Billy Lunn on Myth-Busting With The Subways' 'Uncertain Joys'

Photo: Laura Lewis

Rock ‘n’ roll’s outrageous lifestyle has always been something of a dream destination for disenfranchised loners and wannabe rebels. Often seen as the ultimate emancipation from society, idealised perceptions of ‘live fast, die young’ and bullshit notions of eternal youth are seductive for  eager souls who, without even knowing it, are often seeking an escape from a troubled existence. As such, when reality crashes into fantasy, the results can be disastrous.

Listening to The Subways’ frontman Billy Lunn, he’s clearly head over heels in love with every aspect of consuming and making music. His passion for the band, formed in 2002 with bassist-vocalist Charlotte Cooper and drummer Josh Morgan, is both intoxicating and infectious. Alas, it was also an all-consuming relationship that came at a huge cost.

In 2021, following an attempt to take his own life, Lunn was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Tackling issues that had plagued him for years, his journey of understanding and contrition culminated in a public, and surprisingly unbleached, confession about what he’d been through and the suffering his behaviour had inflicted on others.

Emerging in its wake, The Subways’ long-awaited fifth album ‘Uncertain Joys’ is a brilliantly crafted work by someone who is deriving creative potency a well rounded and happy life that’s far removed from the arrested development that, in truth, is often the sad reality behind many a devout rock ‘n’ roll existence.

We spoke to the eloquent and transparent Lunn about how his band, which now includes drummer Camille Phillips following Morgan’s departure for family reasons, have evolved while remaining true to their roots, the reason he needed to destroy unhealthy mythological constructs and why, thanks to the album’s epic finale, he might be slowly morphing into Jeff Lynne.

How challenging was it to craft an album over an often turbulent eight year period, where you all stepped away from the music industry for a considerable period of time?

It was an odd album to make because, previously, while playing gigs, we were also writing songs and then would road test and refine them. By the end of 18 months of touring we’d have a whole record and would go into the studio. But this time around I’d decided to go to University and Charlotte wanted to have kids, so we took a period of time off. I went and read English at Uni, Josh went back to France with his girlfriend and daughter and we all got on with our own lives. 

During that time, over three years, I was still pulling ideas together. I was going through purple patches, intense creative patches, where I’d immediately contact the guys and be like ‘Look we need to get together and make these songs’ but they would have to remind me ‘No, we’ve got some time off now. You just sit with those ideas and get on with your degree.’. So, by the time I graduated I had this corpus of material to go into the studio. With me being producer on this record, it all just tumbled together after that period of abstinence. As soon as we were in a room again it was full throttle: here we go, let’s make a record.    

Once you regrouped, what was the process like for whittling all that material down and creating a reboot that sounds cohesive, super-energised and full of joy?

We looked at the ones we’d most enjoy playing live. We’re primarily a touring band. We love being on stage. We love seeing and relating with the audience and having them participate in the show themselves because, for us, breaking down the barrier between the band and audience is an integral part of what we do. Creating a carnival-esque atmosphere. So those songs came together quite quickly, but there were others where I wanted to use different instrumentation. 

Over the course of my degree I’d stepped back from being this guy in a band and became this music appreciator again. Before we recorded our first record I was listening to albums without that analytical head on my shoulders. So, I was just enjoying music in that way again and got heavily into synth music. I’ve always been into pop, like Kylie or Madonna, so synths have always been a big part of my love of music, but I got locked into synthwave and would download all these really obscure compilations from Bandcamp of records being made over in Russia, Estonia and Japan. I also ended up falling in love with the Roland Juno-60 synthesiser and wanted to work some of those sounds into the album. 

Lots of rock bands try to freshen up their sound as they progress, but in doing so their trademark guitars get relegated to the background and they lose too much of their identity in the process. You’ve taken the skeleton, flesh and skin of The Subways and given it a gleaming sun tan.

We definitely wanted to make sure that the essential elements of what we are as a band...we were just three kids from Essex who stumbled upon the fact that we enjoyed playing music together. And it was very rudimentary. We weren’t technically brilliant but loved making a lot of noise. A lot of that has to do with the fact we use our fingers, our hands, our bodies and that’s very much what you do when you play guitar. Not so much when you play the synthesiser.

So, songs like Uncertain Joys, Love Waiting On You and Joli Coeur are fundamentally, at their core, very synth driven. But we wanted to make sure they were part of The Subways repertoire. That if you heard them you’d go ‘Oh, that’s The Subways. They’ve just got synths with them.’ We wanted to explore new sounds without completely changing our sound. 

You’ve described ‘Uncertain Joys’ as an album of two halves. Can you expand on that?

The first part is me dealing with my interior experience. When I write songs I express how I feel in that very moment and only discover how I truly felt, cognitively, at a later date, when I’m able to say ‘I was really in this kind of head space, this kind of environment, with these kinds of people, feeling these very visceral and different emotions.’ Writing music is a spiritual, primal thing, less a cerebral activity, so when I collated the songs together and started working out the track listing I felt inclined to lump certain songs together in two halves. 

The songs dealing with interiority, I put at the front because we all tend to think, subjectively from our own experiences, inside and outwards. So let’s put the songs where I’m looking at things from the outside in, that deal with exteriority, at the back end of the record. Like Joli Coeur. That’s dealing with monuments, space and how those things affect memories. I’ve dealt a lot with relationships in my songs, with people, myself and how I feel, but I’ve never dealt with concrete things that have huge impacts on us on a day to day basis. Those are powerful moments and I felt they deserved representation in a song.            

