This Future Is Bright And I Don’t Want it
Hello there
It is the end of another year and it feels like only yesterday I was like “whoops, I’ve not posted a blog for a while”. It was 11 months and three and a half weeks ago. Time flies when you’re out and about, but it’s time for another unvarnished round-up.
2025 started with a trip across an M8 motorway rapidly disappearing under snow as we travelled to the First Footin’ show in Edinburgh on New Year’s Day. It was a treat to take to the stage with Audrey again, and a pleasure to play in front of a capacity audience of folk hungry for some craic following the weather-related cancellation of the Hogmanay celebrations the night before. It was nice to have a breeze through highlights of three albums as a band for the first time in 6 months, following many duo shows. It was an odd time to have a show and I kinda felt like I couldn’t switch off for a festive break until after it. The dangers of an overactive and overworked mind.
I get my break though, heading to Dublin on the 3rd with my oldest pal to see Christie Moore at Vicar St. A great a wee trip. Christie remains an inspiration as he nears 80 years of age. Two hours of quality entertainment followed by unhinged karaoke two doors down (also class) and then a tofu spice bag from across the road.
We had the biggest BC show to date at the end of January in Cottiers Theatre for Celtic Connections. It was a lot of fun, and probably the best way you can spend a Wednesday night in the first month of the year. We rolled out Cheering In The Distance from the first BC record for the first time in five years, which kinda hammered home that a awful lot of things have happened since September 2019, when it came out. In fact when the fourth record comes out it’ll be four Broken Chanter albums in six-and-a-half years, which feels absolutely crazy.
After the show, we pack up and head to a Travelodge on a roundabout just outside Ayr as we’re on the 7.30am ferry to Belfast the next morning for a short tour of Ireland. Now! That’s What I Call Routing.
We start the tour in Waterford in Phil Grimes - it’s a small venue with a great vibe above one of the cosiest and best pubs you can imagine. Martin, Bart, Charlotte and I are “the loudest band ever to play it” and it genuinely felt that the packed room was about to come crashing into the pub below as we hammered through the set. I love playing in Waterford, as after Linzi and I played there in 2023, it feels like those who saw it embraced BC and brought their mates this time around. The sweat is coming off us as whips steam as we stand outside on the stage right fire escape after the set, and it feels good.
We stay in a cute wee terraced house in Muine Bheag, which is sort of in between Kilkenny and Waterford. As much as somewhere in Co. Carlow can be, anyways. The river Barrow flows along the end of the street it’s on, and the weather is bright enough to sit on the wee fence separating the road from the water, with a cup of tea in hand in the morning. This house is a godsend as it literally comes in at 10% of what hotel accommodation would’ve cost the four of us, and it makes the shows possible. We didn’t get it off AirBnB, worry not.
The next night we are in John Cleeres Theatre in Kilkenny for the St Brigid’s Festival. Cleeres is a great room and we make an extremely loud fist of rattling through the discography. Some rugby lads sneak in the back during our set closer of All You Fascists and start to leather each other. Martin gets a munchie box to himself from the Chinese a few doors down from the venue and is judged by the rest of us as he eats it solo, before retiring to his bed to watch Angela’s Ashes at 1am. Unbelievably, that’s not a joke.
Charlotte and I part way with Bart and Martin and head to the American Bar in Belfast to perform a duo set in their lovely upstairs venue. It was a real pleasure to play in Belfast for first time in [REDACTED] years, the last time being with Kid Canaveral at Auntie Annies back in [REDACTED]. The show was great and it was lovely to speak to a lot of folk who I’d no idea were clamouring for a BC Belfast show afterwards at the merch. Things like that are mad to me still.
We have to postpone our Dundalk show due to a family health scare back home, leading to our time on the island of Ireland to be unavoidably cut short. Poor family health will be a feature of 2025 as it was of 2024, alas.
Time progresses as it does, and we head towards spring and to rescheduled shows in Irvine and Stirling, plus an extra date added in Aberdeen. My 1974 Fender Twin Reverb amplifier blow’s up in soundcheck at Harbour Arts in Irvine. Which is, you know, a complicating factor.
