Interview with The Bedlam Furnaces: ‘I’m driven by musical themes and storytelling, there’s a palette of sounds holding the songs together’

The Bedlam Furnaces gave us their latest album, Fever Dream, earlier this year, dealing with loss in all of its configurations.

Led by guitarist and multi-instrumentalist/composer Ian Allison, working with regular collaborators, The Bedlam Furnaces is a London-based project. They describe themselves as ‘symphonic rock embracing metal, electronica, folk, classical and psychedelia’, not to mention jazz and funk in some places. Allison plays electric, classical and steel-string guitar, as well as bass, keys, percussion and Rebec (an ancestor of the violin). The band name comes from The Bedlam Furnaces in Ironbridge: ‘The place is so evocative and I think the name is, too,’ he said. ‘It was the first to be built in the UK (for coke smelting). I’m originally from Scunthorpe – most people there worked at the steelworks and I did as well for a short while, so the name means something to me.’

Fever Dream is a collection of 11 interconnected songs with beautiful, layered arrangements that are reminiscent of ELO, Queen and Muse. The music is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t listened to it because it doesn’t fit neatly into one genre: ‘I don’t really work from a genre,’ Allison said. ‘I’m driven by musical themes and storytelling, there’s a palette of sounds holding the songs together. You can think of the songs as mini mind-movies. I was a fan of Portmanteau horror films as a kid! With Fever Dream, the concept that holds all of the songs together is loss.’

Two of my favourite songs on the album are ‘Sounds Sacred’ and ‘Good Grief’ and I tell him that they sound like they’re designed to be a pair. ‘Sounds Sacred’ starts off with a gorgeous, acoustic guitar melody over which he has layered dreamy, ethereal vocals: ”Sounds Sacred’ came from loss, where you feel you are losing your connection with something or someone, as if your presence is optional. There were things sloshing round my head in my life at the time that made me feel this way.’

As the song goes: ‘They want you, they haunt you, they don’t need you now. And in the end, that’s all there is, my friend.’

‘Good Grief’ is almost an extension of ‘Sounds Sacred’ and is, as the title suggests, about death. ‘It’s about mortality and a close family member died while I was recording it,’ he explained. ‘It follows the stages of grieving. What ties the two songs together is the sound palette, for example, a melody motif. They gave me the heads up that there could be an album.’ It’s a heartfelt song, as the lyrics reveal: ‘For a broken heart, a spoken word can hold the secret to a twisted, mystical suggestion that we are not alone.’

‘Each instrument is like an actor that comes on and tells a story, it’s like bringing in different colours and shapes’

There are a few musical themes running through the album, one of which was inspired by The Call of Cthulhu, a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft: ‘I was toying with the idea of doing a musical based on it. Actually, ‘Salt Sea Wind’ on the album is based on it. So that theme appears in different songs in different places. It’s a fifteen-note motif – you can hear a section of it when I sing “I couldn’t stop you if I tried. My eyes forgave you, but they lied…”. Another example is the opening melody of ‘Good Grief’ – you’ll have to find the rest! Each instrument is like an actor that comes on and tells a story, it’s like bringing in different colours and shapes.’

Allison describes himself as ‘a bit of a magpie’, musically, drawing on inspiration from a wide-range of bands, including Muse, who he calls ‘symphonic’: ‘Lately, I’m more interested in film and gaming music, so Bartók (Hungarian composer Béla Bartók) in The Shining, 28 Days Later (soundtrack by John Murphy). The Inception soundtrack is amazing by Hans Zimmer.’ We chat for a bit about much we love it. ‘I also love Kate Bush’s storytelling and versatility, I’m inspired by her because every song is different yet is clearly a Kate Bush piece of music. The unifying feature is her vision.’

