Billy, what's happening?

I've been spending the day at my friend John Minton's house working on the video for the next single.

For the next single on your new record, Fragments.

Yeah, it's called Tailgates and Ratchet Straps.

It's a single and I've been wearing this.

Oh, my goodness.

Billy's holding up a mask of himself that may or may not be younger.

It definitely is because no gray hair.

Gray hair in here.

Yeah.

The handsome level is sustained.

It's still there.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Perfect.

So much.

Yeah.

Of course.

I just started wearing glasses.

Short or long sighted?

I am short sighted.

Yeah, same here.

I'm terribly short sighted.

I'm minus eight in both eyes, which is like, oh, man.

Without my glasses, I'm in a terrible.

I just can't see anything.

I basically have kind of a magnifier glass glasses right now.

But soon I'll be advancing to a prescription.

Welcome.

Yeah, thanks.

How you doing?

Yeah, good, thanks.

Yeah, all good.

I saw you in person last fall.

It was literally about 12 months ago.

And it was the final Beak tour with Jeff.

And maybe we're looking forward to the Beak with me without singing.

I think we discussed that.

Very good.

I wasn't sure if that was real or not, but I was chiming in on my candidacy for it.

But I think that'd be difficult without singing and living 5,000 miles away from you.

Yeah.

The geography is tricky.

Yeah.

But I'm still open to it.

Especially when you have double drums, which looks great on stage.

Yeah.

The ocs, they do that well, don't they?

The symmetry.

James Brown did it as well.

Yeah.

What have you been up to?

I know you do a million things.

You play with the great Robert Plant.

I know you do a million other projects.

What have you been doing since downtime for Beak?

Well, since Beak has.

Well, Beak hasn't stopped because we've continued writing.

I was writing yesterday with our new drummer.

So in this room, actually, we've just been writing here in my house.

Just to keep things cheap and simple for starters.

So we're about.

You know, we've got about nine new things on the bubble.

All right, which is good.

But going back to Robert Plank quickly, I haven't played with him since 2019.

Okay.

That's been a while.

So it's just before Pre covered we finished.

All right, well, that's great news.

Some new Beak coming our way.

There will be at some point.

And when we.

When there is, that's when we'll announce the identity of Said Drummer David Grohl.

Oh, no, no, we've got good drummer.

We've got a good drummer.

I had a friend who's in a Foo Fighters covers band in Wales, and they were called Floo Fighters.

That's cute.

They got.

They did well for a while, the Welsh Flu Fighters.

You have a new record out.

Fragments comes out on Invada April 3rd, and I'm privy to the entire record.

I've been listening to it for a week, thanks to you.

It's 16 beautiful numbers.

I never ask people this.

Why the name Fragments?

Does that explain anything?

It does.

Well, it does to me because basically, the.

The music on that album is a collection of, like, demos that I'd worked on all myself over the years.

So it spans time.

It's not from.

It's not like a classic solo album in the sense that, you know, set songs.

You record it in a certain amount of time and then that represents you in that moment.

Whereas this.

This record doesn't really represent me right now.

It represents me as a person who is creating music on their own over a certain length of time.

It's like.

So I think the earliest track on there could have been maybe eight, nine years ago, you know, and this is stuff that I would have submitted, like, to maybe go on a Beat record.

And it was either like, oh, you know, it won't work on this record, or it just got forgotten about.

So that's something I did do in the beak downtime, which was to go onto my old imac that I bought in 2007 with the operating system Snow Leopard, and.

And I located these tracks.

I was like, loads.

So many, like, 50.

And I got it down to 16, and I got the.

The formatting in the right order, and I was just like, wow, that sounds like a record.

But alternatively, I could have gone into Invader and had a go at making McCartney too, you know, but, yeah, that's for another day.

Yeah, yeah.

Does not sound fragmented.

Especially, as I said, I've been able to listen to it.

I've been listening to it from top to bottom, and it's a.

It's quite the journey.

Good.

You have the power to write music that inspire the visual.

Is that natural to you?

Is that your first step towards writing a tune, or are you just throwing down sounds?

I think that's a really good question.

I'm not quite sure it.

The.

