Beth Blade & The Beautiful Disasters: Only Creating Beautiful Rock And Roll
Wales has been a proponent of rock and metal, and has delivered some of the best bands and artists music has seen. From BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE to FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND, the country knows how to rock and roll, and is brimming with musical talent. Another band to add to the country’s list of brilliant rock acts should be BETH BLADE & THE BEAUTIFUL DISASTERS, coming out of Cardiff and bringing a feisty and powerful energy to hard rock. With the band’s new album, Mythos, Confession, Tragedies & Love released in July, vocalist Beth Blade spoke with Distorted Sound all about the album, how the band began, and more.
“It’s probably the most mature, darkest album we’ve ever done,” Beth began in discussion about the upcoming album. “I really hope that people like I’m starting to get really nervous now because the reviews are coming out and I’m like, ‘oh god, oh god, oh god’. It’s almost like having a secret. But then everybody starts to get in on the secret. So it’s like proper nerve racking. We have actually crowdfunded every album that we’ve done, so when we started this band, our very first EP, we recorded it ourselves at my university’s recording studio. We used to be with a platform called Pledge Music, but as that’s since shut down, we used Kickstarter for this album. Pledge actually closed halfway through one of our previous album campaigns, we only got a third of the funds that we’d raised. But we promised the fans that we would do the stuff for them and we couldn’t bear the thought of them losing all the money. So we made sure that we fulfilled every single order, every single CD.”
As stated, BETH BLADE & THE BEAUTIFUL DISASTERS first began whilst Beth was in university in Wales back in 2012, so this year is the 10th anniversary of the band’s existence ever since they first started playing in Cardiff’s Fuel Rock Club. “We did our first gig on a bank holiday Sunday in May 2015,” Beth describes. “We did five original songs and then I think we threw in a couple of covers; we did Blame It On The Boom Boom by BLACK STONE CHERRY, Love Bites by HALESTORM, did a THUNDER song as well, and then we just really grew from there. And Rob Toogood, the owner of Fuel, he gave us a lot of opportunities to open up for established artists”
“I guess we’re kind of old school in a sense,” she continues. “We don’t have the biggest following on Spotify or hundreds of 1000s of views or listens on streaming and social media. We just play a lot of live shows, then tried to kind of foster our reputation through playing gigs and meeting people. I guess we like doing things the traditional way, playing absolutely everything and ended up getting to do some really cool stuff.”
On the topic of shows, especially with festival season starting, a recent article came out that only 13% of UK festivals this year had women or non-binary musicians headline, with some festivals, especially within rock and metal, only having all-male bands headline since their inception. This is something Beth herself is passionate about. “It’s just kind of lights the fire under my ass so to speak, it makes me want to show them that they’re wrong. But when it comes to the festival bills, certainly at grassroots level, it’s definitely an important issue to discuss. I’m not going to name names or the venue or anything like that, but we did a gig once and I literally overheard the organiser say that we were just a bill filler because I was a chick. Or other times, it’s like, ‘oh, no, we can’t have them on because we’ve already got the female singer’. There really shouldn’t be a quota or anything.”
She explains further, “there’re so many bands out there with talented female and non-binary people out there who just don’t get a platform because it’s been that way for so long. I genuinely think people are just used to it and they don’t actually think about it. You’re seeing a lot more women getting into music, and getting into producing and sound engineering, and it used to be really rare. I can name 20 bands off the top of my head who are at the same level that have females or non-binary members in particular. You’ve got women of colour, who have even less representation in rock music; it’s a really difficult one to put your finger on. Because most of the people support women in rock music, they support non-binary musicians, so why are they not getting the support on the bigger stages of the world?”
Hopefully BETH BLADE & THE BEAUTIFUL DISASTERS will be added to festival lineups in the coming months after the release of the record as the songs would be great to hear across the festival fields and grounds. For now, the band have an album release show that’s happening in Blackpool Waterloo in July. “It won’t be the biggest show we’ve done because it’s not in terms of people and bodies, but it will certainly be the biggest in terms of production,” Beth describes as they rounded up the interview. “So we’re actually going to do something a little bit different, a little more theatrical for it. We’re gonna play the album in full and then we’re just going to play as much as we can to get out there to as many people as we can. We’ve got a couple of singles to release and just promote it as hard as possible and get it reaching far and wide. I think that’s the main aim. For us, playing live is the best thing about it. 100%. That’s what I love about music, going out and playing those concerts, having that feeling on stage and then making connections with people. There’s nothing like it in the world.”
Mythos, Confession, Tragedies And Love is out now via Beautiful Disasters Records.
Like BETH BLADE & THE BEAUTIFUL DISASTERS on Facebook.