One may want to turn on The Heavy Heavy’s recently released, rollicking concert album, Live, and crank it up to 11. Or better yet, see them live this Friday, Aug. 22 at HopMonk Tavern Novato.
Though the U.K. rockers wear many of their influences on their sleeves, perhaps the first to surface are David Bowie and Marty McFly.
These heroes of pop culture are important to the band’s moniker. But “to me now, it represents the feeling after you’ve had a rather big night partying, and you see your friend for the first time in the morning,” said multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Will Turner in an early August interview. He asks, “‘How are you doing?’ And you say, ‘That was heavy heavy, man.’ And that smile you have just after saying it, that’s what we’re about.”
Singer and keyboardist Georgie Fuller laughed in agreement before the pair of Brighton-based rock ’n’ roll aficionados delved more deeply into the inspirations that are readily apparent in their brand of blues rock. They’re proudly “making the music the ’60s forgot,” according to a band bio.
The Heavy Heavy also draws from Dire Straits, the ’90s Britpop of The Stone Roses, Blur, Oasis and Primal Scream and American duos like The White Stripes and The Black Keys (who they’ve shared bills with: It’s “a real cool thing” to tour with a band “we’ve really grown up idolizing,” Turner said).
It’s all “rooted in that ’60s guitar band style,” Turner noted, referring to the sound he’s been honing for a decade and a half. “We’re taking a bit of our parents’ music as well as our adolescence and throwing that together in a big melting pot.”
Fuller is a classically trained singer and has a degree in acting. As she was wrapping up her studies, Turner got her to sing on some song demos he was making. It was kismet since it started something new.
“And then there was an EP out of nowhere,” Turner said.
The group, which is now a five piece, self-released said EP, Life and Only Life, in 2020. It was full of warm organ sounds and catchy guitar riffs, rich in vocal harmonies and summery vibes while pulling from ’60s folk-blues artists Delaney & Bonnie and Peter Green’s era of Fleetwood Mac.
If the EP was folk rock, the full-length debut album, 2024’s One Of A Kind, was when the band went electric. It shows the pair’s sharper blues rock chops, but still doesn’t wholly encapsulate who the nascent artists are or where they’re going. Enter the new release, Live, which displays how The Heavy Heavy’s live show “is definitely a whole other beast than the records,” Turner said. “Deliberately, we try and create an experience which is worth seeing in the room.”
“We record every single show, so I’ve got everything backed up,” he continued. “And we just thought, ‘Why not do it between albums? It’s all there recorded.’ And then we had the idea to extend that whole idea… ‘Why don’t we have one side in the studio and one side on the road?’”
As for Bowie, Turner said he and Fuller first heard the band’s namesake phrase when he gave an interview to the BBC in the early ’70s. When asked about the sound of his new record, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bowie responded: “It’s heavy heavy, man.”
With The Heavy Heavy, the feeling is palpable.
8pm, Friday, Aug. 22, at HopMonk Tavern Novato, Session Room, 224 Vintage Way. Tix are $36.79. hopmonk.com/novato.
