Seven years on from their last record, Andrew McGibbon Jr. and Chris McMullan are back.
Age of Monsters marks a triumphant return for the Bonnevilles and their feisty and raw blend of garage, blues and punk.
The record finds the pair in a darker place, reflecting on & struggling with the chaos and destruction of the modern world.
With the record now out in the world, the pair were kind enough to give us an detailed insight into each track.
Not a Penny For The Earl
I wrote this in one sitting after I attended a protest for the Save Lough Neagh campaign. A lady had a sign which read “Not A Penny For The Earl” and that became the song. I wasn’t sure if it was going to make the album but Chris had ducked out of the studio for a couple of hours which left me and Mikey so I set up a little Orange Tiny Terror amp into a 2×12 cab I built. The guitar was made for me by a lovely family in California “Paul Meros Junk Pile Guitars” and it was perfect for this old style simple blues.
The Earl in the song is the Earl of Shaftesbury whose ancestor slashed and genocided (which has come back into fashion weirdly) his way around Ulster and whose descendants still own the Lough to this day and that ownership has contributed to the ecocide which is being carried out today. It was a one take thing, recorded with one mic. When I sing it imagine Li Ban the mermaid suffering and it makes it more emotional for me. When it came time to decided the track order both Chris and Mikey picked that as the opener, I also had but shied away as I thought it bit egotistical but when they did the same we went with it.
Age Of Monsters
This started as a riff a few years old. I wrote it at home and brought it to the rehearsal room and Chris loved it. We jammed it for a bit, made a quick demo as we have mics set up in our space and can just press record on anything we fancy. A couple of years passed and the riff kept turning up due to Chris not letting it go, then I set about to write the album and “the riff” was there when I was going through demos to see what would make the cut. Its meaning is obvious, its about the genocide being played out on our social media in real time by Israeli on Palestine.
We’re watching a mad dog of a country drop American bombs on all of its neighbours whilst simultaneously geocoding an entire people and we’re expected, if you listen to “mainstream media” feel solidarity for the murderers. The song is written from multi perspectives, one of a parent who acknowledges they can’t protect their child from harm, which must be a living nightmare. Then the chorus line is the microphone back to the listener and they say acknowledging our helplessness.
Do we just carry on in this Age Of Monsters
Unhear what we’ve heard in this Age Of Monsters
Unsee what we’ve seen in this Age Of Monsters
The first half of the second verse is part of a poem by George AE Russell, Irelands forgotten genius and fellow Lurgan man.
Two Big Fizzies
This track started life as a piece for Colin Geddis the comedian, he asked me for a bit of riffage for a thing he was doing so we quickly recorded something and sent him a basic version of this with Chris’ drumming being the star of a sub 60 seconds blast. I don’t know if he ever used it but we restructured it added a few elements. When we came to record it was too much fun to leave out.
A friend of mine, Lisa, who is also my arch nemesis had gone through a back surgery and had been prescribed some serious painkillers and it reminded me of my own childhood and my Ma never letting us go into the “cupboard with the tablets in it” as per the lyric. Two of those bad boys and bottle of wine and yer away to the moon. So I just screamed them into a room mic and that became the song, all very impromptu and live, also Chris play a beer barrel on this one.
The Bais
This is wee banger that nearly didn’t make it. I had the riff but had only the chorus and the verse melody without the complete lyric but I loved it too much to not try and finish it in the studio. We were finishing the tracking and before we broke it all down I told Chris to play this structure, Mikey suggested we try it on a baritone guitar that was in the studio so we recorded the basic structure and that night I wrote the lyric at home and came in the next day and sung it.
Mikey was doing something outside and I sat down with an acoustic and played the second/ lead part then we recorded the vocal. Boom, done. Super quick and easy. The lyric is about an overconfident looser who its revealed in the last verse lives in a shed.
SHUDACUDAWUDA
Like most writers I keep ideas in a notepad that I’ll reference back to who I’m looking for a lyric. The opening line on this song was one of those.
“I’m too old to find myself again
Just survived the first time with my skin
Met myself on the way back
High 5 with a heart attack”
We had come back off a tour and I collapsed, it was the 3rd tour this had happened but this time an ambulance had to be called I was suspected of having a stroke. Turns out I was having a severe migrainic episode which mimics a stroke, numbness and all that stuff. It was brought about by severe exhaustion. Basically, I was running myself on empty and into the red for extended periods. You can do that when you’re 25 I suppose but when you’re not 25 you can’t.
When we tour we do everything, we drive, we load in, we load out. We had done a couple of absolutely huge tours, starting in Belgium as far east a Serbia, down into Spain and all the way back west and then we have a high energy show after 9 hours driving in-between gigs, then not going to bed early, sitting up late drinking, up at 8 am on the road again. Brutal. It all takes a toll on the human body. I knew I was burning out which is the reason for the gap to the last album. So the chorus
“SHUDACUDAWUDA
But ya didn’t so here we am”
Is a nod to Chuck Berry, he would invent words and be grammatically incorrect without losing the meaning to make it fit rhythm of the lyric. Plus I think it’s very funny. Audrey Extraordinary, who works with us on the road and helps out with some admin stuff, proof read the lyrics for the album sleeve insert and I had to tell her to ignore the bad grammar as it was on purpose, I think she struggled with that.
