“A guitar is not a natural melodic voice… it’s been forced into that role” Black Country, New Road on rejecting 70 years of guitar wisdom
When a guitar player thinks about the whole – if a guitar player thinks about the whole – it’s often from the perspective of dominating a certain amount of real estate. Luke Mark’s work on Black Country, New Road’s new album Forever Howlong, though, is a complete rejection of that idea. “It takes time to learn that if you’re not playing with a lead tone, a guitar is not a natural melodic voice,” he says. “Really, it’s been forced into that role over the past 70 years.”
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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mark arriving at this conclusion is that circumstances had presented him with the opportunity to go the other way. In 2022, after completing work on the band’s second album Ants From Up There, he became their sole guitar player following the exit of founding member and lead vocalist Isaac Wood. In that situation, many would have skipped over finding out where they fit within a sound, preferring instead to go wherever they please, because guitars are guitars.
But there has always been an element of egalitarian plate-spinning to Black Country, New Road’s approach. They have long sought to afford equal footing to disparate elements, from Georgia Ellery’s violin to Lewis Evans’ sax, while following Wood’s departure vocals are now split between the band’s main songwriters: Ellery, bassist Tyler Hyde and keyboard player May Kershaw. It makes sense, then, that Mark’s role is treated with the same all-in-it-together attitude, even if their past work was studded with plenty of opportunities for loud, brutish guitar stuff.
Image: Eddie Whelan
Ego Death
But Mark’s playing on Forever Howlong cuts back against even that aspect of Black Country, New Road’s make up. It is an ego-free exercise in serving the song over and over again — a quiet sort of brilliance, but brilliant nonetheless. “It’s not really until you’re in a band with a lot of instruments and three singers that you realise you have to let that role be taken by other people,” Mark says. “Most of the time a lead sounds better on saxophone than it would on distorted electric guitar, if that’s what you’re trying to get sustain out of.”
Describing his role during the writing process, Mark refers to “translating” the songs Ellery, Hyde and Kershaw brought to the table. Rather than staking out his spot right away, he waited. The band’s new language took hold over time, quickening the pace, but sometimes, as with Hyde’s Nancy Tries to Take the Night or Ellery’s Two Horses, songs had either been assembled or arranged on guitar, prompting another level of reflection on where he’d find a way in.
“Little opportunities present themselves,” he says. “There’s a space to do something and then you have to find the right cool thing. And, honestly, sometimes you’ll spend all day in the studio while someone’s working on vocals, coming up with a bit, and then it just doesn’t work, or someone else has come up with something that works better. You just have to let it pass you by. Doing the work is sometimes deciding not to use what you’ve come up with, you know?”
Forever Howlong benefits enormously from this sense of patience and diligence. Skipping around the post-punk skronk and surging tonal shifts that propelled Black Country, New Road out of Brixton’s ever-evolving Windmill scene alongside bands such as Black Midi, Shame and Squid, it often resembles the gilded studio experiments of Todd Rundgren or Randy Newman, skirting pastiche by roughing up the edges with freak-folk phrasing or unusual textural choices.
Fool’s Errand
Only a short while ago, this corruption might quickly have been accomplished by turning to Slint-esque serrated noise or a stylistic bait-and-switch designed to shock and upend expectations. But rather than slashing the canvas here, Mark chooses complementary colours that, when you find them, add surprising depth. “I would play really thick strings, wound strings on electric guitars, and fuck with pickups and set amps up weird to try and make it sound more like what I thought a proper instrument should sound like,” Mark observes his past approach.
“I think that’s a bit of a fool’s errand, but the reason for doing that is to avoid signifying [genre]. Whatever chord choices you’re making, the voicings you’re choosing, whether you’re playing cowboy chords or tight jazz voicings, signifies genre immediately. I’ve tried to avoid that. But some of these songs called for a certain sound. I decided to not fight it, to not try and force it into this indefinable space, and just accept that it’s okay to join a tradition.”
