POST-BURNOUT
On the 11th of July, the new Sunderland-based goth band Black Rain released their self-titled debut album. For guitarist and vocalist, Josh Cowey, the band is allowing him to finally realise his dream of being in a successful band after a period away from playing.
Just under two weeks before the album was released, Josh spoke to Post-Burnout about starting this band, making the album, the Sunderland music scene, and much more.
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You’re gearing up for the release of your debut record. The press release said the band formed in March 2024, so, for me, it seems like a very quick turnover rate…
Definitely. It’s felt quick, but it feels like it’s been a long time coming, at the same time. We’ve kind of came out of nowhere, really, but it’s been a busy eighteen months or so, and here we are. So, yeah, it’s good.
It’s a good complaint to have, being too busy, I guess! [Laughs]
Yeah, yeah, yeah! [Laughs] I get a bit of stick from my wife, but it is what it is!
Whereabouts is the band based, actually?
So, we’re kind of from the North East of England. So, we rehearse at a place in Sunderland, so we’re kind of based around there, which is where Scott lives. Me and Mick live a bit further out, but, yeah, we kind of set ourselves in the North East and try and spread our wings as much as, then.
Who’s in the band now? Because I couldn’t find a list.
Fair enough. You’ve got Scott [Hays], who plays bass; I’m vocals and guitar; and Mick [Christon] plays drums.
So, it’s a trio? Because when I was listening to the record, it really sounds like a massive soundscape, you know?
Yeah, it is. We try and make it sound bigger than the sum of its parts. Our setup is very straightforward; there’s no backing tracks or any kind of outside help, if you like. But, yeah, we just try and keep things simple, but hopefully, effective, is the whole craic, really.
How did the band come about initially?
So, me and Scott, we’d both been in bands in our late teens/early twenties, and we both had quite a protracted break away from it, with life getting in the way and all that sort of stuff. So, we were both kind of missing it. Mick, being…you know what drummers are like; they’re in about five different bands at any one time, but Mick kind of kicked on, all the way through. We met online. I think Scott put an advert out, kind of saying, “Look, we’ve been out of the game a little bit. I kind of fancy getting back into it. Here’s some bands that I like,” because you have to do that. I was in a similar sort of position, and I think the bands that Scott mentioned piqued Mick’s interests, as well, and we kind of went from there. We decided to get into a rehearsal room and just hash some stuff out and see what happened, and it’s worked out good. It’s one of those clichéd “Join my band” internet stories, but it’s actually gone somewhere; rather than three blokes standing around in a room for a couple of hours, it’s dead awkward, and then they never see each other again.
I’ve been there! [Laughs]
Yeah, so I’m glad this one’s worked out! [Laughs]
Do you think working as a three-piece is sort of beneficial, because…? Like, even some people just do two-pieces now, and a lot of the reason for that is just for scheduling. It’s just a nightmare to get…like, especially, if people are working, or they have a family, and things like that, it’s just an absolute nightmare to work around people’s schedules. So, has that been beneficial to the project?
A hundred per cent. Like, we’re always going to be a three-piece. We’ve no interest in adding more gear, or people, or logistics into it. Already, it’s difficult enough, as it is, especially when we do the sort of gothy gigs that we do. We sit in both camps a little bit. We pick up gigs from punk bands, we pick up gigs from rock bands, and a lot of the goth bands we play with are two-pieces or solo acts, and it’s backing tracks, and, for me, it just doesn’t land as well as having proper live instruments. Drum kits, in particular, make a massive difference live, as well. So, just keeping things as simple as possible, to minimise the logistics and stuff, has been a massive help for us, live.
Yeah, I will say that I think electronica kind of complements gothic music.
Yeah, it does, and it’s definitely got a place. I’m not saying it doesn’t for one second; I’m just saying, for me, unless you’re playing in a venue where the sound system is up to it, it just doesn’t land as well as a proper drum kit and proper instruments.
