Bad Nerves: New Shapes Of A Generation
The seventies had THE SEX PISTOLS, THE CLASH and THE RAMONES. The early noughties gave us THE STROKES, THE WHITE STRIPES and THE BLACK KEYS. The tens gave us FRANK CARTER & THE RATTLESNAKES, FIDLAR and IDLES. Whilst that list might sound like a motley crue of punk legends, garage-rock veterans and everything in-between thrown together for the sake of it, they’ve all got a couple of things in common. Firstly, they’ve all been champions of do-it-yourself guitar music that shoots out of the gate like a junkie shooting up on a Saturday night. Secondly, they’ve all been the creative catalysts of unforgettable frontmen, the kind of larger-than-life excess-over-everything personalities that go down in the history books. Simply put, the kind of people modern day music is lacking a little, or a lot of, until now. Enter power-punk’s newest poster boy: Bobby Nerves and his band BAD NERVES.
Bobby Nerves is charismatically charming, compellingly controversial and complexingly creative. Across a two-hour tour-de-force of BAD NERVE’s self-titled studio debut – a high-octane explosion of RAMONES-meets-FIDLAR–meets-THE BLACK KEYS power-punk – a pink-lit Bobby Nerves broadcasts directly from his bedroom. This, dear readers, is the world according to Bobby Nerves, and it’s one hell of a trip.
“It depends how far down the rabbit-hole of conspiracies you want to go down, but there’s so much crazy shit going on right now. We don’t know what’s fact, we don’t know what’s fiction, and it’s even weirder with the pandemic,” explains Bobby emphatically, continuing. “I wouldn’t have known it was even happening if it wasn’t for my television, or my iPhone newsfeed, and I find that really baffling when thousands and thousands of people are dying but if it wasn’t for the news, you wouldn’t know it’s happening. I’m not saying that people need to be dead in the streets for me to feel it’s an emergency but with all the fake news and all the talk of politics from both sides, it’s an absolute mess”
There’s a directness in Bobby’s deliverance that is undeniably refreshing. Punk rock has been waiting for a character and for a voice that was unwilling to compromise and more than willing to pull no punches. With the music industry in disarray, fragmenting in the fallout of a global fragment, the wolves of the government are firmly at our doors, waiting to strike as the creative industries are instructed to induct themselves into a new industry. For someone whose very existence owes so much to being creative, the mere mention of it hits a nerve in Bobby.
“Rishi Sunak saying people in this sector should retrain as something else – it’s alright for him, married to his wife who’s dad’s a billionaire from India. He’s so rich he doesn’t have a fucking clue, he probably doesn’t even listen to music – he probably listens to white noise or his own voice on repeat,” exclaims Bobby emphatically, adding. “It’s so annoying when you get people in power dismissing the passions of art, because all the good shit that makes people happy is art, even if it is Gogglebox on Friday nights. The government do not give a fucking shit, I don’t know if any government would – like the fact we can’t freely move anywhere, like going over to Europe, which is where we play the most, is now going to be a nightmare and we don’t even know if we can afford it, and now they’ve banned gigs all together, it’s like Jesus, what’s next, banning recorded music? George Orwell completely understated what was going to happen, 1984 would’ve been nice compared to this.”
The anger that Bobby addresses the current climate of his beloved industry with is one born from his undying devotion to creative freedom and everything it embodies, which is ultimately what brings Bobby, guitarists William Phillipson and George Berry, bassist Jonathan Poulton and drummer Samuel Thompson together as BAD NERVES.
“It’s all about freedom, and being free to do what you want and not letting anyone tell you that you can’t do something. I’ve been doing bands all my life, and that’s because I want to do what I want to do, I don’t want to put music to the side and do it casually here and there, it means more than that and writing music keeps the wolf from the door, music is what keeps me mentally stable – it’s so much fun, the satisfaction of making something and writing a song, I’m not thinking about anything else, no matter what’s going on, it’s like I have peace.”
It’s the price of peace that Bobby ponders on a lot, often returning to the debt young people are already paying for being born into a broken generation, explaining, “I worry so much about the younger generation with all this social media, because you get so addicted to it, my brain just goes numb from spending so much time on my phone. We need to get our heads out of that shit and think about what we really want to do and what will make us feel good, because that’s what the world is lacking really, people don’t feel good do they, and now they’ve fucking made all our fun illegal which is crazy, so it’s more important than ever to think about what you want to do.”
It’s all well and good wondering about what everyone else wants to do, but what do BAD NERVES truly want to do? The electrifying punk-and-roll punch-up of Baby Drummer, an anthem for the underdogs if there ever was one, is about as close as we’ll get to comprehending their true mission statement.
“It’s about wanting someone to come along again and get people excited about guitar music, just like THE RAMONES and THE CLASH did, and there’s some awesome bands around now, don’t get me wrong, but it seems like a lot of youngsters think rock-n-roll is an old thing. You just don’t get too much fast-paced adrenaline shit blasting out of morning radio, which I think would give everyone a good wakeup rather than the other stuff, so it would be awesome to be that band, and if that happened it wouldn’t just be us, you’ve got IDLES and SHAME, and loads of guitar bands getting traction now. All we can hope for is that people will like it, and if we end up championing a genre, then fucking wicked, but we’ll see, we’re certainly not doing anything particularly original, we’re kind of copying our idols and packaging it in our own way although I’m hoping there’s enough originality there to not be a total ripoff.”
