In the cover feature for the latest (March) edition of The Wire, it’s curious to read Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (aka Will Oldham) described as a “fun loving soul” with a “natural bonhomie”.

Clearly, the man Derek Walmesley met and interviewed has changed radically from pre-Bonnie days when Oldham released music as Palace, Palace Songs, Palace Music or, more rarely, under his real name.

Writing for ‘No Depression’ magazine back in 1996,Allison Stewart said of Oldham “He’s either completely humourless or really funny and everyone else doesn’t get it”.  She was frustrated in her attempts to get a straight answer to a straight question, a fate that also befell English rock-scribe Ben Thompson who recalls leaving the room with the tape machine still running in the vain hope that some coherent replies would be recorded in his absence.

Either Walmesley caught Bonnie on a good day or these journalist baiting days are history.  Certainly it is evident from Bonnie/Oldham’s music that he has moved on from what Ben Thompson called the “hardcore introspection” of the records he made in his early 20s. Plainly, the man has mellowed to the point that the light at the end of the tunnel is no longer assumed to that of an oncoming train.

Still, I reckon Walmesley is over egging the pudding when he writes thus:
“Fun is, for now, a vital part of the equation. the first Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy record, 1999’s ‘I See A Darkness has a built in light heartedness; the title track, also recorded by Johnny Cash before his death, with Oldham guesting, supposedly references drunken blackouts rather than the black dog of despair”.


Call me thick, but I fail to see how drunken unconsciousness is a more joyous state than depression!   It’s true that on that album he sings at one point “I like to have a good time/Any of my friends will tell you” but it should be remebered that this lyric occurs on a song entitled ‘Another day Full Of Dread’!

Other songs like ‘Death to Everyone’, ‘Today I was an evil one’ and ‘Black’ did not strike me then, and do not strike me now, as being full of joie de vivre.

‘I See A Darkness’ remains Will Oldham’s masterpiece because it approaches big topics like death and loneliness with a quiet intensity and uncompromising honesty. It is not a happy record but like Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’ or Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’ it confronts the dark nights of the soul without self pity but with genuine depth and poetic dignity.

I miss the isolated and troubled Will Oldham of that record and of those beautifully bleak Palace albums. At the same time I’m pleased to learn that under his Bonnie pseudonym he has moved on to a more luminous plain.

Thankfully he’s still making great records and by the sound of it a ‘Bonnie Sings Greatest Party Time Hits’ is a real possibility.