Northern Irish garage-blues duo THE BONNEVILLES are today premiering a brand new track exclusively with Vive Le Rock!
By Gerry Ranson
‘Don’t Curse The Darkness’ is from the Lurgan pair’s new studio album Dirty Photographs, which is out this Friday 16 March through Alive Naturalsound. It’s available as a CD, download limited edition vinyl and t-shirt bundle.
Says guitarist/singer Andrew McGibbon Jr, “I love this song, one of my favourite Bonnevilles tracks. This song has taken about 10 years to write, believe it or not. One of the million jobs I’ve had in my life, I delivered and removed pianos. After the last economic crash in 2008 I was sent to this guy’s house in the country to remove his piano. He had lost absolutely everything to the banks but the one thing he wouldn’t let go was the piano. We took the piano from his very nice house, which he had just given up and took them into town. He was such a lovely guy, very chipper, especially considering what he was going through, so I asked him why he seemed to be okay with everything that was happening to him and he said back to me, ‘Don’t curse the darkness, light a candle.’ That blew me away. I wrote it down in my notebook. A few years later I wrote the song and we played it out a few times. We even recorded it for our last album (Arrow Pierce My Heart) but the recording didn’t do the song justice, so I pulled it. We rearranged it a bit and tried again on these sessions and it turned out great, I would never allow a crap version of it to go out as I always felt the song has the potential to be meaningful to someone. It might end up being ‘that’ song for some soul out there that needs it.
“We dedicated it to our friend Audrey Extraordinary Fraser, she was in the room the first time we played it at a gig in Montrose in Scotland. She was going through some difficult stuff at the time and it made her cry. We took that as a good sign.”
The Bonnevilles tour mainland Europe this April, before returning to the UK to play Red Rooster Festival, Euston, Suffolk on 31 May and Mandela Hall, Belfast on 15 June.
https://vivelerock.net/bonnevilles-exclusive-track-premiere/
