Cardinal Black Weekend – Part Two. I have seen Cardinal Black many times, and I have photographed them several times as well, from The Patriot to last year’s tour warm-up at Le Pub in Newport, from Chepstow Castle to Steelhouse Festival through to the most recent show at The Tramshed in Cardiff. One thing that I always see is that the band are having fun on stage. Is this a true representation, I wonder? Or is it just a comedic act that Tom Hollister portrays?
He is quick to put me straight. “No, no, no. We all love it. Genuinely. I joke a lot about it in terms of the top five things that I enjoy about being in this band: That playing on stage doesn’t come close to the top. But the context there is to say that all the top five I fucking love.
“It’s not that I think it’s something that doesn’t particularly come naturally to me and my defensive mechanism. We talked about this the other day, of being a little bit funny and a little bit self-deprecating. It’s basically because in the earlier days [I wondered] Is this going to go down okay?
“We talked about the idea of having impostor syndrome the other day. It was funny because I get that all the time. But I think we all love it and genuinely are mates. You know me, Adam and Chris, go way back, right? And like with genuine friends, we’ve got closer, not further away, by being in the business together.
“Chris and I had kids roughly the same time and gone through major moments in our life, which you do when you work with someone so close. I love being on stage with those guys and being able to turn around and understand they have my back.
“We play a genre of music that allows a little bit of freedom musically as well. I love listening when Chris is playing or when the band is playing and I’m not singing. There’s a reason I turn around and dance and look at the drums. I love listening to them play. I love the nuances on the bass, and then there’s a little film on the guitar and whatever might be happening. That’s exciting to me. I genuinely love it and I’m only joking when I say I don’t. I really do like going out”.
It’s evident that Chris and Tom are totally committed to the live performance. “Playing, I love it,” Chris says. “It’s why I got into music. Ultimately, all the other stuff, all the business stuff, even more pragmatic stuff, isn’t the reason that you start to play guitar when you’re 14. That’s not the reason you join a garage band and want to rock out with your mates, to understand the business and understand how the publishing deals work.
“It’s because you want to have fun on stage and play for lots of people. So that is what underpins everything else. All the other stuff, as I said, melts away the moment you get on stage. Not just because it must, but because this is the reason I started doing it in the first place.”
Midnight At The Valencia is about six weeks away from release at the time of our interview. Having had an advance stream, I have already experienced their second album. It is often the way that bands are sick of how their album starts by the time it’s released.
With three or four songs already firmly embedded in the live set, is the subject matter more personal this time around? Some press releases refer to the album being more personal, but was it a difficult album to make?
Chris has a wry smile on his face as he answers. “I think probably part of that is obviously there’s a bigger machine around the band now,” he says. “So, we have stuff like press releases telling you that it’s a more personal album than the first one was. Inevitably, all the music you make is personal to a degree. I guess there is more overtly personal stuff on this record.
“Whether it’s Adeline, whether it’s a song about Tom’s daughter or whether it’s Push Pull, a song about my old man. I don’t think it was a difficult album to make. It was, for me at least, a little bit more liberating to go into this record because it was working with a clean canvas or a fresh canvas.
“In that respect, whereas the first record was this kind of culmination of everything that had come before it, the last 10 years’ worth of history. I made the joke the other day that the first album felt like recording the greatest hits album of songs that nobody had ever heard. Because, for us, for the most part, it had been around for a very long time.
“Our manager jokes that was the album you needed to make. You needed to get that album off your chest and almost go fresh from there. So going into the second album with a fresh, clean slate was quite a liberating experience because it gave us a chance to write an album, which, for me at least, feels infinitely more cohesive.
“I guess it feels like a complete record from start to finish rather than a kind of sporadic collection of tracks written over 12 years. I love the process. I really enjoyed that process of quite diligently throwing yourself into it and just writing and writing and writing and putting together the best of them.”
Tom agrees. “We always joke about the fact that I’ll cry at the fucking toilet roll advert,” he smiles. “I’m an emotional bloke, and I quite like to take advantage of that with lyrics and songs. I like to write about little moments in my or other people’s lives. I think they’re all a reflection of the truth.