Sounding like a total ripoff is something that simply doesn’t stick on BAD NERVES. It’s revitalising and it’s refreshing, sounding like a band in a basement bashing through their jam session before they set off for a night on the town. They throw out fast-and-furious adrenaline shots of power-punk and garage rock that hits your eardrums with its hooks and carries on. It’s a sound they’ve wanted to cultivate from the very beginning of BAD NERVES.
“We wanted to write songs that were superfast with great hooks so that the faster-paced the song is the more adrenaline you get, the more adrenaline you have the cheesier the vocals can be without it being shit. It’s the first time I didn’t have to compromise on either the music or the melodies. It all started when my mate sent me these couple of bands, RADIOACTIVITY and JAY REATARD, and something clicked in my mind and I was like ‘fuck’ – you don’t have to write cheesy pop music to have a good melody, you don’t have to do crazy death metal to get adrenaline, you can mix the two.”
By mixing up the puressence of old-school seventies punk with the ferocity of garage-rock and the powerhouse hooks of power-pop, they’ve bred a batch of balls-to-the-walls anthems that are over-and-done within less than half an hour. Whilst you might think it’s a risk, it’s something Bobby believes is working in their favour.
“You’ve got to try and catch someone’s attention on a newsfeed, and without that in mind, we’ve written music that does that straight away – if you’re clicking through your newsfeed and there’s a band you’ve never heard, and there’s an intro to their song, the chances of you listening until it really starts is quite slim. Let’s face it we all just flick through these social media blackholes, where with our songs they all start immediately, you’ll know if it’s up your street within the first two bars. It wasn’t deliberate or to serve that purpose, but it’s worked quite well with the times we’re living in, especially with everyone locked in doors.”
You might’ve even argued that synthesising their sound into short-and-sweet bursts would’ve worked in their favour in the era of playlisting and streaming services. For Bobby, in the wake of Spotify’s plans for digital payola, it’s hit-and-miss territory for anybody right now.
“If Spotify reduce my streaming fees anymore it’ll be in minus numbers, I don’t fully understand the inner workings of streaming and finances, but you do sometimes sit and think that a lot of people get rich from music, and very rarely is it the people who make it” he explains, adding “I don’t give a shit about being rich but it would be nice to get some income from doing it. I feel like musicians, or people who make art generally, are taken advantage of, because we love doing it so much. Art is so undervalued and because we love doing it so much, they’ll know we’ll do it for free, so the system is set up where they won’t give us any financial support, and we’ll still do it, and they’ll make money out of it.”
The system is something that Bobby shouts about a lot, whether it’s the way the music industry works, the way the government governs, or even the way the mind ticks and tocks. Whilst self-admittedly not a political punk band, or even remotely one interested in putting out protest songs, they dabble in the dark arts of speaking out on the likes of New Shapes and Palace. The former fears for the lack of equality in our communities in the 21st century, whilst the latter looks a little at homelessness and the establishment, bringing with it one of the album’s sharpest stabs at the system.
“I only did it for a joke originally. I said ‘why does the queen get a fucking palace but not me?’ but looking back it really puts it into perspective. This is really anti-royalist but it baffles me that there’s all these people living on the streets going through all this crazy shit and we’ve got one family who are, let’s face it, harbouring pedophiles and they live in this palace in the middle of London, it just seems crazy to me.”
“That’s how the system is set up, you have to have the rich people to have the poor people – didn’t they say that all of the billionaires of the earth could make every person a millionaire, but if they did the whole thing would collapse, so they need us to suffer – I’m not suffering too bad, I’ve got a bedroom.”
It’s here in his childhood bedroom that Bobby Nerves plots to bring about the revolution banger-by-banger, but more importantly, it’s where he broadcasts from as the voice of a voiceless generation. Having lived through the worst of it, watching millennials be born into a world addicted to technology, he wants to use whatever platform he can get to help the youth generation find what works for them, and to follow their hearts no matter what.
“When it comes to the youth, it’s been said before but I can’t stress enough how important it could be for some kid to play a guitar, because for me it’s been my saving grace. It makes me feel good when I feel like shit, it’s like medication – instead, it seems kids are growing up with technology and their medication is this dopamine hit from their phone, and that won’t really make you feel better when you don’t feel good” he says, elaborating further “it’s hard to say ‘do music, you can make a good career out of it and buy a nice house’ because that don’t happen for any of us, but the thing you get is this medication, it takes you out of this reality, and focus your mind on this thing you’re passionate about and for a period of time you don’t worry about this normal life.”
Whether Bobby and his band of BAD NERVES are speaking as the voice of a generation or flying at the speed of light championing guitar music with their power-punk parade, one thing is for sure; there is nothing normal about Bobby Nerves, and that’s what music needs right now.
Bad Nerves is out now via Killing Moon Records.
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