Yeah, it’s funny to me that some sound engineers at venues and stuff still kind of get freaked out when someone brings in a drum machine. [Laughs] You’re kind of like, “Well, we’ve been using this since the ‘80s!”
Nightmare soundchecks we’ve had, where there’s a band with a backing track, and their soundcheck takes two hours, and we’ve got five minutes at the end, which is like, “You’re on, and play half-a-song, and that’s what you’re getting” sort of a thing. But, it’s a part of it, innit? Like, it’s just part of the game, part of the fun, and everyone’s got their own way of doing it, and everyone’s making it work as best as they can, and you can’t really begrudge it. But, yeah, definitely my preference is, if there’s noise happening, it should be coming from the proper instrument rather than out of a track or whatever. But it’s horses for courses, isn’t it? It’s one of them.
Yeah, of course. One thing that I wanted to ask, you mentioned that it was an ad that was posted online, so I was wondering what the reference points were, in terms of what drew everyone to get involved?
So, you go on those sort of [websites]… – you say you have experience with them, as well – …and 99.9% of them are covers bands, and they’re like, “I want to play The Killers, and the Kaiser Chiefs, and [Mumbles],” and all that sort of stuff. There was a bit more of a kind of, “Oh, I like Joy Division” or “I like The Cure,” or…It’s still kind of the obvious picks, but a lot more in my sort of wheelhouse, rather than just playing songs at somebody’s wedding. So, that definitely piqued it for me, and the whole being out of the game a little bit, wanting to get back into it, I was like, “Oh, I can relate to that,” and it felt like a bit less pressure than walking into a band where everybody’s been doing it all the way through, and I’m kind of at the thick end of a decade after not doing anything, coming back into it. So, there was a couple of different things, and you get talking online, and, I mean, Scott’s lovely and Mick’s great, as well, and we kind of clicked really well straight away. It was definitely the kind of normal, cliché cover bands that were mentioned on the advert that drew me in, 100%.
Yeah, I guess you could play maybe like a black wedding. [Laughs] One of those alternative wedding things.
Yeah. [Laughs] We haven’t quite got to weddings, but we’ve had offers to play birthday parties from the scene and that sort of stuff, and I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but it would be a very different vibe, let’s put it that way.
You were mentioning coming back to music after being away from it for a while. Was it like riding a bicycle, or was it more difficult than that?
I guess, for me, probably a little more so. I mean, when I hadn’t been in bands, I kind of settled away in my spare room, the whole time, and just kept writing stuff, because it was my hobby and that’s what I do in my spare time. I think Scott found it a little more difficult; he, pretty much, had not picked up a bass guitar for the best part of twenty years, and the first couple of practices… – he’ll admit, himself – …he was kind of relearning how to play bass alongside all the other stuff that comes with rehearsing in a band. So, yeah, a bit of a mixture of both, really. I think, quite quickly, we sorted ourselves out, and started to make some actual noise, rather than just crap. So, yeah.
[Laughs] Well, that’s the important thing, too, is also when you start a band like that, what’s also awkward is that, first of all, you’re trying to make sure that your musical tastes are aligned to the point that you can actually create something with a consistent vision. You don’t have to listen to the exact same kinds of music, but that everyone’s there to focus on a particular style of music and what they craft. But the important thing – …and I relate to what you’re saying there about the awkward rehearsal sessions… – is that when you’re starting to gel with people on a personal level like that, was that easy, too? Like, did you guys just click from the get-go?
Yeah, it’s a bit of a funny one, that, because, absolutely, we did, and, yeah, we’re really close. But we’re all of a very different age, we’re all very different in what we do for a living, and all that sort of stuff. The only similarity we have is the music we like, but we’ve found such commonality in that that we’ve just kind of grown through that. It’s one of them, where you can almost be too similar sometimes to a slight detriment. We’re all our own personalities, we’ve all got things outside of the band that we like to do, but when we’re in that setting, it’s very much, Right, we’re here for this, and this is what we all enjoy doing together. It’s very nice.