“Whether it’s talking about my mate who’s gonna join the army and had a successful career in that, or the same bloke going through a divorce, or my daughter and my wife, Chris’s father passing away. We’ve been together a long time.
“10,000 hours is reflective of the fact that people die. People get married, have kids. People get divorced. Christ, we’re at the age where people are starting to get divorced, So it’s inevitable, for me at least, that those things will be reflected in my songwriting.
“My favourite artist, probably of all time, is John Martin and he was essentially not a very nice bloke at times. I had all his problems and instead of keeping a diary, that guy wrote songs. I like that as an idea.
“That’s the creative outlet for good, bad, or just neutral things. Things that just happen in life. I like writing songs about pretty definite moments in a relationship rather than just big, broad themes. I can’t do that very well. I like the process of it.
“You’re right, I think. Joking aside, I think it is a more personal record, and I think it’s a little bit more of a record than the first one, with tighter themes. That’s probably because we’re just older. I’ve done it over a short space of time, whereas for Chris, the first album was ten years in the making kind of thing.”
As time runs down, I’m keen to ask the duo about the video for the single Keep On Running, which is, for me, a departure from the norm for them.
“We had a budget, and we wanted to spend it,” laughs Chris when we explore the origins of the video. “No, that was a conscious decision to make a music video which was a bit more in keeping with the themes of the track.
“Also, we were conscious that this was almost the launch of the album. This was the announcement of the album and we wanted to have something which really felt like a statement of ‘oh, they’ve gone up a gear’.
“They’ve gone to the next level, not just in terms of the production of the tracks, but everything else around the release of the record, and also the actual music video to accompany that announcement.’
“We were very lucky to have Molly Windsor, a BAFTA-winning actress, in the video. She’s a fan of the band, so it all fell into place relatively quickly. But we joked that Tom produced that video or directed it or, wherever you credited it, because that was his brainchild, really”.
He laughs at his friend. “Go on Spielberg,” Chris smiles. 
By now, if you haven’t already gathered, you will have realised that Tom has an earthy humour. “I had a vision,” he laughs.
“No, honestly, we like the song, but it’s not particularly lovely subject matter. It’s about a girl I knew in university who had a stalker. I don’t know whether we would have called it that back then, but that’s definitely what it was. The song is almost being sung from the point of view of the stalker, which I guess is a strange angle to do it.
“So the video is meant to reflect stages within that person’s life as a result of that bad time that has ended up causing other things. We started with that as a theme and then thought well, how can we make a BAFTA winning actress just run around a lot?
“But she was incredible. Molly’s so lovely, so massive. Thanks to her for doing it. There’s another video and its completely different to that. A bit more light-hearted.”
As we race towards the end, I get my thank you in early, conscious that I’ve been cut off before. Before we end, I need to know a bit about the band’s forthcoming North America tour in August.
By the time you read this, several of their shows will have sold out. It seems like the right time for the band to be heading across the water.
“It’s a big undertaking logistically and financially,” says Chris. “The timing had to be right, and it had to feel like it was going to make sense in a lot of ways. Obviously, we dipped our toe, so to speak, last summer and those shows went incredibly well.
“We did the Basement East in Nashville, which sold out, and we did the Troubadour, Los Angeles as well, which sold out. So that felt indicative, I guess, of there being an appetite for it or hunger for it.
“So, we thought, yeah, let’s take that on a bit of a larger scale this summer off the back of those two shows, we signed to Thirty Tigers our record label. We also signed to WME booking agency in North America. They’ve been very heavily involved in orchestrating this tour and the choice of venues and everything else.
“We’re playing a couple of iconic smaller places that it’s the done thing for, hopefully, bands to go through those places on their way up, not their way down. Hopefully. It felt like the right time.
“Hopefully that decision will be vindicated. We are hopefully on track for most of the shows to be sold out before we even take off for North America. It felt like the right time.”
Do Chris and Tom ever take the time or get the opportunity to reflect on where they are? “I think we are particularly bad at doing that at times,” says Tom.
“One of my roles is often more people management within the band a little bit. I usually end up being the person to say, why don’t we go for a bite to eat, have a couple of beers, and just think about where we are?
