The Blackheart Orchestra Reveal The Cosmic Inspiration Behind Their New Album Hotel Utopia.
With the impending release of their deeply spiritual and thought-provoking new album Hotel Utopia, Chrissy Mostyn and Rick Pilkington, of The Blackheart Orchestra, reveal exclusively to Rock Scribe Files the divine inspiration behind this album’s cosmic musical journey.
Rick Pilkington and Chrissy Mostyn.
Interview by Paul Davies
In a myriad of wondrous ways, The Blackheart Orchestra's latest and liminal recording, Hotel Utopia, hovers on the threshold and is the soundtrack to the unknown. It overflows with cosmic ruminations on a journey into inner space and attempts to address the existential preoccupations of the human condition, from time immemorial, of what might, or might not, occur to us mere mortals after death. It's a mystery we all share but we can only know, or not, the answer individually once we have transitioned beyond this physical realm. Hotel Utopia attempts to process this eternal conundrum with an enchanting album of ethereal and celestial music as one half of The Blackheart Orchestra duo Chrissy Mostyn reveals this album’s inspiration: “I think after losing my mum, I've always been a little bit fascinated with death. It's wanting to know the answers. It's an eternal human question, isn't it? But it was very much like, gosh, is she still around? Because I remember when we released Mesmeranto it got to number 18 in the Rock Charts on the 18th of October, which was my mum's birthday. I know that we always look for meaning in things, but that kind of felt really bizarre." Multi-instrumentalist Rick Pilkington expands upon this album's theme: "Hotel Utopia developed these kinds of thoughts, or maybe our thoughts developed, we developed them in thinking about the afterlife, was there an afterlife? Is there an afterlife? Is there anything after the light goes out? It's about belief. It's about faith. It's about hope. It's about wonder. It's about fear. Did we do good enough to deserve an afterlife and all these kinds of thoughts that have been programmed into us all our lives about what happens when it all changes." Chrissy agrees: "And I guess that feeling of fear. Maybe, it will be easier if there was nothing as well?" These universal feelings are translated into the thirteen mesmeric songs that make up Hotel Utopia: "The songs were sort of marinated in that kind of thinking and that's the way they came out," says Rick, "so you put them in a row, it looks like it's a concept album. But it was never intended to be it was just a kind of a diary of our lives and thoughts over a period of writing." With its fluttering layers of music, the ebb and flow of the opening song Tides find Chrissy in angelic voice on a musical movement inspired by her mother's death. This devastating event influenced their previous album Mesmeranto and Hotel Utopia progresses this journey as a meditation on the afterlife. Rick draws back the curtain on their creative process: "Our physical process of writing is always the same. The songs are written to be played live; they're usually written in my home where the ideas come together. The songs have always been performed heavily before we get to the studio with them. So, 99 times out of 100 they are complete performable songs. Then we get them into the studio, and it's a case of expanding and elaborating on them, extending them and enjoying the process of making them into something bigger and more. We're essentially a performing band that's at the heart of what we do. We love playing live and the songs are always designed to be live songs." Chrissy agrees as she details the new songs in the live set they are currently touring: "I think there's nine and Astronaut is probably going to be the next single. So, we need to add that to the set as well. But there are nine and that's quite a lot for us. We're trying to get a balance of some of the older stuff as well as what people know. The new stuff has been well received. We've had lots of people saying they really love the new stuff, whereas we were like are we giving them too much of it?"
