Blue Bendy sign to Practise Music, listen to “A Celebration”
Blue Bendy
Release New Single
‘A Celebration’
Announce Signing To Practise Music
Photo Credit: Jason Sheehan. Hi-res available here
Listen To ‘A Celebration’ Here
South London based art-rock group Blue Bendy are back with their new single ‘A Celebration’, their first for new label home Practise Music. The song moves between time changes and intricate instrumentation, with deadpan group vocals making it an oddball anthem. Defiantly building on their early promise, Blue Bendy are getting weirder and poppier in perfect tandem.
Singer and lyricist Arthur Nolan on ‘A Celebration’: “It explores the idea of letting lots of good things around you come crashing down in order to perpetuate a comforting habitual *well earned* ego trip and eventually coming to terms with it.” “It’s in a simplest sense just about the duality of romantic relationships and the inevitability of two people drifting apart. Love is manic and despairing and ultimately finite. Not to forget fun.”“I thought it sounded like Belle and Sebastien doing an Ice Age song”
When Blue Bendy independently released debut single ‘Suspension’ in 2019, it caught the attention of producer Margo Broom – Fat White Family, Goat Girl – who understood the potential in that single and the pop experimentalism that needed to be conjured from the six piece. 2021’s ‘International’ and ‘Glosso Babel’, the first products of their work with Broom, established Blue Bendy as one of the most exciting bands emerging from South London.Though crucially different from their South London peers, Nolan points out how that scene has allowed the band to grow and become more interesting, more sharp, more distinct – “I don’t think we would have progressed the way we had if we hadn’t been surrounded by those bands, and watching things shoot up around you. It makes you strive much harder.”
Nolan’s charismatic vocal and a committed interest in lyric writing that has perhaps been absent from British music over the last couple of years. Though you might be able to detect trace DNA of the humour of Malkmus, the romantic absurdity of Bjork and even the kitchen sink despair of Johnny Cash, there is something truly unique that runs through everything Blue Bendy put their hand to.Blue Bendy are Arthur Nolan (vocals), Joe Nash (guitar), Harrison Charles (guitar), Olivia Morgan (keys and vocals), Sam Wilson (bass) and Oscar Tebbutt (drums)