Beau Flies Buzz
Ben Thompson
“It’s a zipper, it’s the act of flying, it’s an annoying insect” explains Beau Flies singer and guitarist Otti Albietz, of the band’s newly extended name (they were formerly plain old caps lock BEAU). Functional, thrilling, and with an insistent buzz, this explosively catchy power-trio have more than enough momentum to carry that expanded brand forward.
In the run up to their first full hometown headline show at Henry Ward Hall on 12 July, Beau Flies will be releasing the third in their series of double A-sided singles (universally accessible via Bandcamp, but you’ve got to be quick to get the seven-inch vinyl version on the Plural Baby label, as the first two sold out within days). When Otti has introduced ‘A song about the 500 most important people in Hastings’ at one of the sequence of gigs which have taken the band from a festival inside the Arctic Circle to a virtual residency at Lower Clapton urban cool epicentre Biddle Bros, it’s seemed like a brutal put-down of self-appointed tall poppies might be on the cards.
“Poking fun at the cliques that be” is how bass player Haydn Ackerley puts it. But on closer listening, an infectiously humane depiction of people “looking for meaning and purpose” in testing circumstances also emerges–“I need to make a living… so little time to live!” Otti yelps, relatably.
The Hastings 500 is one of several Beau Flies songs offering a vision of collective betterment. “This band is a community,” explains drummer Colden Drystone. “It feels like much more than just three people, because musically we bring together a much bigger history and a broader sense of the world.” Having first come to public attention as a visual artist, Drystone says the experience of being in Beau Flies compares favourably with his formative years in the Peckham art squat scene. “That was also about people with the same soul but different ingredients working together to make something new and hopeful, but generally speaking I think art struggles to do this as effortlessly as music, because it is so much more focused on the individual ego. I love our band because of its immediacy and democracy. When a gig goes well it feels like we are playing music that our audience has helped to write.”
That sense of communal exhilaration is pithily summed up by Otti as “Real-time therapy for a town in dire need.” Just don’t call them Deep Purple to Borough Council’s Rainbow…
Show begins 7.30 pm.Tickets for Henry Ward Hall are £12 (+bkg) on Eventbrite or £15 OTD
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