At the very nucleus of the moment as I begin, whether I have it in mind that, like, I'm picturing, you know, herds of wilder beasts sweeping majestically Across a mountain range or, you know, there's an army coming over the hill to attack our camp, or it's just like.

I think I'm just kind of like.

I'm just interested in finding sounds that sound interesting and chord movements and just music that sounds interesting and doesn't sound like you've heard it before.

But I'm also very interested in finding melodies and hook lines that sound like that.

They've been around for a long time, but they haven't been found yet.

Like, they've always been there, floating around, and then you just sort of pluck them out of sky.

So, like, Rummer and Free Blind Mice for me are kind of a bit like that.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense now that you say that.

And another thing that kind of dawned on me when I was thinking about talking to you about this is I kind of had this thought that sound can inspire a visualization, and at least for my brain and a lot of people that I know, it doesn't go the opposite as easily.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I think so.

And your newest single is.

Is Three Blind Mice, and I'd like to play a little bit of it.

Does that work for you?

Yes, please.

Why not?

All right, here we.

That's beautiful.

And the other thing about these tunes is you seem to exhaust what you're doing in a.

In a beautiful way.

You know what I mean?

It really peaks and sometimes you let it down a little bit, like Three Blind Mice.

But it seems like.

Speaking of visualization, I can visualize you working on the piece of music and then going, huh, that's done.

I mean, weirdly, though, I don't think Three Blind Mice is a really good one to pick on this one, purely because all the other songs on the album, I think, are like four channels of audio, maybe five.

Right.

Three Blind Mice was just one of those ones where I. I it.

It constantly needed feeding to get it over the line.

Okay.

It's like this animal that just needed more.

More info to become a being and like, to become something at the end.

And I think it ended up being like 35 track channels of stuff just to kind of make it work, to get it over the line.

So that one, it wasn't.

I kept on thinking I'd finished it and then I go back and go, oh, man.

No.

It's like it needs, I don't know, a frying pan in the chorus, you know?

Right.

You didn't stop.

At least you.

No, no.

And it's because I enjoy doing it.

You know, I'm not.

I don't see, you know, I work in the business, but it's pure.

Especially this music on this record is like.

It's a really good example of me really enjoying myself, you know, and being in the moment and enjoying what I do.

And it.

I would do that if I was, you know, if I was working in the supermarket or if I was a banker or it.

Like, it.

I love music and I like creating music and I like finding, you know, I like to dream, you know, And

I know that it's over a pretty long span of time, but.

Did you record most of it at home in your headphones?

All of it's at home.

All of it is me, apart from the drums that come in halfway through on Three Blind Mice is a friend of mine, Andy, playing a bit of drums.

Because I had the first drum beat that starts.

Is my mobile phone resting on the floor.

Tom with the drum kit over there.

And I was just recording the beat and I got a good eight bars of that.

But obviously over the whole track, it was like, yeah, yeah, this isn't really going to cut it.

It needs some.

It needs a human being who can actually play.

So I got him in to just do a better.

To just give it some humanity and some.

And some coolness.

Good move.

Do you have a instrument or anything that you typically start with to write?

I always pretty much base.

Always.

Unless it's without bass on it.

But I mean, because I'm, you know, primarily, if that's my number one instrument, I will always pick the bass up.

And that's how, you know, composing.

Beak stuff has always been like that for me as well.

It was always.

I'd always take it in and go, here's a song.

And it'd be a bass line.

And the.

The video for Three Blind Mice.

Or the film.

I would say the short film.

What came first on that one.

So, no, the music came first.

And my friend Echo Panda, who's in Ontario, in Canada, he.

He made the film to the.

To the song, basically.

Yeah.

And.

Yeah.

And it was.

And it's all the same characters, like, who were in the.

Oh no video for Beak.

And he also did a fan video for the jail as well, a long time ago.

That's how we got to know him because we saw this fan video.

It was crazy.

And.

Yeah, who's this dude?

You know?

So we got.

And then he's like, he's become a really good friend and he's come to shows when we've been over over there.

And stuff.

So.

Yeah, he's a good friend, Dan.

Yeah, he mastered that marriage there.

Yeah, it's brilliant.