A couple of weeks later, I come off my bicycle in the rain out the back of Braehead Shopping Centre in Glasgow. I was feeling very pleased with myself out on a bank holiday, exercising in the pissing rain. Unfortunately, I did not slow down significantly enough for the path turning into wooden decking. I was aiming to stop and re-route but the bike went from under me, and my barrel chest slammed into the wood. Essentially under the panoramic windows of the food court, no less. Some folk having a fag out the back of the mall had a brief look over, but lost interest as I got back to my feet, apparently uninjured and hitting a pure riddy that would thankfully have been hidden by the weather. I have 13km to cycle still in the big loop I’m doing and adrenaline carries me most of the way before I start to realise I have not gotten away with it and have done myself a fairly bad injury. The minor injuries confirms it is probably a fractured rib or two and definitely damaged intercostal muscles. I spend the next 10 days oot ma bin on Opiates and feel very sorry for myself, as I know from experience that my summer of cycling and climbing is likely off the menu now. I get back into the saddle a few weeks later and it is far, far too soon and I am confirmed as an idiot as an 80km cycle in the heat causes my lungs to accumulate all sorts of dust and gunk that I am not able to clear properly because of my injuries, resulting in a severe chest infection that absolutely floors me and gives me a temperature 0.2ºC shy of what would require another trip to the hospital. What a dickhead.
It also means that I almost miss my team winning the Scottish Cup for the first time in 35 years. I am a barely recovered, sweaty mess at Hampden, required to make as little sound as possible and brandishing a prescription inhaler because my lungs are so gubbed.
The injuries, chest infection and its lingering effects result in my writing for the new album to fall behind schedule. Once I’m able to properly hold a guitar again, my voice is still nowhere to be found. In fact, my proper lung capacity for singing doesn’t really get back to where it should be until the tour in October.
The summer passes in a flurry of demoing and recuperation, with an album starting to take shape. I visit Charlotte in late June and we go over everything that I have. She pours a bucket of relieving news over me when she tells me both that, I’d done way more than she’d expected given my anxiety about it, and that there was definitely an album in there. We spend a week untangling demos and ideas and by the end of it, what works sounds better with both of us playing on it, and what doesn’t work gets binned. I spend the rest of July working on the demos, filleting them, extending them, singing nonsense over them, and eventually sending them to Paul (Savage) for production notes, alarmingly close to the start of our time in Chem19 studios.
The weekend before the recording sessions start I am in Edinburgh at the Fringe to record a podcast with Siobhan Wilson, Gill Fleetwood, and Adam Ross, with Vic Galloway hosting. The idea is that we all play songs from our back catalogue together and answer questions in-between songs. It works really well as a format. It was an enjoyable thing to do, and I talked about my entire “career” which got me recounting things that I had not thought about for a long time. The enjoyment of the night washes away the chastising I had been giving myself for booking a show 34ish hours before we load into the studio to record a new album.
For myriad reasons, we didn’t fit in as many rehearsal or pre-productions sessions for the new record, but this means there is a real energy and edge to the performances in the tracking days as a result. It all starts to come together with live takes of the rhythm section being the foundation of the record once again. This is the third record we’ve made with Paul in just over four years in Chem19, which feels mental - April/May 2021; May/June 2023; and Aug/Sep 2025. Not forgetting the EP we did in July 2024.
The record is agitated and angular like Chorus Of Doubt, but it stretches beyond that into melodic, mournful pop, into untethered electronica, and into unleashed chaotic instrumental abandon in places.
I don’t feel like I have perspective on it and I leave it alone for a few weeks before returning to it to work through final recalls to the mixes. With fresh ears, it’s great, and that’s a relief. It’s an album - a coherent piece of work - and I am very proud of it. More news on that soon.
During the mixing sessions, I receive a call telling me that a member of my family has passed away, and within days of that I learn that another close family member has cancer. Out of respect for their privacy, and for the fact that my private life is something I like to keep separate, that’s all I’m going to say about that. Obviously, it’s all very bad news indeed.
The morning after I finish up with the final recalls with Paul in the studio, Charlotte and I hit the road, I try to pack away everything rattling around my head, and we plot a course to Newcastle for the first date of the Emma Pollock tour on which we are the support. It’s quite funny going out on tour with your boss. Seeing what gentle piss-taking I could get away with each night onstage was a fun high-wire act too. We didn’t get dropped from the label halfway down England, so that’s something. It’s a really enjoyable tour, and our mailing list sheets are filling up nicely, although things take a turn for the worse in Hull. I woke in our hotel just outside Cambridge (and immediately next to Bronze Age burial mound - yes, really) with a queasy feeling right in the pit of my stomach. I ignore it the best I can and we head to Hull for our next show. I last until just after load-in and, while having a lie down on the dressing room couch, I accept my fate and stumble to the bathroom where I vomit for a full five minutes, leaving what feels like no liquid in my body. In my defence, the sink looked cleaner after I’d finished puking in it. Charlotte takes one look at me and orders me into the car. I feel wrecked and when Charlotte strongly suggests we skip our hotel in Wakefield (and therefore the next night’s show in Manchester) and head back to Glasgow that night, I am too weak to un-sensibly object. This is one of the many reasons I love Charlotte, making sure to haul me five hours through the night to deposit a fever-ridden me in my own bed. I would have loved to have seen footage of us heading up the M6/M74, as I was semi-conscious and slack-jawed, only occasionally rousing to have some electrolytes, while she was laughing away to Fern Brady’s audiobook to keep her company in the dark; it must’ve looked like a low-budget Weekend At Bernie’s sequel.
