Mr Bewlay is a busy Bewlay, touring like the clappers across the UK, and bringing the tail end of the festival season to an efficient if colourful close. We talk a couple of weeks before he travels up to Liverpool from his Cardiff base, the third show in the northern city in a year. He’s a boomeranging Bewlay for sure, making a concerted, determined effort to reach as many places and audiences inside and outside Wales as he can. On top of that, new EP Against All Reason arrived a couple of weeks ago – the final in a trilogy, with accompanying drama. More of the subject later.
For now, we settle down over zoom to reflect on recent adventures, him sipping a weak Carlsberg, which he marks a puny three out of ten. At this end, it’s green tea with a sharp shot of lemon juice. It feels all very born to be mild, and yet the man I talk to today’s been mad at it with promo, interviews, editing videos, talking to his label Dirty Carrot, press, venues, and promoters. Always looking at the road ahead, literally and creatively, the life of an independent artist in contemporary times is a full one, for sure.
‘It’s all good, though. This is the life I chose,’ Bewlay explains. ‘I was thinking about this today where 15-year old me, Baby Bewlay, dreamed of having shows, having music out, having merchandise, having music videos, and every time I’m exhausted, I always think, you know, this is what I dreamed about.’
He confesses at being ‘a bit of a control freak’ on the creative front. ‘Everything is planned, nothing is accidental. I found that when I was releasing music back in 2020 with ‘Her Name is Juniper’ I wanted to boil things down to be as simplistic as possible. That was an exercise of trying to make a poppy sound, with choruses, with verses. Try and make things with small, little motif. Little motifs and then the Black Reason EP last year was, rather than it being simple songs, the theme was sweat, chaos. This time there was a lot more nuance to it and I was, how do I make things which have two sides, not so much edge to it, but shade to it.’
Latest EP ‘Against All Reason’ produced, mixed and mastered by Lee House is now with us and comprises of five songs, ‘Worst of All Women’, ‘Honey’, ‘Why Don’t People Love Me’, ‘Against All Reason’, and ‘Far In Love’.
The chanty and anthemic ‘Worst of all Women’ unleashed on international Women’s Day back in March, was inspired by reading 17th century Mexican writer, composer, poet, philosopher Juana Ines de la Cruz’s observance of herself, ‘I am the worst of all women’. The universal female experience in that we are found ever wanting. The phrase stuck with him, to the extent he toyed with the idea of exclusively female vocals on the song. ‘The original idea, was I wasn’t going to be on the track at all, but both me and Lee, the producer, felt that it might have been too far of a step.’
‘Honey‘ is slick smoochy sophistication with Viz‘s Finbar Saunders and his Double Entendres smoothly slid right in good and proper, a thematic continuation of tongue-in-cheekiness firmly established last year with ‘Live, Life, Love’, in which he celebrates the virtues of ‘yummy mummy MILFS’. The pop tart Mr Bewlay has a sweet yet sticky side, it seems. ‘I couldn’t just do a love song,’ he says of Honey. ‘I tried, and I had to make fun of it some way. I recorded on this piano, and we got some guitar work done, and then added a skipping bass line. Kept it as natural as possible.’
He was paying attention to C Duncan’s ‘Holiday Home‘ at the time, which fed into the song.
‘I couldn’t stop listening to it. It just has this beautiful piano, and it’s super simple, a nice pop song.’ He loves Old School R&B, Motown. ‘And despite the fact that this EP doesn’t really sound like that, the direction for it was a kind of funky groove.’
A few weeks ago here at GIITTV, we had ‘what’s Mr Bewlay gone and done?’ emails in our inbox. The response to strange, morally outraged social media posts from Bewlay’s colleagues and contemporaries professing shock and disgust at an unnamed misdemeanor. It all got quite heated and mysterious, with lots of exclamation marks. Much clutching of pearls. Handbags at dawn. Melting snowflakes. Raised temperatures and rumour.
