When a young Mark Holley began playing music, he dreamed of being in a successful band. It was more than a hobby to him – it was his life’s ambition; a destiny he was bound to fulfil. Inviting bassist Tristan Jane and drummer Ant Thornton to join his fledgeling band, the Black Foxxes vocalist/guitarist set about achieving his goal of becoming a musician known around the world.
All the ingredients were there for Black Foxxes to start making big things happen fast. In Mark, they had a songwriter with ambition and a genuine vocal strength many young rock singers lack, and a fast-growing reputation. But away from the music, things weren’t so rosy.
When he was 21, Mark was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a condition without a known cure, which can cause severe stomach pain, diarrhoea, fever and weight loss. It’s an illness that requires constant medication and treatment, which makes life on the road a challenge. On top of that, Mark also suffers from anxiety and depression, and it was his experiences with mental illness that fuelled Black Foxxes’ 2016 debut album, ‘I’m Not Well’.
Their first full-length saw the Devon trio emerge as one of rock’s brightest new bands – it was, on the face of it, a huge success. Behind the scenes, however, Mark was falling apart.
“When we were making the first record, I didn’t really want to do anything,” he remembers. “I didn’t want to be in the studio, I didn’t want to tour, but music was the only thing I felt I could do to get everything off my chest. I wasn’t sure if I’d get out of the rut I was in.”
Making ‘I’m Not Well’ was tough, and while the band experienced runaway success on the touring cycle that followed, when things began to wind down, Mark struggled to adjust to life back home.
“I found it hard coming off tour and having to reintegrate to home life, and I think that’s one of the reasons things went sour with my ex-girlfriend,” he recalls. “It’s strange to go from being social with people every day, and then come home to a completely different environment – it’s like starting a new job. I read something a while ago about how so many touring musicians struggle with depression and anxiety because of that, they find it hard to readjust to ‘normal’ life.”
It’s a story that’s been told before, and one that has, thankfully, been pushed into the limelight over the past few years: that of a touring musician struggling to cope with the strain that a career in music places on one’s mental health.
Looking to clear his head and find inspiration for album two, Mark turned to the sense of adventure he’d always possessed and travelled to Iceland, a country he’d been to and found solace in previously. There, surrounded by some of the most stunning landscapes he’d ever seen, the future of Black Foxxes began to take shape.
“My mental health was so bad the first time I went to Iceland,” Mark explains. “But I was starting to see progress every time I went. It was a big step for me to go to a place that is barren, with no-one there and insane weather conditions, and do it all by myself. It felt like there was a mutual relationship between me and that place because I overcame a lot out there. I wrote plenty of music when I went to Iceland the second time, and our new record reflects that.”
Black Foxxes’ upcoming second album, ‘REIðI’ (“It’s pronounced ‘Ray-dee’, and is Icelandic for ‘rage’,” Mark tells us), exemplifies the transformation their frontman has undergone since the release of ‘I’m Not Well’. An expansive, shapeshifting and at times abstract record, it’s a bold leap from the formula that brought the band their early success. But in light of all the change in Mark’s life and the journey he’s been on to get to this new album, it was never going to sound like ‘I’m Not Well’ 2.0.
“’I’m Not Well’ was such a labour of love – it was so hard to write and record that album, and you can hear it when you listen back,” Mark says. “The one thing we’ve said is that, on reflection, we would have sonically changed ‘I’m Not Well’. The album is all the same – every track is dark and loud and sounds similar to what’s come before it. So, we wanted to make sure that with ‘REIðI’, we had a dynamic record. I felt much better in myself this time, and I reflected that in the music I made and naturally a lot of lighter songs came out. The moment that happened, we decided to push for a light-dark record.”
When putting together the music for ‘REIðI’, Black Foxxes went old school, and thought about the experience of a listener hearing the music through a vinyl record. Writing an album with two distinct parts, they were keen to show a softer side to the band, but retain that element of dark ‘depression pop’ with which they’d always been associated.
“The way it was written was to have the first half of the record be super light, and then the second part be really dark, so if it was a vinyl, side A would be light and side B darker,” Mark outlines. “It’s really dynamic in the sense that you have tracks like ‘The Big Wild’ and ‘Saela’ which are real pop songs, and then you can flip the album over and hear ‘Flowers’ and ‘Float On’, the latter of which was written about my cousin who drowned – the music is super dark and twisted. I think the message of doing that is, while my mental health was better when making this album, it’s something I’ll always live with – those demons will always be there. It’s letting the listener know that this is still Black Foxxes, but we’ve grown, and we wanted things like strings and horns. We wanted to make a sonically ambitious record, and we have.”
Clearly, ‘REIðI’ is designed to be not as restrictive – musically or lyrically – as ‘I’m Not Well’. Black Foxxes’ first album is a great record, but it’s an album that finds its sound and sticks to it, rarely challenging the expectations of the listener. Similarly, as its title suggests, ‘INW’ is a record that’s occupied with Mark’s battle with mental health. The material is compelling, but again, not particularly diverse. ‘REIðI’, on the other hand, does away with that singular style.
“You never truly move away from mental health issues – it’s more about understanding and realising that it’s a part of you and that’s okay,” Mark explains. “But the subject matter on this album has definitely moved on from entirely being about mental health, because the previous album was pretty self-explanatory in what it was about, whereas on this new record I challenge loads of different subjects. I tried to be more open-minded with my songwriting this time.”