While working on Forever Howlong, Black Country, New Road got big into the Band. The record bears zero resemblance to any of their work but Mark credits Robertson, Danko et al with letting them know it’s cool to slow down. “Rhythm on electric can be very satisfying, but it never really has been in this band because the way Charlie [Wayne] plays drums is extremely polyrhythmic,” Mark says. “It’s constantly changing. We never really grooved until this album, so getting to strum away on a nice acoustic guitar is a great feeling.”
While working with producer James Ford — famed for his work with Arctic Monkeys and lately of records with Fontaines D.C. and Fat Dog — at Angelic Studios close to Brackley in Northamptonshire, Mark regularly turned to his Atkin White Rice, modelled after a storied D-28 owned by bluegrass players Tony Rice and Clarence White. “As soon as you put a mic in front of it, it sounds like the archetypal acoustic guitar,” Mark says. “It’s like a pop-country album, which is the hardest thing to achieve. It’s like having a Les Paul and when you plug it in it immediately sounds like Led Zeppelin. It’s the dream.”
Also in the mix were two loaners that became important voices on the LP, sometimes being threaded together with the White Rice as a trio, notably on the opener Besties. “I’d gone to James’ house before recording and he had this great OOO-18, very old and very dry,” Mark says. “But it belonged to Beth Gibbons, he made an amazing album [2024’s Lives Outgrown] with her. I thought, ‘Man, I need a guitar like that to do the album.’ So I got in touch with Alister [Atkin]. He gave me a call, I was like, ‘I need a smaller body guitar, I’ve got this White Rice off you but I want something else to double track and use it for finger picking.’ He sent me a guitar [an Essential OOO] but James ended up bringing Beth’s, too.”
Country Fried
Seven songs into the record, Mark digs in on a gritty, desert-bleached riff that comes out of the blue on Happy Birthday, upending the chamber-pop palette for a moment in a manner that’s genuinely surprising both tonally and in terms of the longish wait for this sort of sound. The hit it provides underlines the importance of good sequencing and also the power found in deploying a sound or an instrument as is required, not simply because that’s what you’ve always done. Mark played the part on his Brad Paisley signature Telecaster. “It’s extremely light, it’s got a nice fat neck, and it’s just great,” he says. “That’s the Americana sound. It’s a cool, cheap guitar.”
The gold Strat that Mark used on every Ants From Up There song, with Mojo Gold Foils in the middle and Firebird pickups in the bridge and neck, was also along for the ride, with a couple of major alterations. “I changed the neck on the first day at the studio,” he says. “I think it’s a licensed Fender neck that was on one of Isaac’s old guitars. It’s been at my house for, like, three years. A Tele neck does fit on a Strat — people say that it only works the other way around, which is bullshit. I had a tech fit it with a five way switch just before we went, too, so it’s out of phase in these positions, which is quite a fun, weird pickup combination.”
“I had a big blue Gretsch that I used when I wanted to have a bit of Bigsby,” he continues. “And I used a Japanese Strat for one moment on the song Socks, with a bit of warble when I double tracked one of the lines, but whenever I plug anything else in I’m just missing [something]. The Strat’s middle pickup is basically what I use the whole time. It’s got a 500k pot, it’s very bright but it’s also very clear when you play complicated chords. It still sounds round and nice. I use that basically all the time, and the couple of slide parts on the album are on it as well.”
Taken together, all of these small elements amount to a beautiful, ornate whole. For Mark, removing the default option of getting loud and hairy led to a different understanding of what a guitarist’s role might be. Equally, Forever Howlong isn’t a record that hopes to luck into exceeding the sum of its parts, it’s a record that draws attention to what might be achieved when each of those parts is given proper consideration.
“It’s like Johnny Marr when they started the Smiths, he was not going to allow himself to use distortion to make it sound big,” Mark says. “He had to fill it out in some other way — he layered up guitars, octave guitars, Nashville-strung guitars. That’s an amazing approach. It’s about finding my own way to do that.”
Black Country, New Road’s Forever Howlong is out on 4 April on Ninja Tune.
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