Hello!
We are back. I’m afraid we’ve missed the window to wish you a happy new year, oh well, there’s always next year. But we do hope you had a good break until you realised you felt sad that you hadn’t heard from your friends at The New Cue and started frantically refreshing your inbox, asking other people in the house if their internet was working ok, “is your inbox refreshing?”. You can calm down you flaming nutcase, we’re here!
Before we get to our first chat of the year, some TNC information: from now on, we’ll be folding all our Wednesday content (our Story Behind The Song features, career-spanning Lost In Music interviews, ace Q&As and more) into a bumper Friday edition which is for subscribers only. We figured it’s easier for that legendary crew of paying TNC customers to have all their exclusive content in one place rather than split between two. So from now on, we’ll be delivering one free edition that all the cheapskates and their mums can read on a Monday, and one edition for subscribers only on a Friday. Monday, Friday, Monday, Friday, you with us? Yeah you are, I know you are. Not a paid subscriber but this slightly-aggro description of you as a cheapskate has made you want to be one? Click Subscribe Now below!
Now onto today’s chat, where Niall speaks to Bristol’s brilliant singer-songwriter Billy Nomates about her new album, out this Friday.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Billy Nomates
This Friday, Billy Nomates releases her excellent second record CACTI. It’s the follow-up to 2020’s self-titled debut and completely reshapes the minimalist, synthy post-punk of that record in lush 80s guitar-pop sounds and uplifting, earworming melodies. Tor Maries, the Midlands-born, Bristol-based singer-songwriter-producer behind the Billy Nomates handle, took a break from unpacking after a tour last month to tell Niall how it all came together…
Hello Tor, where are you at the moment?
I’m at my Bristol flat, unpacking from the last of the tour.
It must have been great to get back out there.
Yeah, it’s nice to take new material out and test a lot of that stuff for the first time, that was interesting and it surprises me every time that people know the singles. I forget that things go on the radio and it’s been shared, so that’s always really nice.
What was your favourite to play out of the new batch?
I’ve got a song called Roundabout Sadness. It’s only a minute and a half long but it’s this really intense thing and to do that live felt really cathartic because it’s a total change of pace and it’s not like anything else I’ve written. I like those quirky, odd moments. It’s great to play the stuff that gets people dancing and that people want to sing along to but the interesting thing for me is to do the weird quirky things, they keep me interested.
Do you learn things about the songs that you didn’t know when you play them live?
I do. I often find a new groove or something else that’s going on, or lyrics take on very different meanings in live settings as well. When you see other people sing it back to you, there’s this realisation that it means something else to them and they’re delivering it to me, I’m always surprised by that. It’s a really nice exchange because you can’t plan for that, it just happens. It’s really cool.
Take me back to the beginning of CACTI. Was it a clean slate going into this record or did it merge with your debut in some way?
It was a really clean slate because so much time had passed with Covid. I wrote that record in 2019, it came out in 2020 and then finished this one over the course of a year. It was a good amount of time that it passed and it felt like a very clean slate, and a very strange slate. I didn’t expect after Covid and putting an album out in that time that I would actually be doing another one. I just didn’t think I was making enough as a success of it, so I was glad to have a slate at all.
That’s funny because there’s a real sense of momentum about this record.
Oh, that’s interesting. I did try and take my time with it, I wrote so many things around this time for this album, and it was a toss-up as to what made it. I think half of this album has been fished out of the bin.
Really?
Yeah, most of it ended up in the bin and it was co-producers and people that were just like, ‘What are you doing?!’ Hopefully we sat with it long enough that it has a sense of momentum, and it has a sense of purpose, and it has peaks and troughs.
What was it that made you bring those songs back?
I think, for me, often my first ideas and my first demos seem to be the closest thing to what I want to make. But I will sometimes go away and go, ‘Yeah, but you need to go make it better, or you need to go and progress on this’. What I’m slowly realising is you never throw the dart closer to the bull’s eye than when you first burn off a demo, because you create something that’s just the feeling and sometimes it actually doesn’t need the other things. It’s taken me a long time to understand that but I’m starting to grasp it now. I think getting them out of the bin was a lot of encouragement, there was a lot of kicking and screaming, there was a lot of ‘naaah, what are you talking about, it’s rubbish!’. That’s the cons of being a solo artist, you are your best friend and your own worst enemy in those situations.