One of my favourite songs on Fever Dream is ‘Space’ because it’s musically complex and layered: ‘You can play it on an acoustic guitar, it’s layered in the way it is because it’s about giving each other space,’ he said. ‘It came from anger at extremists of all kinds and is saying let’s solve differences through tolerance, conversation and debate – give each other space.’ The song has a different feel to the others on the album, which comes from the new approach he took to writing it: ‘Arranging it, I took a different route this time. I recorded the melody then recorded the song around it. I laid down the basic structure, then I recorded the vocals and then I pretty much stripped everything out and re-built it around the vocals. It was a bit of a revelation to me not working with a riff or a loop.’ I say that it’s an incredibly peaceful song, despite the frustration inherent in the lyrics. ‘If you shout at people, they stop listening,’ he laughed. ‘You have kids so you know what I mean, you reach a point where they don’t listen.’

As the song dreamily kicks off: ‘Space, floating softly into space. Who will win the human race? Hiding darkness with your faith.’

‘The song was this idea of being locked into yourself and thinking about the same things over and over’

‘Fever Dream’ is one of three instrumental tracks on the album and one of the most evocative because various voices fade in and out, sharing their dreams: ‘It describes dreams in a cinematic context. A ‘fever dream’ is getting locked into that circular thinking, like social media being an echo chamber. The idea had been knocking around in my head. The song was this idea of being locked into yourself and thinking about the same things over and over.’ I tell him it sound like all of us during the past year and he agrees. ‘It was written at the height of lockdown, it’s like a little mind film. I contacted a bunch of people and asked if they’d share their dreams with me, which I’d then share and put out there for everyone to hear (laughs). There are dreams within dreams, it’s a bit like the film Inception. The song ends with an alarm clock going off and you realise that the whole dream was a dream within a dream. Are they being woken up or do they want to wake up?’

Allison has talked about sound palettes tying songs together and I find it fascinating that, even so, the tracks can sound so radically different. ‘Fever Dream’ feels quite surreal and cinematic, whereas ‘Hypnotigon’ is quite folky and the opening track ‘Wild Rocket’ is rifftastic with some brilliant shredding. We veer back to talking about film soundtracks and how composers such as John Barry and Ennio Morricone have influenced him: ‘I’ve got a couple of songs I’m working on, one of them has a sort of spaghetti western feel, it’s a bit Morricone. He was a genius, all his stuff sounds so different.’

Recently, he’s enjoyed the score to the movie St. Maud by Janota Bzowski: ‘It sounded like the inside of the lead character’s head, sort of pulses and very, very dark electronica. The indie scene is where it’s all happening now, in my view, for example, Brass Against, a crazy brass outfit who are redefining the brass band!’

‘I stuck pieces of paper under the strings to make them buzz’

Allison’s prized musical possession is his Stratocaster, which was named ‘Joyous Twiddly’ by a bass player in a band he used to be in. I ask if he’s named all of his guitars and he laughs. ‘Haha, no, the others don’t have names but they have personalities! I’ve got another guitar I like if I’ve got heavy riffage to do. When I was starting out, I only had a cheap nylon stringed acoustic guitar, so I stuck pieces of paper under the strings to make them buzz like an electric.’

I ask him if there are any songs in particular that he really wishes he’d written? ‘Yes, there are loads, they might be surprising ones! I heard this the other day on the radio for the first time in years, a Kiki Dee song called ‘Amoureuse’. It carries me off to another place, it was a French song originally (sung by Véronique Sanson). It gives me goosebumps, the second chord in the verse, the Gm to B-flat 7, and then the cello that comes in later on. It’s like being warm but having freezing fog roll over you. It squeezes your heart, her version is sublime.’ He also wishes he’d written ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ (Roberta Flack) and ‘River Man’ by Nick Drake, which I also love: ‘He rips his chest open, it’s utterly raw. His songs tear you apart, you almost feel embarrassed to be in the same room as the song!’ I laugh and agree.

We chat for a bit about why certain songs have the power to move you more than others and he offers up his theory, which is spot on: ‘The songs that skewer me are the ones that put their heart in your hands and ask you to look after it. There has to be something of the person in there and I will love it.’