For their first few months in the limelight, Black Honey shrouded themselves in an air of deliberate mystery, playing secret sets in hometown Brighton and releasing low key demos, barely showing their faces to an increasingly curious fan base. At last this year they appeared on the festival rounds, playing hometown Brighton’s The Great Escape and making appearances on Reading & Leeds’ Festival Republic stage. This Autumn they have embarked on their headline UK tour, but with plenty of new tracks up their sleeves they still stun audiences with that element of mystery and surprise.
Bristol’s own Rozelle supported on Thursday night, bringing a euphoric and fresh sound with haunting vocals from front women Hayley Smith and Loulou Barrie. Just 10 days after their debut EP release at the Louisiana, they enchanted the crowd in Start The Bus’ atmospheric performance space, playing from a tiny stage overlooked by a split-level standing area. Eerie and dark ‘Fold’ was the highlight of the set, sending shivers down the collective spines of the audience members with guitars steadily escalating in intensity to dramatic climax. Rozelle return to the Louisiana on November 9.
Enjoying her support’s exciting set, Black Honey’s Izzy Bee could be seen standing alone at the back of the crowd, wearing a band T-shirt and hand stitched “Black Honey” choker. At 10pm sharp she and her band took to the stage, starting immediately with the first few bars of new hit ‘Spinning Wheel’ painstakingly drawn out, demanding the crowd’s attention. The room quieted down as the song very quickly picked up a wild pace, Bee’s breezy vocals ripping into a shrieking crescendo. The wooden boards lining the walls and the tattered red theatre curtains around the stage made added to a very cinematic performance, the song itself feeling like it would belong in the soundtrack to a Western thriller. Indeed, her leather and suede clad bandmates would not have looked out of place hijacking trains in the Mississippi. Bee’s platinum blonde hair and Riot Grrrl aesthetic with powerful bold vocals perfectly capture the simultaneously sweet and savage qualities of the band, appropriately epitomised in the name “Black Honey”.
‘Spinning Wheel’ was followed by ‘Madonna’, their debut and a seamless mash of genres from 60s surf to modern rock. ‘Sleep Forever’ was appropriately played melancholically and extortionately slow. However the mood was lifted by Bee’s following merchandise sales pitch, laughing that “If you buy [our shirts] it means we can eat on tour!” Noughties jam ‘Bloodlust’ was met with liberal head banging from the crowd, and upbeat ‘Corrine’, the band’s latest release, clearly saw the performers enjoying the hell out of their own music as much as the audience was. The set ended with 3 unreleased tracks. “Mothership” became frankly terrifying when it got to Bee’s repetitive begging to “hold me silent, sway me slowly, I wait for mothership to control me”, coming to an apocalyptic close with screeching guitars and howling vocals. The closing song ‘You Said It All’ was an electric close, high energy and ending on a cliff-hanger as the members sprinted off the stage into the crowd as soon as the last note had been played.
After the performance the band hovered around their merchandise stand signing posters and T-shirts. Bassist Tommy Taylor happily told the story of the attempted kidnap of band’s lucky mascot, pink lawn flamingo Jerry, by Peace’s Harry Koisser. Meanwhile, guitarist Chris Ostler and Izzy Bee herself chatted to familiar faces in the audience, which, after their WhatsApp escapades of last year, really helps establish them as a personable band not aloof from their fans.
Listen to ‘Corrine’ below: