New Music: Mr Bruce – GO SLOW

While his OK album is packed full with leftfield bangers and high-profile guests, GO SLOW is possibly the fulcrum of it all.

Exploring grief and how those left behind deal with that, Mr Bruce takes the high-energy motifs and sounds that typify the outgoing tracks on OK and turns them into a double eulogy. As clubby and dubby as the intro comes across, it is essentially a memorial in words and music to loved ones. It was conceived in the wake of both his twin brother Eddie and his bandmate and best friend Chucks (Time Cole) both dying.

Covid lockdowns did impact the ability to address his grief, as they did for many of us, and also left him searching for a way to express that grief in a way that carried meaning for him. That is done through both the song and video. The latter could easily be seen as a way to work through grief in an open and shared way, informal but with a form of its own, not offering closure but a context that works for Mr Bruce.

It’s not an easy piece of film to watch, especially on Monday morning but some of us will find solace in it, so it’s a worthwhile one. It got me thinking of the ad-hoc memorials for those we lost to AIDS in the 90s, then needing to find a new language for dealing with what we experienced.

He says, “On the whole, Western culture is ill equipped for processing death. This film is my attempt to imagine a ritual for saying goodbye outside the church or the funeral parlour – a pilgrimage to the sea with painted puffins that become a burning effigy.”

“In retrospect I realise that I wrote GO SLOW as a kind of a device to say a proper goodbye to my bandmate and best friend Tim Cole, who died in 2020. As it was during Covid, we faced all kinds of social distancing and capacity restrictions for his funeral, which made it impossible to give him a proper send-off. This song creates a ceremony of a sea-bound pyre being carried to the shoreline and pushed out to sea. I am hoping that others might use this song as a way of letting go.”

OK came out on the 15th of May and also features contributions including Brian Eno, Homeboy Sandman, Daisy JT Smith, Olivia Douglass, and Roz Hervey; you can find streaming options right here. The album sees Mr Bruce hit the festival and gig circuits this year, and he can see changes from his days with The Correspondents and pre-pandemic days.

“I have found over the years that gigs/clubs/festivals that I’ve played have gone from being about the pursuit of hedonism to something else. There’s still all the dancing and raucous energy, but there’s also space created for a little catharsis if that’s what you need.”

“Many of the songs that I’ve made are designed for the dancefloor, but the lyrics are about processing grief and standing in defiance of systems built to oppress and divide us. For my new live show, I want to make a space for collective engagement with the complexity of our volatile world along with the release of dancing and shaking it all out with a room full of people.”

Mr Bruce is on the bill for a whole host of UK festivals this summer, with that UK tour scheduled for this October. Head to his website or follow Mr Bruce on his Facebook and Instagram accounts for details of those and streaming options for OK.

Header photo by Mr Bruce