The revelation that such fuss and bluster was in effect an art performance around the next single ‘Why Don’t People Love Me’ came as somewhat of a relief. Mr Bewlay is naughty but actually thoroughly nice, as it turns out. His temporary tormentors were pals, in on the dastardly plan to highlight the song and make a massively important point, one well observed. The drama mirrored typical human activity and extreme reactions on social media these days. The performance was timely and captured the zeitgeist of 2024: false information mere days earlier had caused violence in towns and cities across the UK. Art imitating life to a scarily accurate degree.
‘It was tongue in cheek, and although to a certain degree dangerous where my reputation was concerned,’ says Bewlay of the exercise. ‘In light of what’s been happening, false information sparking riots and prevalence of witch hunts and people losing their careers and losing their jobs due to either misinformation or just rumours spreading. The uncritical way that people will just soak up information and make judgments on things. And so I wanted to see how people would react. Thankfully, 95% of people reacted positively.’
There was a small minority of randoms who reacted vehemently, inventing further rumour themselves to add to the intensity.
‘Isn’t that that’s kind of the point?’ he shrugs.
The video for Why Don’t People Love Me begins with a weepy confession, OTT with no tears what so bloody ever, before he sweeps on some blusher in a ‘I’m ready for my close-up Mr DeMille’ flourish, before skipping downstairs to join a party.
‘The idea of the music video came first,’ Bewlay explains. ‘Doing a straight to camera piece, an apologies piece as an influencer, and then cutting straight to the song.’
Two weeks later after our lively zoom, he and band arrives in Liverpool. Soundcheck speedily and efficiently boxed off, he’s keen to explore the city centre. We hunt the urban landscape for suitable scenery, stopping by the scarred yet treasured St Luke’s Church, known locally as the Bombed Out Church damaged in the 1941 Blitz, and now an arts space. The gates are locked, so we can’t wander the grounds but Bewlay poses gamely for our photographer, yards away from the graveyard.
He then makes the best of the side streets, the bars with flickering red light electric signs, happy to hang off streetlamps Singing In The Rain Gene Kelly-style, kneel in the road with a car growling behind him, and pose with newly bewitched fans.
Job done, we trace our steps back to find the venue flooded by the pale-skinned decked on black lace, funereal purple and leather. Not the natural audience for art pop, these goths arriving for their monthly disco due to take place after the live music. But if goths have one thing in common, it is surely a sensitivity to tolerance and self-expression. Beyond potentially intimidating attire and demeanor, they are an open minded and accepting subculture.
Maybe, we wondered, they might sense our attempted graveyard exploration earlier? We have more in common than sets us apart, do we not? At the opposite end of the music genre spectrum they may well exist, but as Bewlay stepped onto the stage and launched into the Worst of All Women, there was a puzzled shuffling. Almost. Borderline. Maybe. Maybe not.
‘They had as much dancefloor presence, as a shadow in a dark room. They could a thing or two from some family-friendly Bewlay gyration,’ Mr B reflected wryly afterwards, before heading off to spend the night in a haunted public house.
The fun sponges are now surely safely back in their coffins or mother’s basement, while Bewlay’s back in town next month but not before showing London’s what’s what later in October. Then there’s a performance at Shiiine On festival in Somerset.
‘And Christmas, I’m taking off because this is the busiest year I’ve ever had. And then January, we’ve got a little short film coming out. Then it’s album time….’
Lots of people have always just been like, how are you going to top this? Are you going to do better than this? And I’m going to do it. I love having fun with it. I want to release more crazy merchandise.’
Bewlay’s already got a perfume/love potion, and the cartoon socks. Is there any merch you wouldn’t put your name or face on?
‘No,’ he laughs, and continues to reel off his ambitions. ‘I want to open up Prosecco bottles in the crowd at a live event and spray everyone. I want to be able to go on a radio show and run circles around the radio presenter. I want to be able to write songs about MILFs...’
‘Against All Reason’ is out now via Dirty Carrot Records.
Live dates:
24 October London Servant Jazz Quarters
9 November Liverpool Sotto
15 – 18 November Shiiine On Indie and Dance Festival
Photo credit: Michelle Marshall