The music that you guys are making is, obviously, very gothic and dark, but also very industrial. I think when people hear “industrial,” they think of Ministry or something, but I just mean more so in terms of it really invokes black-and-white images, for me, of industrial cities in the 20th Century. If you’ve ever seen The Elephant Man, those sorts of images were coming to me. When it came to singing over that style of music, is that naturally the way you sing or did you have to add some character flair in order to fit the music?
I mean, I’m not a good enough singer to put an act on. What you kind of get is what you get. But, vocally, for me, I’ve taken a lot of influence from…I mean, I’ve got a kind of naturally deep voice anyway, which pushes it right down. But bands like…I used to love Editors, growing up, as a kid. Joy Division, as well, sits in there. The Smiths sit in there. There’s not a lot of bands that I can relate to, vocally, because it tends to sit a little bit higher, but from growing up and stuff, those are the big three that spring to mind that have that sort of…I don’t know what you’d call it; a bit of a droney sort of sound in it, and it’s lowdown, but it’s loud and it’s projected.
A bit of baritone, yeah?
Yeah, rather than the kind of low and mumbly sort of sound. I think people who have a higher voice tend to get a bit mumbly when they get lower, but there’s not many where they’re belting it out, but it’s in that register, from my experience. So, they’re probably where I’d say that comes from.
Yeah, that’s a really good point that I haven’t considered. When you listen to a lot of gothic music, as you mentioned, yeah, it is in that lower register, but there’s always full clarity. The vocals always tend to be quite high in the mix. As you mentioned, Joy Division, Ian Curtis, or something like that, the vocals are at the forefront. That’s an observation that I hadn’t even really made; just the clarity in the vocal range, rather than, as you mentioned, that mumbly thing. So, that just kind of happened organically for you? It wasn’t something you had to train?
Yeah, it’s just how I’ve always sang; I’ve not had any training or anything. It’s one of them where you get pushed into it because nobody else wants to do it, in your first bands when you’re in your teens, and you just kind of go from there and try and make it work as best you can. A bit of reverb and a bit of delay can hide quite a lot of sins, I tend to find. But, yeah, you just kind of fall into it, and it’s a bit weird for me to play live and not sing now, because it’s all I know. Yeah, just kind of fell into it and went from there, really.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying. It feels a bit like you’re losing a limb or something like that when you don’t sing. [Laughs]
[Laughs] God, it would be the same as singing and not playing the guitar. I’d be like, “Well, I don’t know what to do with my hands!” But, yeah, it’s one of them.
So, when it came to gig opportunities and things like that, how did you find gigging around with the music you’re doing?
We’ve been very fortunate, to be fair. We’ve done really well out of it, and we’ve had some good support from venues in Sunderland, in particular. There’s a really strong scene in Sunderland, at the minute. And we rehearse at a place called The Bunker, which has practice rooms for music lessons, and it has a venue in it, and it has a recording studio. That’s where we recorded the album, and that’s very much our musical home. And a lot of other bands in Sunderland rehearse there, as well, so we’ll see guys on a weekly basis, almost, who you get to know, and there’s a couple of bands who stick out that we’ve played with multiple times off the backs of just getting to know them, really. With the whole Music City thing that’s happening in Sunderland at the minute… – they’ve got that group now – …that kind of helps, as well. We’ve not had too much support directly, but they’re always like dead supportive, and they’ll post stuff if we’re doing a gig or, obviously, with the album, they’ve been reposting stuff, as well, which helps. But, yeah, basing ourselves in Sunderland has probably been the biggest factor in allowing us to be as big as we are, gig-wise.
Then, onto the album itself, it’s self-titled. It’s your debut album. Did you have a full songbook crafted beforehand, did you have ideas beforehand, or is this just naturally what came out as you were collaborating?
