the rain at last year’s Macmillan Cancer Care Big Mix festival and they totally blew us away. Since then they’ve gone from strength to strength; playing Green Man, Truck & Swn festivals and getting radio play from Huw Stephens & Gideon Coe amongst others. We caught up with Oli (creator of the rather splendid bison artwork above) from the band and posed him our now all too familiar set of questions…
1. How long has the band been together and how did you all meet?
Bleeding Heart Narrative seems to have come together over a gradual, extended period, like iron filings sliding inexorably towards a particularly ineffectual magnet. It started as a solo project and then expanded and contracted through various line-ups before settling on the 6-piece we are now. This line-up has been unchanged for the past couple of years, though our bass player Max’s name is now ‘Matt’ and he looks quite a bit different to what he once did.
2. Where did you get your name from & what does it mean?
I actually don’t know. When I worked in a bookshop I used to keep a load of notebooks where I’d write down loads of stuff that I saw or that I thought of. Going back through one of those books while I was trying to find a name to attach to a couple of tracks I was putting online I saw that and it seemed to fit. So it could be a literary reference (though if so I have long forgotten what it’s from) or it could just be a phrase that stuck in my head. Either way I guess we need to come up with a better origin story…
3. Describe your sound for us & who would you say were your biggest musical influences?
Live, we make a big sound with drums, guitars, cellos, violins, electronics, loads of voices and occasionally a bontempi organ. Recorded we use quite a few more instruments. Given there’s 6 of us, our lists of influences could probably stretch to several pages, but a few might be Boredoms, TV on the Radio, Arthur Russell, Sleater-Kinney, Tortoise, Bjork, Oneida, William Basisnski, pretty much anything on Anticon, and Seal. But whether we sound like any of those is another thing entirely.
4. And what about non-musical influences?
Again, too many, but a handful – travelling, walking, writers like Carson McCullers, Marina Warner, David Foster Wallace, Angela Carter, Haruki Murakami, and Brian Greene; artists like Henri Rousseau, Sarah Sze, Doug Aitken, Gregory Crewdson, Caspar David Friedrich, Matthew Barney, Mike Mignola and James Jean; filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Terrance Malick, David Lynch, Buster Keaton, Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Steven Spielberg before he was killed, cloned and replaced sometime in the early 90’s.
5. Music can be a fickle mistress, what is your biggest high & low as a band so far?
Playing Green Man last year will take quite a lot of beating – we played on the Far Out stage in the afternoon on the Sunday and not only was the tent pretty full we also found out afterwards that we were playing to a pretty large extended audience of people relaxing in the sun in the grass outside as well. It was a great weekend too – amazing festival and always nice to play a proper gig sound system too.
Lowest point? We’ve had a few. The one that springs to mind is the second of two gigs we played in a row a couple of years back. The first night we played to a packed room at the old Shunt Vaults in London Bridge and left on a complete high. The next night we found ourselves playing to 4 friends in a terrible pay-to-play venue in North London. The band before us (a visionary 4-piece who did their best to cement London’s reputation as a hotbed of ‘cutting edge’ new music by playing a set of Eric Clapton covers) overran so most of the audience (and the promoter) left after they finished. As we were playing the sound guy started turning amps and channels on and off to see what was causing the almost constant feedback then yelled at us after we decided to call it a day after 3 songs. Needless to say, there’s a lot of terrible pay-to-play venues and promoters in London and we’ve done our best to avoid them at all costs since then!
6. What one fact about the band do you most want to share with the world?
*Whisper it* – we’re not actually a post-rock band.
7. The old model of record demo-do gigs-get signed-make millions is pretty broken these days, what’s your plan to deal with this?
We’re currently deep into our masterplan model of ‘record demo/album/dvd-do gigs-do more gigs-record EP-do even more gigs-self release EP-make billions’ – just having a little trouble with the last part but sure it’ll sort itself out. Failing that we’ll just carry on enjoying getting our music out there and playing to people. The negative impact of the internet has been greatly exaggerated – there’s been no death of music (far from it) and the death of the old music industry model would be no bad thing at all.
8. We journalists like to use easy labels to describe bands, what’s the worst thing you’ve seen yourselves described as?
“Taking the Daniel Bedingfield approach to recording, Bleeding Heart Narrative…”
9. We’re loving what you do but who’s floating your boat right now?
We’ve been lucky enough to play with quite a few bands we really like over the past few months. We did a short tour with Mat Riviere and Bastardgeist – both of whom make incredible pop songs that sound like absolutely nothing else. We also did a gig with Lost Left at the end of last year – a 4-piece who sound beautifully fragile on record and then give you tinnitus live – which is definitely the best way to do it. Could actually go on for ages with all the music we’re listening to between us but probably easier to point you in the direction of some mixes we did a few weeks back – https://www.mixcloud.com/bleedingheartnarrative/ – one from each band member featuring stuff we’ve been into recently (new and old).
10. What’s up next for you guys?
Currently taking a live break while we finish recording on another EP that we should be putting out in a couple of months. After that we’ll hopefully be playing a tonne of gigs and getting going with recording more for the next album that will be out later in the year with any luck.
