BONNIE PRINCE BILLY

Prince’s Palace

Singer, songwriter, actor and long term exponent of a mighty mass of a beard, Will Oldham has a steady stream of music making its way to the stores each year, with Wolfroy Goes To Town being his latest. CHRIS HAVERCROFT spoke to Oldham as he dusts off his Bonnie Prince Billy moniker for his Perth Festival show at Festival Gardens on Friday, February 24; and at Margaret River’s Jewel Cave on Saturday, February 25, and Sunday, February 26.

He may well be a regular visitor to these shores, but it has been six long years since Will Oldham has been to Perth. Last time he was here, Matt Sweeney (Guided By Voices) was on guitar duties, but pretty much since that date, Oldham has surrounded himself with Emmett Kelly of The Cairo Gang fame. It is not unusual for Oldham to change band members, in fact he appears to do it at a whim, what is odd is that he has teamed up with Kelly for the past six years without the partnership wearing thin.
“Emmett shares a fascination and a need to explore,” says the quietly spoken Oldham of the long standing musical partnership. “We love to make music that has a relationship to the written music, performed music and recorded music that we have grown to know and love throughout our lives. At the same time I feel like Emmett and I both shy away from what are popularly recognised trappings of success. It is rare to find someone who is so fluent and energetic and excited and at the same time is quite eager to shun certain types of things having to do with material success. It just works, I don’t know why.”
Oldham has a knack for making the records of Bonnie Prince Billy share a relationship to each other that is thematically and sonically familiar without treading the same ground over again. Since the making of Wonder Show Of The World with Kelly, Oldham feels that he is in a more collaborative space. This led to the sessions for Wolfroy Goes To Town as being something very out of the ordinary for Bonnie Prince Billy.
“If there was something different in the making of this record it is that we had played together as a group for about a year, which I don’t think has ever happened in my working life before. I have never performed a record with the musicians in the live show that will then record the songs together for the album. We did that for this record. We came into it with everybody having a greater familiarity with the material than I have ever dealt with before. The only time that I think that I have done something similar was when I did a show in Venice as a solo show on my way to Iceland to record The Letting Go and I played all those songs from that record by myself.”
Oldham has a knack for uncovering dynamic female singers and lifting them from relative obscurity as their voice is used to act as a foil to his gentle tones on Bonnie Prince Billy records. The latest in this long line is Angel Olsen who hails from St Louis. Oldham’s path to Olsen is a little different in that it revolves around his fascination for the record Babble by Kevin Coyne and Dagmar Krause. Oldham considered the best way to learn more about the album that had been a passion of his for decades was to learn it and perform it.
“I couldn’t think of the ideal person who could approach the female part,” confirms Oldham of his take on Babble. “It needs to be someone with a certain access to certain levels of emotion while retaining musicality while still being experimental and expressionistic in her approach to singing, and I couldn’t think of anybody who fit that. I think the wildness is what was missing from all the women of great vocal ability that I knew. There was not a sense of unpredictability to them. I finally introduced the idea to Emmett (Kelly) and we spoke about the idea for over a year. One day he called and said, I think I saw someone here in Chicago that might be good for the Babble thing and he sent me some of her music and we met and did a couple of experimental shows to see if we got along, and we did indeed so we embarked on the Babble trip.”
Upon finding Olson, the band embarked on what Oldham describes as a full six piece expression of karaoke that they played every night. Oldham toured it as a Bonnie Prince Billy tour and then told the venue that he was bringing his own opening band called the Babblers.  Bonnie Prince Billy and band would show up with one set of equipment but with a different lighting set up, as well as costumes that they wore as The Babblers and came on and did the Babble record from beginning to end to people who didn’t know what to expect and many people didn’t know what had happened until it was over.
“It can’t be better than that. We got a couple of offers after that of people that wanted us to come and play as the Babblers, but we didn’t do that as part of the fun of it was hitting people with the intensity of that record by surprise. While we were doing Babble it was so awesome that I was thinking that maybe we should record this. At the same time it was pretty cool for what it was, and the record already exists so why would we reproduce the record as you can already get it. What you can’t get is the live experience, so that is what we were trying to do.”
During the most recent London riots there was a huge music warehouse that burnt down and the contents of it were lost. Amongst those was the vast proportion of the Domino Records catalogue which contained the records that Oldham made as Palace Music. When approached, Oldham agreed that those albums can now be reissued, but he is keen for the albums to be treated as if they have been serialised like the many editions of a pulp fiction novel with new font and art.
“For years I had always thought of those Palace records that there were things about them that I was impressed by and awed by and happy with and at the same time they were definitely a period of feeling around in the dark,” he says. “I have thought about them for years as rather than getting a university degree, I went to the Palace school of making records. It was a time of intense trial by fire education in music and recording and performing.