So, yes and no. I mean, with this being quite new, the setlist and the songs that we would actively rehearse and drive would kind of organically change over that twelve months, anyway. You kind of graduate from your first songs, then you kind of write some slightly better ones, and some of those originals stay, and some of them go, and some of them change, and that sort of stuff. You know the score. So, we kind of ended up with, probably, a dozen songs, maybe a bit more, to pick from. We really struggled originally because, when we went into the studio, the intention was to just stick to three to five studio songs, stick an EP out, and see how it went. But then we played a gig at The Bunker, as a bit of an anniversary of our first gig there, and Phil the soundman, who also did the album for us, just completely captured our sound in that live setting, and they were too good not to use. It was one of those where you hope…You have a sound in your head that you hope you sound like, and that’s the first time that we heard ourselves back live and gone, “That’s exactly how we think we sound,” if that makes sense.
Yeah, totally.
So, yeah, it just felt like it would be such a shame to not use them, so we kind of took the opportunity to show off a few more songs that we hadn’t recorded that were slightly newer or we didn’t, maybe, think fitted in as one of the original five, but it definitely had a home in that extended list of songs on the album.
I’m interested in your release pattern, because at the moment, it seems like a lot of people are focusing on…If they were to record a full body of work, as you guys did, they’d bring them out, periodically, as singles, because that’s the nature of the game. But for yourselves, you have a single out, but you’ve decided now to just release an album in one go.
We just thought, “Aim for a penny, aim for a pound. Just go for it.” It’s something we’re toying with for a follow-up release, but I think, for us, we’re not really doing it for a kind of commercial aspect or anything; we’re doing it because we enjoy doing it. We’ve kind of been…not “pestered”; it’s the wrong word, but we always get asked at gigs, “Oh, do you have a CD we can have? Are you on Spotify?”, and all that sort of stuff, so we kind of felt we owed it to people to have something up that they could listen back to, if they wanted to. So, it’s just kind of born out of all that, really. There’s no alternative motive behind it, beyond, “Right, at this moment of time, this is where we’re at, so have that.” Then, next year, whatever then, that’s the snapshot from then, and then that will be the snapshot from where we are at that period of time. So, yeah, just stick it out there and see where it goes, really.
Were there many songs that didn’t make the final record, or is pretty much everything you had on the record?
Eh, I would say four or five that we’ve already had that aren’t on there that we kind of play, occasionally, live, and then there’s probably three or four newer ones that weren’t ready or still in the works, and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, we’ve sat on a fair few songs, if you think about it, but they were definitely the ones that we were happiest with and, at that point in time, were ready to go. If we did it again now, there’d probably be two or three that would be different, just as your songwriting develops and things move on and that sort of stuff. But, I think in terms of where we were when we recorded it at the start of the year, I think that’s our best foot forward of what we could bring to the table.
As we’re speaking now, the record is a few weeks away from releasing. Is there nervousness now or excitement?
I’m just looking forward to getting them out. I think it’s one of them where we’ve, obviously, had these songs since day dot of being in a band, and it’s great to play them live, and it’s great for people who hear it live to comment on it, one way or the other, but to get them out in the big, bad world, so to speak, rather than those little bubbles of live performances, I think it’s exciting. As I say, we do it because we like to do it, and we’ve had some really, really nice comments about them. For some people, it hasn’t been for them. That’s fine, as well. Different strokes, different folks, innit? Some people like it, some people don’t. That’s fine. At the end of the day, we’re really pleased with it, and it’s just a reflection of all the music we like and what we like doing, really.
Yeah, don’t compromise for anyone. [Laughs]
No, it’s one of them, innit? You can tie yourself in knots, getting worried about what other people think, but, at the end of the day, you’ve just got to get your head down and do it how you want to do it.
I love the message that you guys have, which is kind of like your mantra: “Too goth for the punks. Too punk for the goths.” I really did get that when I was listening to the record; you really do see influence from punk and goth. One thing I really loved was the tones of your instruments. I thought they were really stellar. Was that worked on, or was that your sound from the get-go?
