New album and Chidham date for Deborah Bonham
It was an album suggested to Deborah Bonham back in the 1990s, but only now has it the felt the right time to do it.
“I just wasn’t ready enough or mature enough”, says Deborah, who lives just outside Chichester. 30 years of life since then have made all the difference.
Bonham-bullick (Bullick being Peter Bullick, Deborah’s husband and guitarist) is a joint project songbook of some classic, some obscure interpretations spanning seven decades.
The album, produced by Deborah and mixed by Tim Oliver at Peter Gabriel’s
Real World Studios, offers a fascinating journey with songs from the greats such as O V Wright, Johnnie Taylor, Albert King, Sam Cooke and Ann Peebles plus more modern-day luminaries including Bernard Fowler (Rolling Stones), Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees) and Chris Wilson. Its release comes as Deborah go out on the road again at last, with dates including one close to home, Chidham Village Hall on Saturday, May 28 (tickets on www.wemsfest.com).
“It is great to get back to it at last but with the pandemic we just got through it. We grew vegetables and we wrote songs! And we just thought well this is OK, there’s nothing else we can do. Lots of people went through a lot worse than we did but we stayed very, very well and we managed. We just spent our time trying to raise money for PPE and it was a gradual calm down from the mayhem that our lives are usually. We got through by trying to raise money for a lot of charities including rescuing dogs. It was nothing we had ever experienced before. The government said that’s it; we would never have taken the decision just stop for two years but we just had to do what we could.”
Fortunately the album had been recorded: “It was really something that had been discussed for me with another record company,
Sony Records, and I was just not ready to do it. I was too immature. They wanted me to do a Lady Sings The Blues type of covers albums, Etta James and Billie Holiday and things like that but I just wasn’t ready. That was back in the late 90s.”
So much has changed since then: “Experience and lots of stuff and getting older and all the things that go with that, 30 years of life and stuff and I find that I can now dig into it. No way could I have ever got into those great blues writers then, into their situations and where they were writing from, but at least now I can dig into my own things.”
Quarto Valley Records approached Deborah to do a record when she was touring America with Paul Rodgers, and this was the album she suggested: “I thought it would be very tough to decide what tracks but when I started it was so much easier than I thought because I know the band so well, 30 years together, and I know what I can do and I think I know instinctively when I hear a song whether I can bring something new to it. And that’s what you’ve really got to do if you’re going to do these songs. You can’t just think that you’re going to give it a go. You’ve got to really love the artists and the music and you’ve got to show respect for the original song and keep the integrity of the original song you have also got to bring your own interpretation and personality to it. You can’t do a straight copy. You’ve got to bring something new.
“We started with about 100 songs but I found whittling them down really quite easy. I could tell at first listen that I couldn’t do this and couldn’t do that. The hard part was going into the studios and doing it. We had to dig really deep. That was October to December 2019 and we were thinking about the mixes when the pandemic happened. We did it remotely and then when things were opened up we were able to do it properly and we finished it in mid-2020 but the record company didn’t want to put it out then because there was no way we could tour. But now we can...”