I'm really, really happy with that video.

It's really great.

Except what happens at the end?

Oh, do I have to use my imagination?

Well, just, you know, it's.

It's a.

It's an open ended.

It could have gone either way.

So stressful and fun.

I know.

Well, don't gamble, kids.

That's right.

Don't.

Nothing on the horses.

Kids or the dogs.

Horses.

Are you gonna play these songs live?

You're gonna take.

Take it to the road?

Yes, I am.

Yeah.

I've got two other people involved.

We're going to start rehearsing this Sunday in fact.

And we got our first show in a festival in the Rennes in France at the end of June, so that's what we're aiming for.

And then we got some festivals lined up as well.

Yeah.

And some UK gigs are going to get booked in and.

But yeah, so.

But I'm doing it, you know, I'm.

I'm self managing and you know, as always, I'll be torn tor mangling.

Tour managing.

Yeah.

Tour damaging.

Yeah.

So I'm, you know, it's.

It's all on me.

So if.

And as is this record, so if it all goes wrong, it's completely my fault.

Which is quite a nice place to be.

Yeah, it is.

And what's the instrumentation going to be like?

So it's going to be bass and drums, keys and guitar and with some vocals.

So very much similar to the beak setup.

Oh, great.

Cool.

All right, well, you're going to come to the States, right, to get over here.

The price of fuel is going down.

I heard.

I'm not coming to your country until that fucker is gone.

All right, thank you.

Thank you.

You know, I wish I could leave until he was gone.

Oh my God.

I mean it's.

Well, I mean it's all of it.

It's just.

So anyway, we know.

Yeah, let's not go.

There's two.

Yeah.

Well, I hope to see you again in the next five years.

I will probably won't see the Fragments tour, but if.

If I am near it, I'm gonna bug you.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I'll film it at least and put it on the YouTube and we didn't

really get to see each.

We saw each other's faces last time, but we didn't.

It was really brief.

You gave me your record.

Oh, I gave you the drum record, right.

Yeah, yeah, it's great.

The green One.

Yeah.

And you had.

And you had to lug it all the way home.

Yeah, it's fine.

But I was.

I mean, as you saw as well, after the show, I just were at the merch table, so.

And I was inundated, so.

And you know, I'm a grafter, as they say in the trade.

Yeah.

I like to graft.

So Jeff yelled at me that night because I was going back.

I was like, I gotta at least shake his hand.

And I went back there and Jeff goes, could you not be back here?

And I was like, you're right, this is ridiculous.

No, he would have gone, what the fuck do you think you're doing here, mate?

What do you think doing.

Anyways, I got to shake your hand.

Hopefully I get to see you and shake your hand and share a.

Share a beer or something with you.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Yeah, totally.

I'll always support Billy Fuller's musics unless you make something bad you want.

Well, and I'd like to know as well, you know, was there anything on the, on the record you thought was bad?

This is.

I knew what I need to know.

Was there something where you went hit and this is important.

Was there.

So was there something that you heard and you went,

gosh, probably, but probably just for a second.

But I've.

I, I, I over listen to it.

I crammed it all in in three or four days.

I will say, if I didn't say it earlier, I can't is my favorite number right now.

Is it?

Oh, look at that.

You got a pick with some crosses on it.

Yeah, but it's a special one.

It's a Sunno one.

Oh, you got a sun.

Oh, pick.

Nice.

It came with my pedal.

You're gonna bring the Suno pedal on tour?

I used it on the, on the Beak tour at the end of Cellophane.

The heavy bit at the end of Cellophane.

That's right.

That makes sense.

That's fat pedal.

All right, well, again, great to see you and congrats on your record.

I'll let you carry on with your celebration of St. Patrick, which I know that you do every year.

With Lager.

With Lager.

All right, take care and travel safe when you get out there.

Nice one, Joe.

All right, take care.

I look forward to another bass review soon.

Yes.

Oh, it's coming.

I have.

I mean, there's 16 songs.

I've got the record, bass review, and then a bunch of other stuff.

Just kind of taste ideas.

All right, take care of yourself.

Cheers, dude.

See you later.

Bye.

Bye.

Sa.