A Hit on the Head

Ahead of the bi est release of his career, we catch up with Manchester-based alt-pop act BC Camplight to talk about creating art out of personal turmoil

Words: Max Pilley

As Brian Christinzio sat in his Liverpool hotel room late last year between recording sessions, it seemed like his life was falling apart. The experience was indelible enough to have now earned immortalisation in his song Kicking Up a Fuss, and Christinzio remembers every second of it. “I think the hotel was decorated in a decade that has never existed. It was so weird; it was burgundy carpets with cigarette stains and early 90s art but with modern day ‘live laugh love’ shit. It was a hit on the head, for sure.”

The sheer bleakness of the details may not have stung so sharply were it not for the circumstances in which Christinzio found himself. Halfway through the recording of his new album, his fiancée and partner of nine years split up with him. It left him bereft, and suddenly all of the music he’d been working on as BC Camplight seemed redundant. The only consolation to be found was that a flood of new material was suddenly ready to replace it.

“When that happened,” he says, referring to the breakup, “I was like, ‘Christ, this new record is gonna be good.’ I had to focus on some sort of a positive, and I recorded the new record in, like, five weeks. It was just a geyser of songs and feelings. It’s really the only thing that’s made the breakup tolerable.”

In typical BC Camplight fashion, the results are a blend of sweet, infectious melody, wry, matter-of-fact comedy and gently profound life observation. The album’s title track is driven by an unshakably addictive piano riff, while Christinzio sings about an existential wait, or perhaps longing, for life’s finality to become clear to him. On She’s Gone Cold, he borrows lyrics verbatim from the conversation his fiancée had with him that fateful night. If it all seems a bit dark, then welcome to the BC Camplight story.

Since relocating from Philadelphia to Manchester, he’s released a string of sparkling alt-pop albums, each one blighted by misfortune. He was deported from the UK two days before the release of 2015’s How to Die in the North; his father died days before the release of 2018’s Deportation Blues; 2020’s Shortly After Takeoff was released in the first month of lockdown.

That The Last Rotation of Earth is also defined by personal turmoil, then, seems to place it in the same tradition, although Christinzio sees this album as a substantial departure from his previous work. Like its predecessors, it contains several references to his beloved Manchester, but the themes are more internalised and therefore more universal. What does remain, though, is his characteristic ability to throw in seemingly mundane everyday references, with Homes Under the Hammer and Faith No More among the pop culture potpourri.

“It’s just a device that I really enjoy,” Christinzio explains. “It puts the listener in a specific place. It’s a reminder that you’re listening to a person going through something, and I’m not trying to be Bill Shakespeare.”

Few songwriters of his generation sprinkle laugh-out-loud lyrics into their songs so successfully, especially while walking the tightrope of maintaining such heavy subject matter at the same time. “Music is just the instrument my brain uses to get its thoughts out,” is his typically self-effacing explanation for that. “You have to be mindful that you can’t just dump 3000 pounds of awful feelings onto people all at once. I enjoy having a reprieve and letting people breathe and reset [...] and I think some people appreciate music that reflects the complexities of just how weird our brains are.”

Something else that sets The Last Rotation of Earth apart from his previous work is the expansiveness of its sonic palette; tracks like The Movie and Fear Life in a Dozen Years are positively cinematic in their scope, with members of the Liverpool Philharmonic adding grandeur to Christinzio’s arrangements. The album closes, meanwhile, on a disarmingly uncertain note with the drifting two-minute instrumental The Mourning. “One thing that I don’t like about some musicians is that they assume they have answers to things,” he explains. “I just want to be honest with people, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, and I don’t know how any of this is going to turn out, but this is what I have to say, and I hope you come along for the ride.”

The BC Camplight stock is continuing to rise, with one of Christinzio’s childhood heroes Elton John now an avowed fan (“He used to hate me, you know, but he likes me now; I wasn’t expecting him to come around”), and a mystery collaborative project with comedian James Acaster in the works. All that remains is for him to cross his fingers that no further disasters get in the way of the bi est release of his career.

“I can’t say that I haven’t been checking the news for comets. I was on the NASA site checking for any undiscovered meteors that might strike on 11 May. But I’ve done my job, I finished it, so the world can go ahead and explode at this point.”

The Last Rotation of Earth is out on 12 May via Bella Union BC Camplight plays Mono, Glasgow, 20 May; The Caves, Edinburgh, 21 May bc-camplight.bandcamp.com