Yeah, it’s something that we definitely have worked on since we started rehearsing. Scott, in particular, takes great pride in his sound, and the bass massively drives the record – it’s enormous – and it sounds exactly the same in a little 6×6 room on a Tuesday night as it does belting out on a stage somewhere. He’s done a fantastic job with it. And I’m really pleased with how it’s been captured on the record, as well. It’s a really good reflection of it. I’m a little bit more…Like I’ve said before, everything is as straightforward as I can keep it, so I have my board and it’s one sound, and if I need to kick it up a notch, then there’s another pedal to give it a kick up the arse. Scott’s into the kind of technology behind all the pedals, and he’s got different sections of his board that do different things, and it’s brilliant how he does it; it’s really clever, but I just can’t be arsed.
I’m exactly on your wavelength with that. I cannot deal with massive pedalboards because, eventually, my brain just fizzles out.
And you always end up gravitating back to the same two or three, anyway. Like, regardless of what’s there. I’ve done the whole…one of those big Boss ME-150, or whatever it is; the big multi-effect thing that can do five thousand different sounds or whatever. They’re really good, but after hours, hours, and hours of pissing about with it, you end up with three sounds that you use all the time, anyway, so it just defeats the object, really, anyway. So, from Scott’s point of view, I think it absolutely makes the record. It’s a massive part of our sound, and it fills a lot of the negative space, and just widens the whole thing out, whereas I’m a bit more of a simpleton with it, and I like what I like, and I know it works, and I know it’s not going to let me down or anything like that. I just stick with that, really. I’m not really adventurous when it comes to pedals.
I can say the same. [Laughs] Well, I guess it’s better now, because with the electronic pedals, you can experiment a bit more, whereas, before, you’d have to fork out a couple of hundred every time you wanted to try new pedals.
And I’ve kind of migrated away from it. So, I had that, and then, just as I say, I just used these same three things, so I’m just going to buy them, because I like them. I know they’re sound. So, yeah, I just got rid of them. I think I’ve only got half a dozen pedals on the board now, and one of them’s a tuner and one of them’s a compressor, so they don’t really do a lot, anyway. That’s about it. Just to minimise the amount of faff, really.
Perfect. One final thing I wanted to ask was about doing things for the love of it rather than for any kind of commercial prospect. What are the band’s prospects? Obviously, you want to be successful, but you’re not too worried about the “proper way,” quote-unquote, to do things. So, is it just doing something that would have resonance in the local scene, or would you like global expansion?
We’ve started to spread our wings a little bit. Last year, I would say, we were… – what? – …75% local, and a few away days and stuff thrown in. The end of this year and into next year is looking more like 90% away days, and more local ones chucked in, instead. So, we’re definitely looking to spread our wings, spread our reach. We quite like the adventure of the…we call them “an away-day gig,” where you kind of have just a bit of a step into the unknown, and a bit more of a challenge, and you try to win over people that you don’t know, and all that sort of stuff. We’re really up for that. So, for us, to get out and about, play some cool venues, meet some similar-minded people for the craic, and that sort of stuff is what we’re about, really. If people like it along the way, and bigger shows or whatever else comes off the back of it, then cool, but we’re not going to lose sleep over it if it doesn’t because, at the end of the day, we’re doing it for us, first and foremost, and everything else is a bonus.
Black Rain’s self-titled debut album is out now. You can keep up with the band through their Linktree.
You can see Black Rain live at:
Sep. 26th – Sunderland – Sanctum Sanctorium @ The Fire Station (TICKETS)
Oct. 4th – Leeds – Carpe Noctum (Details TBA)
Nov. 1st – Whitby – Jay Sinful’s Shadow Factory @ Crafty Cove (TICKETS)
Feb. 28th – York – The Boneyard Blitz @ The Fulford Arms (TICKETS)
Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.