“I remember when we signed with Thirty Tigers. That was like, can everybody do Wednesday night to go and grab a bite and celebrate the fact that we just signed a deal with a Nashville record label?
“You can get too bogged down in taking too much stock, I think, and not looking about progression. But equally, I think it is really important, especially for mental health, to just think. Crikey, five years ago, I would have bitten someone’s arm off to be anywhere near where I am now and making a living out of music, you know? So yeah, we need to do it more.”
Ever the pragmatist, Chris concludes our conversation with his views. “It’s the nature of the beast,” he says. “In this hamster wheel, there’s always something bigger. Always something better. And you’re always thinking, could we have put more people in this venue if it’s not sold out?
“And you know, if it is sold out, what’s the next venue to play? So there’s always something for you to continue to keep your eye on. So, it is hard to take stock of things. As Tom alluded to, I’m particularly bad at that.
“It is a rare moment where I look at something objectively and try to say, that’s quite a cool accomplishment. We’re on the verge of selling out Antone’s in Texas [It is now sold out]. This place I’ve only ever read about. So, yeah, you must take stock of stuff like that otherwise, you do lose sight of the fact that it’s going OK, you know.
“But at the same time, as I said, it’s the nature of the beast, and it’s just on to the next. An old manager of ours used to constantly instil this idea in me that it’s the journey, not the destination. Because there is no destination. He has managed Guns N’ Roses, and he references, ‘I’ve been to the top of that mountain.’ It doesn’t get much bigger than managing a band that’s playing Wembley Stadium. There’s not much at the top of the mountain. Enjoy the enjoy the journey because that’s what it’s all about.”
It is often true that these interviews could go on for much longer. Two more engaging musicians you could not hope to meet. Both carry that Welsh humour that resonates deeply with those of us from the Principality, but they also have eyes on the prize.
And with Midnight At The Valencia, 2025 may well see Cardinal Black hit even greater heights. When they do, we at MetalTalk will be right there with them.
You can read Part One of the Cardinal Black interview here.
Cardinal Black will release their new album, Midnight At Valencia, on 23 May via Thirty Tigers. There are a number of in-store dates in May, a headline North America tour in August, returning to the UK in October and Europe in November and December.
Cardinal Black Tour Tickets are available from https://www.thecardinalblack.com/tourdates.
Midnight At The Valencia will be available in neon pink and neon orange vinyl formats, alongside standard CD and digital editions, and can be pre-ordered from https://orcd.co/midnightatthevalencia-eu.
Cardinal Black – In-Stores:
May
24th – CARDIFF, HMV
25th – BRISTOL, Rough Trade
26th – LONDON, Lower Third w/ Rough Trade
27th – BURY, Wax n Beans
28th – NEWCASTLE, Cluny 2 w/ Reflex
29th – GLASGOW, Strip Joint
North American Headline Tour
August
6th – NEW YORK, Mercury Lounge (SOLD OUT)
8th – TORONTO, CA – The Drake Hotel Underground (SOLD OUT)
9th – ONTARIO, CA, Kitchener Blues Festival
12th – CHICAGO, Schuba’s (SOLD OUT)
14th – MINNEAPOLIS, 7th Street Entry (SOLD OUT)
16th – OMAHA, Playing with Fire
18th – NASHVILLE, Basement East
19th – ATLANTA, Vinyl at Center Stage (SOLD OUT)
21st – AUSTIN, Antone’s (SOLD OUT)
23rd – PHOENIX, Rebel Lounge
26th – LOS ANGELES, Troubadour
29th – SAN FRANCISCO, The Independent
30th – CAMINO, Concert Series @ Delfino Farms
European Tour
November
20th – AMSTERDAM, Bitterzoet
23rd – COLOGNE, Stollwerck
24th – HAMBURG, Bahnhof Pauli
25th – BERLIN, Privatclub
27th – MUNICH, Backstage Club
28th – VIENNA, Flex
December
1st – ZÜRICH, Papiersaal
2nd – FRANKFURT, Brotfabrik
6th – PARIS, Supersonic Club
