Sounds Made By Humans – Brian Bilston and the Catenary Wires (2025)
A perfect pop record, full of wit and great hooks, where the poetry and the music are equal partners – what’s not to like, eh?
It’s been a week full of music. There was news coverage of Taylor Swift buying her music back and Oasis balloting fans in Manchester about how close they could get to the stage. We were in London for a long weekend where there was a trip to 23 Heddon St to view the Ziggy album cover location (minus the K West sign), an afternoon in Camden posing like Simonon, Strummer and Jones on The Clash Steps and our first ever visit to the legendary Roundhouse to see The Waterboys. Back north on Wednesday, we saw my nephew Steven make his am-dram stage debut with a supporting role in an exuberant and hilarious version of the Priscilla Queen of the Desert musical at the Kings in Glasgow. He auditioned after the death of his mum last year – like my dad, my sister was active in am-dram and a huge lover of musicals and she would have been so proud of her boy.
The old six-song blog would have had a field day with that lot but there would have been no time to write it! So, this week, the new single-song format of the blog morphs into a single-album format to feature what I suspect will end up being my ‘Record of the Year’, even though we are less than halfway through 2025. It’s a bit of a throwback to the old blog where I had just started to have occasional selections on the weekly playlist under the ‘New To Me’ banner. And, not for the first time pop-pickers, I have the wonderful Mickey Bradley and his Friday night show on BBC Radio Foyle to thank for alerting me to this collaboration between two artists who were very much new to me.
The online profile of Catenary Wires tells me they were formed in 2014 and were initially a duo comprising UK indie-stalwarts Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey. They had previously been in a number of bands including C-86 legends Talulah Gosh and 90s band Heavenly, most famous for the bouncy P.U.N.K Girl. But their debut record as Catenary Wires Red Red Skies was not the fuzzy indie-pop of old – listen to debut single Intravenous from 2015. Expanding their sound and line-up to five piece for their second record in 2019, it was their third collection that got them on the critical radar. Birling Gap was released in 2021 on the Kent-based Skep Wax Records which Fletcher and Pursey founded. Try the single Mirrorball out for size.
T’internet also tells me that Brian Bilston is one of the UK’s most popular poets – I clearly live my life under a musical rock! Having started out by sharing his poems online, Bilston now has over half a million followers on social media and a number of bestselling books. The terrific Ian McMillan (a poet I have heard of!) described Bilston as “a laureate for our fractured times”. There is a great short video profile of him here which features poetry presented in Excel spreadsheets and Venn diagrams and one about never being able to fold a fitted sheet – true dat! The ‘About’ section of his website simply but brilliantly states: “I write poems” and he famously likes to hide his face in publicity shots, usually behind a poetry book.
Since the third Catenary Wires LP, Fletcher and Pursey have reactivated their band Heavenly and the story goes that word reached them that Bilston had been spotted wearing a Heavenly t-shirt at one of his shows, and was a big fan of their music. Given that they were fans of his poetry, they made contact and they became friends. Sounds Made By Humans was the outcome.
Enough of all this background stuff you’ve stolen off the world wide web, I hear you say, tell us about the bloody record! Well, if there are any long-term followers of this blog left, they may recall I have a penchant for songs which use spoken word so it’s maybe no surprise why I like it so much. This is no ‘poetry with background music’ thing – it really is a collaborative collection of songs where the words and the music wrap around each other dynamically in a true ensemble piece. The music remains decidedly indie but jumps around from shoegaze (Alexa, What Is There To Know About Love) to dream-pop (Every Song On The Radio Reminds Me Of You) and touches pretty much everything inbetween. See how many song lyrics you can spot in the latter!
On most tracks the words of the poems are spoken by Bilston but elsewhere they are sung by Fletcher and/or Pursey. And often both happen at once. The quirky, wry words leap out the speakers at you with great humour and real bite, particularly if you are old enough to have made a compilation tape, had a horrible job interview and have no use for stupid voice assistants.
It is the type of record that I am in the process of purchasing directly by mail from the Skep Wax’s Bandcamp page – I finally got round to ordering it today after securing tickets for their show at the CCA in Glasgow in November. While I rely on the reach of the evil empire of Spotify to write this blog, their pitiful payment structure for streams means I want to ensure that artists I care about get some modest reward for their efforts. The record has a final track not on the Spotify version, the withering Customers Who Bought This Record Also Bought… One review I read described it as “a hilarious litany of pointlessness and tenuously celebrity-endorsed shite of the kind people clutter up their lives with”. And the LP comes on green vinyl too!
With only one song going on the WIS Master Playlist, I had to choose the first song from the LP I heard Mickey Bradley play a few weeks ago which stopped me in my tracks – I was sat on the sofa at the time, mind. With shades of Gang of Four in its musical style, 31 Rules for Midlife Rebellion is just glorious, even though I’ve fallen foul of a couple on the list.
As an example of Bilston’s insightful work, two of the rules from the lyric are:
Renounce quinoa and banish kale
Burn all copies of the Daily Mail.
I think we can all sign up to that.
The record is a work of genius – spread the word and catch them while you can at a venue near you below.
Last Word
I forgot to mention that adding Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy to the Master Playlist last week took the total tracks on there to the mildly alarming total of 666. Fortunately, we’ve all survived that ominous (omen-ous?) count and have moved on to the safer confines of 667 tracks with the wonderous 31 Rules For Midlife Rebellion.
AR
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