Servant To Jesus
It was a stream of consciousness lyric that I just loved playing so it grew into a full song, the opening line
“Gonna save my soul, won’t concern myself with things like,
Love and money, Death and taxes
All my children, you’ve got to be of service to Jesus”
That line is so much fun to sing over the escalating guitar part. I had a notion of a preacher that maybe started out with pure intent but becomes corrupted over time and like all corruption it poisons the well. He ends up believing that he alone can save a soul and is the only path to God. Which is obviously total bollocks.
Reflex Liar
This started out as a single for Westergaard Records. We had toured in Scandinavia and those guys had asked us if we would do a split single with one of my favourite bands “Sunshine Reverberation”. Obviously I jumped on it and wrote this. I knew Kari and Robert from the label were into a classic single for this project as we’d spent time with them in their huge record collection in Tromso, Norway talking about the beauty of the single so I just thought lets write a 3 minute bouncing pop song and this what came out.
It was too good to not appear on an album though, so we remixed it to make it fit a bit better with the rest of the album and that was that. I won’t tell you who it’s about though. I don’t need that heat.
Sumpin’ I don’t Wanna Do
I hate this song, I got overruled by Chris and Mikey as its one of their favourites but they’re wrong. The lyric is part stream of consciousness gibberish and nonsense about girls coming in to our local pub The Woodville in Lurgan all glammed up and the weekend moving too quick before Monday morning comes again. If this becomes our biggest hit I’m going to kill myself. Next.
Awaken From Slumber
Its basically a working class solidarity tune. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of the bloody obvious, we’re all the same regardless of skin, sexuality or gender etc. The thing we have in common is our class, we get up and go to work for our livings. The billionaire class do not despite the propaganda we have to endure making them out to be “elite” which is a word I do not apply to them.
Its a plea to the working to wake up and stop letting petty social issues divide us. Who you go to bed with at night makes exactly no difference to my life and watching the working class across Ireland allow itself to be used so easily makes me very sad.
“Then he’s your brother, she’s your sister
You’re in the same shit now even if you’ve got a different Mother
Then he’s your brother, she’s your sister
It doesn’t matter about the colour of your skin or who you call your lover”
Daedalus
This is a song about our Overlords and the fucking hubris at suggesting we should populate another planet rather than save the one we’re one. These bastards are looking for another planet that could sustain life whilst standing on a perfect planet that does sustain life and rather than engineer our society to exist sustainably they look to sci-fi shite.
Daedalus, in greek myth is the inventor who made wings for him and his son Icarus to escape captivity but Icarus flew too close to the sun and perished, in the song its the name of the space ship/life-boat that is taking the last humans off into space to another planet but just as it leaves the earths atmosphere it breaks down and the options left are freeze to death or crash the ship into the sun.
The narrator names a distant nebula after himself knowing he’s about to die and no-one will ever know. I also used another AE Russell poem for the second verse which fitted with the sentiment. We also got my cousin Laura Kerr to play fiddle on this track and the singer songwriter Spy From Moscow to do some backing vocals which completely made the song for me.
N.A.A.B.O.
This is an acronym of some Irish language words. Níl Aithreachas Ar Bith Orm which translates roughly as I have no regrets. I read the poem The Seers by George AE Russell, I wanted to get as much of him into this album as possible. We jammed this song earlier 2024 in Michael Mormeecha’s Treesong Studio then we recorded the basics guitar and drum parts at the album sessions later in the year.
I wanted a bit more time to work on various tracks and didn’t need to do it with everyone in the room so I took a few tracks back to my studio in Lurgan and did all the overdubs, mostly vocal, some guitar things and this was one of the tracks I worked on. I really dig this one. We then got Laura up to do some fiddle on on it was well. She hadn’t heard it and we quickly mic’d her up and she did it live in one take. We love working fast like that.
Parchmen Farm
The only cover we’ve ever put on a record. We’ve been playing this one out live for a few years, its a Bukka White classic but the version we lean into was the Billy Lee Riley one. Very simple big fat guitar and drums with Mikey on keys.. Class.
Guillotines
A dinky wee country, americana track about reminding the ruling class that things like guillotines exist and we’re going to start getting them out of storage whilst reminiscing about meeting my future wife and love of my life Janie. Y’know, perfectly normal stuff. Laura Kerr also features on fiddle on this one.
Age of Monsters by The Bonnevilles is out now and is available to purchase via Bandcamp below and all the usual online music stores. You can purchase their previous releases and other merch over on their Big Cartel store.
