Bonfire Radicals announce their third album

Bonfire Radicals, the “exhilarating and exuberant” (Songlines ★★★★) six-piece [un]traditional folk band, release their third album, Spaghetti Junction, this September. Named after Birmingham’s most notorious stretch of motorway, it is a network of musical journeys that pulls traditions from Shetland to Brazil and the British Isles to the Balkans into one splendidly unruly whole. The band play sixteen live dates across a summer of festivals and venues, with limited early copies on sale at shows before the official release.

“…a serious powerhouse of a performance… foot-stomping and adrenalin-powered… came on like folk music played by ravers.” The Arts Desk ★★★★

Known as one of Birmingham’s most adventurous folk acts, Bonfire Radicals are gloriously hard to pin down: joyful, fierce, raucous, heartfelt and full of sudden turns. Spaghetti Junction takes its title from the city’s famous tangle of roads, a fitting image for a band whose music races through traditional tunes, original compositions, unexpected detours and the occasional musical pile-up, before somehow arriving exactly where it needs to be.

Like the interchange itself, the album is a network of musical journeys that cross boundaries of geography and genre. Built around an all-female front line of recorders, fiddle, clarinet and vocals, powered by electric guitar, bass and drums, their sound fuses pounding grooves, virtuosic instrumentation, rich vocal harmonies and moments of spellbinding a cappella. The material is shaped by Ilias Lintzos’ Greek heritage, Pete Churchill’s love of Bach, and the time Sarah Farmer, Katie Stevens and Emma Reading have spent travelling, learning and absorbing music in Shetland, Bulgaria and Brazil.

These many routes come together in the hands of six musicians who thrive on connection, collision, and the happy accidents that happen when styles are allowed to sit beside one another without behaving too politely.

The opener, ‘Balkan Replacement Service’, is a Balkan-flavoured tune Pete and Katie dared each other to write in a single lunch-hour between two music workshops at HMP Birmingham. It is also the first outing for Pete’s new pride and joy, a cherry-wood Italian accordion bought with the money his solar panels made him (thank you, sun). ‘Im Tocht Lang Tae See Dee’  gathers three traditional tunes Sarah brought back from Shetland’s fiddle tradition, while ‘Northern Lights’ threads Norwegian “blue notes” and a Swedish schottis through afrobeat, South African highlife and a Sub-Saharan 6/8 groove.

There is mischief everywhere. ‘Der Heyser Bulgar’, a 19th-century dance tune made famous by clarinettist Naftule Brandwein, takes a sharp turn into a doom-rock middle section and a wonky closing waltz. ‘Green Fingered Hectus’ started as a stress dream Emma had about her first gig with the band, the one where she looked down at the set list and found a tune she had no idea how to play. The track is what that panic sounds like. The title song came out of a dare too: after a gig, Katie challenged Pete to write something about Spaghetti Junction, and he did, mock-opera choir and all, in honour of the band’s favourite piece of 1960s civil engineering, the Gravelly Hill Interchange.

The album ends close to home. ‘Birmingham Rain’, a bonus track written by local singer- songwriter Barbara Norden, is sung with the Choir With No Name Birmingham, the city’s choir for people affected by homelessness. It is a wistful, country-folk turn that sounds nothing like the rest of the record, and the band would not have it any other way. Pete is the choir’s musical director, Michelle a long-standing volunteer and Katie plays in its band, a friendship that goes back more than a decade.

As Emma Reading puts it, this is a band where “anything goes, with twists and turns that sometimes even take us by surprise”. Spaghetti Junction reflects the city it was made in: a place where people, cultures and musical traditions meet, overlap and live alongside one another. Like all big cities it holds both rootedness and rootlessness, and the band dedicate the album to anyone still searching for a place where they feel safe and can belong.

Artists’ website: www.bonfireradicals.com

‘Balkan Replacement Service’ – officially live:

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