There’s always been a predominant punk backbone to your music, so it’s interesting that Futures, the final eight minute track on the album, is almost your first foray into the world of prog-rock. 

Oh my lordy, I know. I hate talking about it. I remember first presenting the idea to Charlotte and Josh and going ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve got three movements here.’ We’re calling them movements, because they’re not phrases. Each movement has different phrases within, so when we started sewing Futures together I was like ‘This movement here, oh, this movement here, oh god...I’m talking about movements...I feel like friggin’ Jeff Lynne.’

And it’s a difficult one to talk about because Futures is me coming to terms with who I am, how I feel about myself and how I see the world. I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder last year and Futures is me trying to explore a sense of identity. In the first section I’m looking at myself, and then looking out at the world, and constantly undergoing this interplay. My ears haven’t stopped ringing since I was nine years old and that affects me every single second of every single day. It’s why I fell in love with rock music, because it drowned out that tinnitus that’s very anxiety based. That affects the way I undergo internal processing and what I’m going to say, how I relate to other people, and how I see the world. 

And then I thought ‘That’s not enough. I need to explore what’s going on in my brain’ and that’s what happened in the second section. It deals with that internal cognitive struggle. And then I was still saying ‘That’s not enough...I need to deal with my body, who I am corporeally.’ There are moments, because of my Borderline Personality Disorder, where I feel like an empty translucent vessel. After I suffered my first breakdown I said to my therapist ‘I just feel like I’m this inanimate object with air going in and out and that’s it.’ I have full conversations with people and I’m not present. I’m not here and can’t feel my body. So with that last section I talk about just looking at my body as a machine ‘tearing off my skin and seeing wires for veins and gears for brains.’ 

Just how bad did things get and, to what degree, did the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle exacerbate your condition?

Last year was probably the hardest because I made several admissions. I couldn’t go on, I couldn’t pretend any more, I couldn’t maintain the myth. We all have this fundamental problem within us where we are constantly, on a day to day basis, maintaining these myths. In the music industry, the rock industry in particular, there’s a very mythologised iconography that goes on with the frontman. Where there’s a lifestyle that’s indulged, a culture that’s participated in and maintained. It just keeps churning on and everything’s fine and this is what we get with our frontmen. They’re mysterious, crazy, weird, off centre, they’re divas and can do what they want. 

I could not continue living the myth that I was OK, that I’m behaving the way I was because I’m an artist and I’m in a rock band. That I go on tour and my lifestyle’s really unstable and that’s cool and what makes my songs interesting. It’s the diametric opposite actually. All the problems that I’d created, all the barriers I’d established around myself to deal with those problems were not conducive to creativity. I’ve had probably my most creative period of my entire life since I’ve broken those barriers down.

You bravely disclosed everything you’d gone through in a very candid public statement. Why did you choose to do that when you could have easily kept it to yourself? 

As soon as I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder I didn’t feel so anomalous any more. I realised the biggest step I could take was to puncture this mythology. To completely dismantle it and just say ‘everything’s not OK. This is why everything’s not OK. This is how I feel. This is how I act. And this is what I have to do on a day to day basis.’ If I’d have continued without taking that action I probably wouldn’t be here today. A huge part of the problem, of not speaking about it, was one of the reasons I ended up the way I was. 

I felt compelled to speak out because if someone else I might have looked inwards and been able to deal with the stuff I was dealing with at a much earlier stage, been so much happier and made everyone around me happier as well. The stigma is one of the biggest obstacles because if you start talking about this stuff the mythology is disrupted and all of a sudden everything becomes real. This idolisation that everyone bases their adulation on for their favourite frontman in their favourite band...the scales have fallen...the veil is lifted…the mystery is broken and everything suddenly becomes much more real. 

In 2015 you said something that seems quite telling in hindsight: ‘I wake up every morning and I’m thinking of the band. I go to bed at night, and I’m thinking of the band.’ Eight years later, and in light of everything you’ve just talked about, how would you revise that statement in a way that reflects your mindset now? 

That is such a bookmark for me. Thank you for bringing that up because I have completely shifted priorities. It’s not like something has taken the place of the band, it’s that things have levelled up to a much greater degree. My family are incredibly important to me. I can’t believe I never put them first, that music was always first, the band was always first. I’ve sacrificed so much for this band that I would never change, because the experience has been absolutely incredible, but from here on things are different. 

Number one on my list is to stay breathing, to stave off the thoughts that veer towards self destruction. Eat well, walk, read. Satisfy your muse, that’s definitely up there. But the whole business of a band, that’s a different thing to me now. Where we’re going or what we’re doing or how well we’re doing is much less important to me than how I’m feeling while we’re doing it and how other people are feeling while we’re doing band stuff.

If we’re smiling, laughing and losing ourselves and experiencing transcendence and ecstasy, and doing it together, not just inside ourselves, but together as a community, and we’re passing on that happiness to as many people as we can, that’s success right there. I can’t emphasise how differently I feel now to how I was in 2015 with that statement. I wake up and think how much I can make the people in my life who are important to me happy. 

The Subways' 'Uncertain Joys' is out now through Alcopop! Records.

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