All thirteen of the tracks that make-up Hotel Utopia's meditations on death and the afterlife have their own narratives. The new single Astronauts is about a child's vision of life replaced by reality. Whereas Under The Headlights concerns itself with seeing our lives as a part of something bigger. Pilkington and Mostyn create a sonic soundscape, for each, that translates these cosmic considerations into ‘big music’, reinventing previous songs as well as Rick tells me: "I think it's essential that we stick to what we are and not what we could be technologically. I think it's essential that we stick to what we believe in and how we started. We are just two people. Twenty fingers between us and a load of old, mostly broken instruments. One thing that we do like doing is multiple versions of songs. For example, a song called 'Not Over Yet', which is an older song, live that was performed in a certain way for a couple of years then we totally changed the way we performed it with different instruments and a much heavier sound. That's now gone back into the set in a totally new form, which is really exciting to play." Meeting up, by happenstance, in a rehearsal studio in Chorley, Lancashire, Chrissy details the formation of The Blackheart Orchestra: "I'd been with a band for about two weeks, and we were rehearsing and the drummer in that band was a roadie for Rick's band at the time and Rick came along to check out the new singer and we just got on really well." Rick agrees: "We just hit it off straight away. It was one of those accidental meetings. I'd been playing with the same guys in the same band for 31 years; it was a heavy, heavy band. I didn't think that was ever going to change my whole life. We met each other and suddenly we just knew we wanted to make music together pretty much from the very first conversation," Rick continues: "Chrissy was trying to also develop a solo career and I was trying to contribute in any way I could to that, which I found quite exciting because, at that point in my life, I'd never written a song at all I'd always been playing other people's songs. I thought that was the way it was and it was going to be forever. I was happy with it. A little bit bored but happy with it. And then when we started writing songs together and it just felt like 'wow', a big door opened. We didn't intend to do any gigs or work together at first, then we started thinking why don't we do just a couple of small gigs and see how they go? So, the first year, we did 148 gigs!"
With serendipity sweeping them off their feet into a new realm of creativity, Chrissy tells me how they came to name themselves The Blackheart Orchestra: "When we first got together, we were just called Blackheart and we were very much just one acoustic guitar and two vocals. It was very simple, very stripped back and we'd started expanding and thinking this name is holding us back. It sounds either like a country duo or a rock band from the seventies. But we'd invested a couple of years in it by then and we were thinking we need to change our name. So, we were coming up with all kinds of different names. And then we'd gone to see one of my favourite classical composers, Ludovico Einaudi, at Blenheim Palace. Whilst we were there, he had The Penguin Orchestra opening for him. And we sat there, and Rick turned to me and said, 'what about The Blackheart Orchestra'? We were worried, but it just fitted." Rick agrees: "We'd been working together for about five or six years and had already recorded a couple of albums under the name Blackheart. We didn't want to abandon the brand that we had started to build with so much hard work and so many gigs. We wanted to kind of legitimise this new move into playing lots of different instruments. We weren't just an acoustic kind of duo that we originally started as we were now becoming more keyboard and synth orientated. So, we wanted a way to designate ourselves as being sort of a bigger kind of concept as a band than it used to be. The word orchestra seemed to fit that, and it seemed to legitimise our crazy need to buy more and more instruments," they both chuckle, "It gave us permission to go crazy on eBay and buy lots of things that we couldn't play and learn how to play them. Which we still do"
The cover of Hotel Utopia displays Chrissy in a pre-Raphaelite style pose holding a lamb. As with the audio and lyrical symbology contained within the music that rewards the listener on repeated plays, is there a deeper meaning buried within the album’s cover visual?: "I do all the design for the band," asserts Rick. "In my earlier life, I used to be an advertising man. There are a lot of religious iconographies in it - 'and spiritual' interjects Chrissy - it is about death about what might happen after death. It is about belief and faith and I just wanted to put something different together that was thought-provoking but with no real answers. It's illustrating the question of this point at which we have no possible knowledge," reasons Rick. Chrissy further explains: "I think it has another meaning as well. It has that kind of religious and symbolic nod of hey, we are in heaven where everybody's safe but also for me here where we live is also Hotel Utopia and we can be kind and we can protect everything that needs protecting and that should be our job. I do think we should do as little harm as we possibly can whilst we're here. I'm vegan as well. So, it's extra symbolic for me. We probably don't have as much power as we think we have. But, as humans, we control quite a lot. And we can do better."
Hotel Utopia will be available on 23 September.
Buy Link: https://store.theblackheartorchestra.com
The album release will be immediately followed by a promotional UK tour:
Sept 22 SUTTON Sound Lounge
Sept 24 WINCHESTER The Railway
Sept 25 SOUTHAMPTON Hanger Farm Arts
Sept 29 PENZANCE Acorn Arts
Oct 1 CREDITON Arts Centre
Oct 8 LEDBURY Market Theatre
Oct 12 CHELMSFORD A Canteen
Oct 13 BRIGHTON Brunswick
Oct 16 POOLE Sound Cellar
Oct 20 BANBURY The Mill Arts Centre
Oct 23 SHEFFIELD Greystones