We rejoined the tour two dates later in Perth, missing only the shows in hull and Manchester, and taking advantage of a scheduled rest day to get some bloods taken and medicine given at the Doc. If you’re curious, bloods were fine bar one result suggestion I was fighting a massive, unspecified infection. Cool, right? Gastritis? An ulcer? Take your pick. It does mean that all of the tour photos of shows where I’ve eaten before we played look like someone has blown me up like a carnival balloon. Not what ye want. Still got a few things to have the NHS investigate as I’m not quite right. Again, cool, right?
We finished up the Emma tour at Oran Mor in Glasgow, and it was joyful. It is a real treat to go away on tour with extremely sound folk. Obviously, I’m very fond of Emma, but Graham and Pete in her band are absolute diamonds too. The whole thing bar some brief gastric distress was a big laugh. Throw into the mix Richie Dempsey behind the desk on the Scottish dates and it’s nowt but fun.
Truth be told, I am absolutely knackered. It’s been a shite year health-wise. I caught the MUTANT FLU that is absolutely everywhere at the moment at the end of November just after (or more likely at) the Glad Cafe shows we did to record the duo live album (out later in 2026). The matinee show was a wee bit nervy, but after Paul told us we’d got pretty much 90% of it, we all relaxed into the evening show and it was one of those special ones. It was weird to go through four album’s and an EP’s worth of songs to pick setlists and reflect on how much we’ve done in the past seven years. And a Kid Canaveral tune too! We got away with the unreleased songs from the forthcoming album the second time around too, I reckon. It was a special afternoon and evening and it’s no mean feat to sell out anywhere these days, so to do it twice in a day was heartening given the state of the industry in general, and seeing so many of you there was genuinely, genuinely touching. And what a treat to share a stage with Jill O’Sullivan again too. A superstar.
I think I am quite run down. There’s been a lot to deal with this year. Two music-related jobs, and another one that’s intense and takes up a significant part of my time too, is a lot to contend with. Put those together with injury, death, and diagnoses and I felt like I was crawling towards the end of this year with one finger come November. I love being on a stage, and I love making records, so I just need to rearrange my life a little. I need to keep doing it, so I will.
I know I’m not getting any younger, despite turning 29 yet again at my last birthday in September there (OK, 32), but look, age is just a number, and I am only slightly less indestructible than I used to be. Saying that, 2025 has taken its toll and I am taking some time over Christmas and the start of January to register the same amount of brain activity as a house plant and properly rest up.
It’s quite difficult to switch off completely though, as I’ve got loads of news for you, about a new record and tour dates and all that, but…all in good time. If you want to receive some good ol’ fashioned snail mail about this in the near future, then give me your address here. You can be safe in the knowledge that hundreds of folk have only received BC-related fun and no junk mail as a result of trusting me with the location of their actual letterboxes. Dae it.
We finished off the year with shows in Aberdeen for the AGP Christmas Party (full band) and opening for The Supernaturals at St Luke’s in Glasgow (duo). I was sweating poison three weeks post-mutant flu in Aberdeen but it was a good show. I did speak less mince than usual to preserve my voice, but we’ll be back in the Spring. The duo show with Charlotte was a good laugh, and felt like a wee celebration of the fun we can have presenting the songs as a duo. I’d regained my ability to be a gobshite by then too.
So! That’s a very brief rundown of the year. I deliberately didn’t include as much description of how things are quite bad in various ways at the moment, as I did last year. An abridged version would be: don’t use “AI” as it’s terrible for the environment, your brain, worker’s rights, and art; please go to gigs and buy the records of your favourite artists when you can afford to; and the slide into fascism in the west isn’t going to go away on its own - go to a demo, organise! Also, please take some time to register your disappointment/disbelief/anger at BBC Radio Scotland cutting their new music output and replacing it with “easy listening content” by writing to them. It is not hyperbole to say that this will be absolutely terrible for artists in Scotland. I have fired off various letters to many at the Beeb, and to Secretaries of State and Cabinet Secretaries registering my own disquiet. Use your voice!
And finally, thank you to everyone this year that has put us on a stage or on the radio. Thank you to everyone that has come to a gig, bought an album, newspaper, tote or t-shirt - that all keeps us on the road and gets the next record made. I know that these things have felt more and more like luxuries over the past few years and every ticket and record sold does mean the world to us.
I’ll be back very soon with news about BC Album IV and when you can catch us live again.
I hope that you have found peace and time to rest at the end of this year. Look after yourselves and those around you.
davidx
