The week before Christmas, at The Troxy in Stepney, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s month-long tour of Europe clattered to a close. Or, even, limped.
Clearly battling winter lurgy and some intra-band spikiness, the Los Angeles-based threesome slogged their way through a set that felt like it lasted three hours. The song selection was notionally based around a 20th anniversary celebration of 2005’s third album Howl. But it was also packed out with non-hits, with co-vocalist and co-guitarist Robert Been grumbling about that third album’s poor reception from the “pissants” in the UK who’d so enthusiastically lapped up predecessors B.R.M.C. (2001) and Take Them On, On Your Own (2003).
It was, all things considered, a gloriously unpolished, messily old-school rock’n’roll show. A band playing the repackage-and-reissue-the-back-catalogue game – but, also, brilliantly, not.
How, one wonders, does that assessment chime with Been’s memories?
“Ha ha, yeah, it was a mess,” the 48-year-old agrees gamely over video-call from his home in Los Angeles. He admits he was poleaxed with a “respiratory thing”, as was drummer Leah Shapiro. “Every time you took a breath it made you want to cough six times in a row. So every time I'd go up to the mic, it was just brutal. But I was fighting through it, with a bit of pride that I did fight to the end.” The only person that wasn't sick was his co-frontman and fellow songwriter Peter Hayes. “He always dodges that shit somehow. But he's pretty dead inside, so there's nothing to kill!” Been says chirpily. “He's got the Keith Richards magic.”
No wonder, then, he appeared grumpy. “I can get dry and kind of salty with shit when I'm exhausted and over it,” he admits. “You play different. And I kept having to find ways to trick the crowd into giving me more time to medicate between songs! Which I can see as being pretty irritating for some folks. Or make them feel like it's a three-hour long show when it was two!”
He did, though, have a point about Howl and its reception. The UK fell hard for BRMC’s first album, a ragged throwback of fuzzy indie-rock that recalled Scotland’s Jesus & Mary Chain. Releasing three months before the one-two punch of The White Stripes’ White Blood Cells and The Strokes Is This It, the Californians and their peers combined in a scene-galvanising burst of exciting new American guitar music. But Howl, as embodied by biggest track Ain’t No Easy Way, was a throwback of a different kind: rootsier, blues-flavoured, so country-textured that its working title was Americana. The regal British “inkie” music press were not amused.
“We always knew that the love affair thing was gonna have its snapback eventually, because that’s the nature of that beast,” says Been sanguinely. “But, um, yeah, we didn't think it would be so ice-cold.” But he’s right when he says that, eventually, Howl came to be viewed as a retro-cool statement of intent. “And ironically, all the folks back in the States who gave us the cold shoulder for the first two records were actually into Howl first. Everything kept reversing on us. It's a little discombobulating,” the loquacious, horizontally laidback Been says drily. “But, you know, that's f*cking rock’n’roll.”
That Americana sound was all the more out-of-kilter for the period given that Howl began life in the UK. BRMC were living in London at the time, partly due to the visa issues of then-drummer, Englishman Nick Jago. Theirs, though, was a combustible relationship, definitely not helped by the very druggy, boozy scene in which the band were immersed. The year before they made Howl, BRMC had an onstage fight in Edinburgh. Jago then left the band, only rejoining once the Howl sessions were pretty much complete (he left again 2008).
“It was really devastating,” Been remembers of that initial split. “We're young boys in this big world alone with just each other. So you feel like you're going through one of your most intense breakups. Because your boy, your right-hand man, has left the boat. So you're scared and hurt and feeling sorry for yourself.”
That, plus a sense of homesickness, all fed into the songs Been and Hayes were writing. “We were feeling things pretty intensely,” he recalls of a time in which they were also dropped by their record label and were enduring “management stuff... It felt like we were alone and nobody was welcoming us back to the party. So we had to prove ourselves to get allowed back in the room. We didn't know how to do that, and that made us real self-conscious. So we just made something where we knew, if everything else failed, we could at least feel peace of mind that we made a record that we loved.”
It was job very much done, and BRMC got back in the saddle and kept making records, albeit never with the ultimate success of their first three albums. Still: those recent Howl anniversary shows were, chaotic London gig included, a success.
“The actual tour, we were getting on better,” says Been. “We were trying to figure out how to be a band again. We needed that. We're doing different things at the moment – I did a film score – so the band's been cooling its jets. But it was a good sign that everyone came back together and found joy in playing together again.
“Because to be honest, a lot of that had been taken away from us,” he continues, “because we've been on a permanent loop since 1999, constantly on the road or in studio. The wheels had fallen off the wagon multiple times. But now it feels a little less like we're heading off the cliff.”
In that tour’s spirit of alchemising the murk of the past to make a brighter future, then: this spring is the 25th anniversary of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s debut album. How about using that moment as an inciting point to start a new record?
“Yeah, that's not a bad idea,” muses Rob Been, smiling and nodding. “I don't know if we're gonna do the looking-backwards thing again. But using it as inciting mark to look forward – I like that idea.”
The 20th Anniversary box set of Howl is out now blackrebelmotorcycleclub.com