What were the things you felt compelled to write about?
I didn’t want to talk about Covid, I felt like I’d addressed some of the panicky feelings on Emergency Telephone, my EP in 2021, so I didn’t want to dominate it with that. I wanted to be able to lean into a vulnerability and an emotional reaction to general life amongst the apocalyptic moments that we keep getting. It felt important to do that at this stage in my life. I wanted to write about how I felt and that it’s okay to do that. I got into my head that I couldn’t do that as a writer, maybe it would be boring or maybe it would be self-indulgent. Then you just kind of go, ‘I think it’s okay to lean into that. I think it’s okay to lean into the vulnerability of how the last few years have left me feeling’. I didn’t feel particularly fierce and powerful by the end of those two years. I thought that I had survived it and ended up here, so all you’ve really got is how you honestly feel, and CACTI as a result of that, for all that’s good and all that’s bad about it, that’s the result of it.
Tell me about Saboteur Forcefield. It feels very emblematic of what you’re saying in terms of facing yourself head on…
Yeah, it’s an acknowledgement of that you get so used to things. For me, I know how to react to things not working or things failing or things just not going very well, what I didn’t know how to react to is things going well. You have to address there’s something in you... it feels like a universal thing is that there’s something in us that wants to destroy things, even though we build things and we want things to work, there’s a part of us that’s always a bit destructive. It’s fascinating to me, why that comes about and why it exists and almost like we can’t build things without that slight sense of, ‘when will we knock it all down?’. It’s not a particularly comfortable feeling but I thought I would lean into that and explore it a bit.
Where did the sound of the record come into it? For me, the whole reason that the darkness and the unsettling vibe of the lyrics works is because of the uplifting nature of the music. They perfectly offset against each other.
I think it’s important to me to write something accessible because I want people to be able to hear it and access it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Life is so light and dark for me. I’m somebody that has depression and I have had different stages of that throughout my life and I have to live with that and work through it but I also get to write music and have these really joyful moments. For me, it’s never one or the other and neither are as good without each other. It’s always important for me to have that dichotomy, that mix is what makes music interesting. I think of my favourite songs, they’re these upbeat beautiful things and they talk about utter sadness, like Love Will Tear Us Apart - the joy of that song with the absolute heartache of it is what makes it so potent. If I can scratch anywhere near that, I think that’s what makes music interesting.
What’s been the hardest lesson you’ve learned since starting Billy Nomates?
They keep coming! I think that you have to live and die by your own decisions. Some days, that’s really empowering and some days it’s utterly devastating. You have to really reason with yourself and you have to navigate this quite hostile environment by yourself on your gut feeling. That’s hard because you don’t always get it right and, as much as people might not believe, I’m incredibly sensitive and not particularly hardened to any of this stuff. Some days, you get cut really deep by what people make of it, which is silly because you don’t make anything with the intention of pleasing everyone. I certainly don’t anyway, I always know that it will be a divider. Some days, it’s a lot because you make music and you write songs and it comes from this pure place and you put it into this very unhealthy, unnatural environment. Some days that’s really hard.
Before you started Billy Nomates, you gave up making music for a time. How much is everything you do now informed by that period?
I think I just learned a bit more about life. I was working several jobs, I got bored with life, I didn’t particularly enjoy it. I learned how to make music in my spare time and I learned how to finish things in order to create something. One of the things with depression I remember reading at that time was to be creative and make things and that really taught me to finish things and put them in the world because it made me happier. I often think of that time, especially now in the UK with the state of things, it could all disappear tomorrow so I could well end up back working where I started. It feels very real and so I just try not to take too much of it for granted and lean into the time that I have to make things and not to be too caught up in it all.
Who’s given you the best advice over the course of your two records?
It would have to be Geoff Barrow, who I work with. We disagree sometimes on many things but his ultimate advice has always been trust your gut. Even when that’s against the label or people I work with, I know he means it and it’s that living and dying by your decisions, you can happily do either when it’s your decision. That’s been the most important thing.
Do you have any other nicknames?
Not really, my name is Tor and that’s short for Victoria. I’m sure there’s plenty of nicknames I don’t know about, but let’s keep it that way!
ND