An overcast mid-summer’s afternoon in a Yorkshire field isn’t everyone’s idea of paradise, but Brian Christinzio (the BC of BC Camplight) is having the time of his life, playing to an enthusiastic crowd at the county’s Deer Shed Festival, dispatching the fruit from his rider into the throng and glugging wine straight from the bottle.
As the skies darken however, so does his mood: dedicating the set’s finale I’m Desperate to Theresa May, the injustice of his deportation and the implacability of the mandarins who oversaw it makes for viscerally great, voyeuristic theatre.
The back story was even grimmer, Christinzio having found a way to return legally back into Britain via an Italian passport only for his father to pass away on the eve of Deportation Blues’ release, the second in a trilogy which began with 2015’s How To Die In The North and finishes with this, a record with every ounce of the anger, frustration and pain endured over the triptych’s cycle and beyond sewn into it with aplomb.
If this is hard to reconcile with the larger than life impresario on stage, it shouldn’t necessarily be inferred that Shortly After Takeoff is a bleak confessional. Instead, the singer opens up a book on his mental health struggles with a scabrous, self-deprecating wit, beginning a conversation for the masses which, as he rightly says, is long overdue.
Whilst How To Die… felt more like a grab-bag of disparate ideas searching for a tune or two, the nine songs here are intense, joyful, funny and unpredictable: opener I Only Drink When I’m Drunk comes off with wonky, leering Duane Eddy licks whilst the opening lines cram in references to Buckfast and Ace Of Base, while Back To Work starts with heavy, inflated synthesisers a la John Grant before immediately cantering off into brightly lit MOR.
These incongruences are deliberate, only because their creator has declared himself as a writer short of attention. Holding all this together into something with structure would’ve been enough of a task for many, but that there is genuine beauty to be found in the likes of Ghosthunting after it begins with a mock stand-up introduction in which Christinzio jokes about seeing his father’s spirit will constitute one of the year’s boldest transitions.
There are, if you insist, proper songs here as well, ones that start and end in broadly the same key; I Want To Be In The Mafia (seemingly a tribute to Nilsson), and Born To Cruise (seemingly a tribute to Steely Dan), while closer Angelo is a brief, poignant dream-pop memoriam.
The press kit for Shortly After Takeoff comes with all the standard blurb about an artist making a great leap forward in their craft, which usually means that they’ve discovered a couple of new minor chords recently, but for Brian Christinzio this isn’t another regurgitated trope.
He confides that his biggest regret is that his father isn’t around to hear it – a sincere, human wish that is as much about love as it is pride.
