Acclaimed blues-rock band Brave Rival to play hometown gig at The Lens Studio, Portsmouth | Interview

In that first year the Portsmouth-based band were already starting to make waves with their live shows, with co-vocalists Chloe Josephine and Lindsey Bonnick fronting Ed Clarke on guitar, Donna Peters on drums and Billy Dedman on bass. Raw Ramp Magazine picked them as one of the Top 20 Bands To Watch In 2020 and they were nominated for Breakthrough Act 2019 by Get Ready To Rock Radio.

Then of course Covid forced them to put things on hold – but behind the scenes they weren’t idle.​

They started off 2022 with Amba Tremain depping for Chloe while she was on maternity leave. Amba is of course a renowned solo act in her own right and as Lindsey recalls: ‘It seems so long ago when Amba was with us – she was incredible, and in turn she got the original music bug when she was on tour with us, and has subsequently released her own EP and been doing loads of gigs of her own music. It's great, because I feel like we've ignited her original music flame and she's gone with it, which is awesome.’

But once Chloe was back in place beside Lindsey focus turned towards gearing up for the release of their debut album, Life’s Machine, playing as many gigs as possible, and as Lindsey says, they ‘hit the road running.’

The album, to quote one of its song’s titles had been a Long Time Coming. They had put out a live album in 2020 to give people an idea of what they’re about. But they were originally due to go into the studio to record their debut-proper in April 2020, which didn’t happen for obvious pandemic-related reasons. It did however allow them to write more songs and hone the material with Life’s Machine ultimately coming out last May to widespread acclaim.

Looking back, Lindsey says: ‘It's definitely been our best year yet – it feels like it hasn't stopped!’

When they finally got the CD copies in hand, Lindsey describes it as ‘euphoric.’

‘When we got the physical copies through, we knew how much time and hard work had gone into it – that's obviously the same with every artist – but because it was our first one it was really quite overwhelming that we had some proper songs to play to the world.

‘We'd been playing some of these songs for years before they came out and we could finally show people: this is what it's meant to sound like with all the bells and whistles on! And it got really well received with lots of amazing press from it.’

As if the band’s sound wasn’t already huge enough, they gathered some of the area’s biggest voices to join them on a couple of the album’s tracks as The Bravian Choir – Amba, Bradley Jago, Faye Carpenter, Leonie Gale, Olivia Haggarty and Marlene Hill.

‘They’re all really sweet people, and some of them joined us at the album launch show for the big songs like Long time Coming and Come Down – it was a real special show, and it was nice to get them involved again.’

The choir were recorded at St Mary’s Church in Fratton, which is where the band returned recently for an acoustic session to record tracks for their forthcoming double-disc deluxe vinyl version of the album. Available now for pre-order, it will feature four bonus tracks.

‘Chloe's brother is the organist at the church, so it's quite nice we can use that amazing space. Entirely accidentally we went there exactly a year to the day from recording the choir and recorded five acoustic tracks.’

On Christmas Eve they shared a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s classic The Sound of Silence from the session. While that won’t be on the vinyl, Lindsey says of the four that are: ‘There’s one brand new song, which will possibly be going on album two, it's been very well received – we've been slipping it into some of our live shows, and the others are reworkings of album tracks. They’re all done acoustically, there’s some cajon on there, it sounds really good.’

The vinyl, which is limited to 300 copies and will be in glorious purple, is due in March, and at the time of speaking they had test copies in hand and were finalising the artwork. As Lindsey says: ‘It's in process, but it's another “long-time-coming” thing getting the vinyl done. But it is coming and we've had loads of preorders.’

And they’ve already started writing album two.

‘We're constantly writing, it never stops. We've probably got about 50 songs that are half-written – it's like, can we just pick a song tonight and stick with it? And it never ever happens like that, it always goes off on a tangent, someone will start riffing when we're having a cup of tea, and it's, “Oh for god's sake, we're writing a new song now!”' she laughs.

The band features a number of multi-instrumentalists.

‘Donna also plays the piano and Ed also plays the drums and flute – I play a mean tambourine too,’ she laughs, ‘but I don't do it live... just in case I mess it up.’

And could this be a new direction for Brave Rival? ‘Ed actually does beatboxing flute – but we haven't broken that into a set, yet. Yet! We'll have to get it into a show one day...’ Lindsey jokes.

As the end of the year rolled around, the album appeared on several ‘best of 2022’ lists.

‘It's a bit weird!’ says Lindsey, ‘when you get notified, you’re like: “Really? We're on that list? We can't be on that list!”

‘It's a bit of a double-edged sword, not in a bad way, but more, “how the hell are we on that list?” We've worked bloody hard to get our name out there and get noticed, so we feel in some ways like we deserve to get noticed – that's really nice.

‘We've done so much work 0 if it’s the opening of an envelope, we're there! If someone asks us if we can do something, we'll say, “Yes, how can we make it work?” Because we want to share our music with people because we are extremely passionate about it. When you see you're on a best album list for 2022 or something, it's reassuring to us that we're doing a good job and people are liking what we're doing. We're absolutely not going to stop.’

The band were nominated for best emerging act at last year’s UK Blues Awards. It’s a measure of how far they’ve come that this time around they’ve bagged seven nominations in five categories for this year’s awards including for best band and acoustic artist, Ed in young artist, then Chloe and Lindsey get a nod each in vocalist, and Ed again and Donna in instrumentalist of the year.

The nominations were announced after we spoke, but Lindsey says of the awards: ‘They have been so good to us. We were nominated for emerging act last year alongside some people we completely look up to – people who are doing such good work within the blues and rock industry. It's just incredible to even be on that list, and then when we got to go to the awards we were hanging out with all of these cool people we see online, and listen to their music, and then we're meeting them and having pictures with them – it's like, hell yeah, this is what we want to do with our lives!’

The band were also invited to compete for the UK entry into the most recent International Blues Challenge. While they didn’t ultimately get the nod, they made it to the final five and it was another feather in their collective cap.

‘It was incredible to be put forward for that from such a big group of artists – to think Brave Rival could rock this, it was awesome and again, we were hanging out with all these cool people. It was like having imposter syndrome – are we really here?

‘But we're really grateful for all of the opportunities we've been given and for all of the venues and promoters who've given us these chances. That goes for all of us new artists – if it wasn't for them giving us a chance, and also the bigger artists who are giving support slots to us. Getting support slots is quite tricky for us as we're a big unit – we don't break off into a one or two person acoustic act. We are a band, we come as a family, so we're grateful for people who give us a chance to do that.’

Brave Rival play The Lens Studio, Portsmouth, on Thursday, February 2, doors 8pm. Tickets £12. Go to portsmouthguildhall.org.uk.