Despite having received strong critical acclaim for their 2022 debut album Life’s Machine, Portsmouth-based blues-meets-classic rockers Brave Rival have opted to retain their independence for the newly released follow-up, Fight Or Flight. Below, co-lead singers Lindsey Bonnick and Chloe Josephine explain why the Joe Bonamassa-approved five-piece still favour “the hands-on approach” – for now.
Brave Rival have become one of the UK’s hardest-working bands, performing 86 shows in 2023 alone for Life’s Machine. It sounds like hard but rewarding work.
Chloe Josephine: That’s a very good way of describing it. We seem to spend almost our whole lives in the van.
Who does the driving?
Lindsey Bonnick: We are very lucky that [Rupert] the husband of our drummer Donna [Peters] is a sound engineer who owns and runs the studio that we record and rehearse in, and he also handles most of the driving. Just about everything is done in-house.
It must take a huge amount of invisible graft to keep moving forward. So behind the scenes who does what?
Chloe: Right now I’m packaging the Fight Or Flight CDs to be mailed out. Lindsey and Billy [Dedman, bassist] do all our designing. Billy liaises with the booking agent. Lindsey runs our website, and I handle the merch. Donna does our adverts and marketing.
Lindsey: Some day it would be nice to hand over a few of those tasks, but for the moment the hands-on approach works best, especially with things like social media.
The mix of your two voices is central to Brave Rival’s sound. Do you remember the moment when the potential of that became evident?
Lindsey: It was a long time ago. We’ve been singing together for eleven years. We met in a Motown band, when Chloe auditioned for that.
Chloe: We clicked straight away, but since then we’ve really learned how to blend our voices. It’s blossomed into something that’s effortless.
It sounds like a cliché, but more than most of your contemporaries Brave Rival genuinely seem to enjoy being on stage together.
Lindsey: Always. Absolutely.
Chloe: It blows my mind that some bands don’t take pleasure from playing live. Otherwise why would you do it?
From producer Tarrant Shepherd to guest keyboard player Johnny Shepherd, and using the same studio as for your previous, first album, with Fight Or Flight the band adopted an attitude of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
Chloe: Yeah, but this time there are strings on three of the songs. Because the first album was done at the end of lockdown, this time we felt more of an ownership of the songs.
Several of the album’s songs touch on mental health. Five years ago we probably wouldn’t have even talked about that subject, let alone set those opinions to music.
Lindsey: It’s become more accepted to speak about mental health. Coming out of a pandemic, almost all of us struggle in different ways. We are very open about how we deal with our own issues, also those of people that we meet on the road. We encourage that, and doing so helps to normalise it.
The song Five Years On celebrates the first half-decade of Brave Rival and voices hope for the next five.
Lindsey: Having come from almost nothing to selling out our own shows, including the Wedgewood Rooms [in Portsmouth], we’re massively optimistic for the future.
So, realistically speaking, where would you like to be five years from now?
Chloe: Playing bigger venues and getting more radio play is great, of course, but it would be lovely to be doing this as our full-time job.
Brave Rival are touring throughout September and October. The band launch Fight Or Flight with a date at London’s Dingwalls on September 12. Physical copies are available from the Brave Rival website.