So, if he’s moved away from singing entirely about mental health, what is Mark singing about on ‘REIðI’?
“The thirst for adventure is an overall theme of the album, but more than that, it’s an obvious journey from start to finish about myself,” Mark answers. “I sing a lot about rage on this album, and the final words sung on the record are ‘now I understand rage’. That’s what’s pulling it all together – you’re going through this journey of working things out with the writer. There’s the lighter first half of the album where you think things are figured out, but then the darker second part comes, and you realise you’re stuck living with this darkness.”
Does that make this an angry record?
“It’s a subconsciously angry album. When I was writing ‘REIðI’ I didn’t feel angry, but then things would come out of me in the studio, and I realised I had a lot of those feelings still, buried deep inside me – they were just being poured out in a different way.”
The thirst for and traversing of a journey, and the rage that provokes, continually rears its head in ‘REIðI’’s lyrics. ‘Breathe’, ‘Oh It Had To Be You’ and ‘Manic In Me’ all find Mark singing about a desire to escape, be it from his own head or his home county of Devon.
“There’s a lyric on ‘Oh It Had To Be You’ that goes, ‘I wanna live alone inside my head’. That line and the song ‘Breathe’ in its entirety both demonstrate how, even if you’ve set yourself free mentally, there are times when you feel like living inside your mind. When you have mental health issues, you can feel like you’re not alive and not living in the moment – your mind is flooded with negative thoughts. So Breathe’s lyric of ‘I wanna set myself free’ was me reflecting back to those times. Overall, ‘REIðI’ is explaining what I needed to do to get over the things I was singing about on ‘I’m Not Well’, and my process of doing that.”
As for the subject of literal escape on ‘REIðI’, second single ‘Manic In Me’ speaks to that desire – and it’s a song Mark thinks can take Black Foxxes to the next level.
“’Manic In Me’’s line of ‘I’ve gotta get out of here’ speaks to how I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Devon,” he explains. “It’s a beautiful county, but every time I come back, nothing has changed. As a 29-year-old that has missed out on so much of their life due to illness, I really want to experience everything I possibly can. That need to get out sounds like a selfish one, but I realised very quickly that if I spend too long by myself with my own thoughts, my anxiety and depression will swarm me.”
Here’s hoping ‘Manic In Me’, or any other song on their new record, does introduce Black Foxxes to a wider audience, because they’re the kind of rock band 2018 needs. ‘REIðI’ is musically ambitious, no doubt (“You’re not the same band you were three years ago, so why recycle old sounds? That’s why I have a problem with pop-punk,” Mark argues), but it’s also an example of the hope rock music can inspire. The journey Mark describes on ‘REIðI’ is universal; a story of growing-up, branching-out, exploring the world around you and coming to terms with the battles inside your own mind is one we can all relate to. Told with unflinching honesty, the narrative at the heart of ‘REIðI’ is masterfully crafted and utterly engaging.
The outlook on display throughout ‘REIðI’ feeds into Mark’s campaigning away from Black Foxxes. The subject of a recent BBC Newsbeat documentary about the impact of Crohn’s disease on a touring musician, Mark wanted to use such a large platform to help those who may be suffering in silence, but he wanted to do so in a way that was candid, genuine and empathetic.
“What helped me early on was seeing people I loved coping with it, like [Glassjaw’s] Daryl Palumbo,” Mark says. “I just want to help people, and the amount of messages I’ve had about it has been overwhelming. When ‘I’m Not Well’ came out it was a big deal for me, because it was the first time we had a record in the shops, and I remember people messaging me saying how much they loved it. But when I did this documentary, I had double the amount of people getting in touch – it was crazy! I wanted the documentary to be honest, and to show that sometimes it does suck to have Crohn’s and that you don’t want to be on the road. There’s a really rewarding feeling that goes with helping people, especially young adults. I’m stoked with how it came out.”
His work in the public eye is admirable, but one has to wonder if the constant questions Mark gets about living with Crohn’s and mental illness ever becomes tedious for him. Would he not prefer it if the focus was solely on Black Foxxes’ music, rather than the circumstances that surround it?
“I see such a journey with this band,” Mark replies. “It’s not a case of if it will happen for Black Foxxes with me, it’s a case of when. It doesn’t matter if this album doesn’t blow-up, because there is going to come a time when we write that song or that album that just connects with loads of people. So, I don’t really mind talking about my health conditions in relation to Black Foxxes, because this is a journey we’re on, and these things are what I’ve been going through at the time of writing our music. It’d be stupid to not talk about my experiences, because they’re an obvious, recurring theme in our music, and people want to hear about it. It’s obvious to me to be honest as a musician, but for many other people, it seems like honesty is an afterthought, almost like it’s something they don’t need to consider. My experiences with Crohn’s and mental health are just what are happening to me now, and I’m fine with talking about that. Otherwise, there’d be nothing to talk about.”
The physical and mental battles Mark has faced may be at the forefront of his life right now, but they’re something that neither define Black Foxxes nor are they something the band shy away from. Mark, Tristan and Ant want to be the biggest band in the world, and they want to get there by writing ambitious albums that inspire with their craft and provoke hope through their honesty.
Whether ‘REIðI’ sees Black Foxxes achieve that goal or not almost doesn’t matter, because, as Mark says, it’s a matter of when their dreams come true, not if. In the meantime, as long as the songs are connecting with people and helping listeners conquer their own battles, as far as they are concerned, Black Foxxes have done their job.
