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Bido Lito! June 2015
Words: Paddy Clarke / @paddyclarke
Photography: Adam Edwards / @AdamEdwardsFoto
As well as being the proud owners of one of Liverpool’s most
ferocious whirls of sonic attacks, psych rockers HOLY THURSDAY
are a welcome return to the band-as-gang mentality. From the
collective swells of dovetailing four-piece vocals to the faultlessly
choreographed stabs of interweaving, winding guitars, they’re as
tight as they come.
It’s not just onstage, however, that the group are their own,
cohesive unit. Self-produced from their own studio, Holy Thursday
are more close-knit than most, and in interview they speak in
collective resolution. “We don’t want to be someone’s project; we
want to be our own project. We’ve had people who’ve expressed
an interest in [producing us],” says keyboardist and lead-producer
Ollie. “Not any major names or anything. I think you’ve got to get
us, what we’re trying to do.”
“It’s probably a bad thing to say,” Ollie continues, “that [at first]
I was ready to record other people, that’s what I always wanted to
do, but now I just want to record us more than anything. I know
there’s some stuff there that needs to come out. I’ve done a few
bits for mates and covers bands that want to show off to wedding
people, but mostly it’s been our own stuff. Loads of things; stuff
that will never see the light of day.”
“It’s an advantage and a disadvantage,” continues Ollie,
“because of course you can record loads of stuff but it can make
you way more critical of what you’ve actually recorded. Whereas
loads of bands would go out and play stuff live first and see how
it went down, we’d just be trying to get the sounds.” “We know
what we want it to sound like…” his bandmate Callum adds. “It’s
a sound in our heads. We want to be able to capture what we
hear in our heads, and between the four of us we can do that
sufficiently without someone else coming in.” All this affirms
the sense that this group, more than most, feel like a staunch,
individualist unit. It begs the question of just how long the group
have known each other to instil such understanding.
Inquiries duly made, the group respond with an unusually
edgy laugh – “quite a while”, says guitarist Barney. “Three of us
are brothers…” says Callum, while the fourth is their cousin. “We
tend to play that one down a bit…” adds one of his siblings. “We
just haven’t talked about it yet,” Callum explains of the revelation.
“You’re the first person we’ve told about this, but we didn’t want it
to take away from what we were initially doing. Now we’ve found
a bit of a grounding with ourselves we’re happy to talk about it.”
Growing up, it was mutual immersion in the music of their
bidolito.co.uk
parents, the prog rock of Supertramp, the pop of Neil Diamond
and Motown and the usual suspects (The Beatles, The Beach Boys
et al), alongside the Britpop of their youth that sowed the seeds
of musical kinship, though they diversified in approach. “[Our
taste] is so varied,” says Barney, “and I think that’s why it took so
long for Holy Thursday to really come together.” Indeed, though
the four had joined in part under different guises for various
musical projects, it was only at the dawn of 2014 that the group
as we know them now began to coalesce.
“We sat down and thought about what we actually wanted
to last January,” remembers Liam, “and by about July we had a
good idea of what we actually wanted to do. We went through
loads of different ideas. I think the idea was to sit in a room for a
while and