03/26/2023
https://sentineldaily.com.au/blood-moon-weddings-steve-lake-our-music-is-dark-but-with-the-light-desperately-trying-to-burst-in-round-the-edges/
Blood Moon Wedding – the opera punk duo who have created their own parallel universe where timeless truths are unveiled and love always wins through – are an intriguing prospect. We hear at Sentinel Daily certainly think so, and their debut, self-titled album underlines the fact. So when the chance came up for a chat with one half – the punk part – of the duo, Steve Lake, best known for his work with UK agit-punks Zounds, then of course we snapped it up…
First off, congratulations on the album – it’s a hell of a record. In my experience, records like this don’t just happen – they evolve from the initial idea, sometimes over years and often swamping their creators in the process – how did the pair of you go about putting the flesh on the bones of that original spark of inspiration? “You are right, it was a long process. Originally we were just going to work on a song together. I like to collaborate with people. It’s one of the joys of playing music. Mia (Dean, vocalist extraordinaire and Steve’s ‘Other Half’ in BMW) sent me a fragment of the song Looking For Us and I found it quite easy to fit in with her vision. I wrote some parts for the song and it really seemed to work well. We decided to take it all a bit further and the idea for doing a long narrative piece evolved. You have to be quite careful with these types of stories though. They tend to conform to quite a standard set of narrative conventions. You know, a couple on the run, outside the law, alienated and in love, go down in a blaze of bloodletting and glory. You want to use those conventions but you don’t want to lapse into cliché. It’s a fine line that you have to tread cautiously. For me the USA is quite a mythological place. Like ancient Greece or something. There are stock characters and situations and moral dilemmas that exist outside the real America. Everybody is familiar with them from Hollywood. So we took that and then we added this whole fantasy element to it, which for me is a metaphor for trauma and neural diversity. But beyond all that I wanted it all to work well as independent songs. We had a lot of discussions on the phone and video. Then we worked separately for months sending parts to each other. You have to remember a lot of this was done through the lockdown. So it was a weird science-fiction time anyway”.
Can you tell us a little about the personnel on this album? “After Mia and I had recorded the basic parts, her husband Tom arranged and played all the keyboard parts and essentially orchestrated it. He is a phenomenal talent who has composed and directed many operas. . . .
