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Review: Billy Nomates, Strange Brew – ‘A millennial popstar-in-waiting’
“For legal purposes,” Bristol-based Tor Maries joked midway through the gig, “these people on stage with me are not my friends.”
Why so careful? What could it be (to paraphrase Mrs Merton) about being an independent artist, in the year-of-our-Lord 2024, and also a woman that makes Tor so wary of being wilfully misrepresented?
The answer is in the question, and in the misogyny that rained down when the BBC posted her Glastonbury performance online last year. Tor asked for it to be removed. She knows the men who seethe about her performing solo to a backing tape are likely to froth just as much when they see ‘Billy Nomates’ with a drummer and a bass guitarist on stage.
is needed now More than ever
It’s almost as if women can’t win. But Tor has had the last laugh. It’s “a trades description thing”, she says, smiling.
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The antipathy of others is armour for her. Her stage name, Billy Nomates, comes from an insult lobbed at her (by a man, naturally) and in tonight’s penultimate song, fawner from her 2023 album Cacti, she sings a credo for her contrarianism: “the ladies in waiting don’t want me around, and that’s why I’m gonna stay.”
There’s a joyful, gatecrashing defiance to the show.
She needn’t worry about being misunderstood at Strange Brew. Everyone is a fan. Her label boss and early producer, Geoff Barrow, is here. It means she can joke too about the other misleading aspect of the billing: that this is an acoustic gig. In truth, only fawner counts as that, but the gig is more relaxed than you might expect if you’d only heard the spiky stuff.
It’s a hometown gig, which helps – the last of a short tour of UK art spaces. A stop-gap show too, with Cacti nearly two years old and a new album due next year. Cue huge cheers as Tor announces this, then plays an previously unheard song from it – The Test.
There’s a joyful, gatecrashing defiance to Billy Nomates – photo: James Caig
But you sense she’s keen to show she’s evolved too. Barrow gave her first album bass-driven guts; she sounded like a sweeter Sleaford Mods, or La Roux if she’d grown up listening to PiL and not disco.
Of the 12 songs tonight, only No comes from that self-titled debut. There are five from Cacti and five from a tape she put out quietly last year called tor tape: mind is a mystery and peter are slower, more lo-fi, tinged with Americana and harmonies, reminiscent of Stevie Nicks’ songs on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. Live they sound slinkier still – enigmatic and beguiling.
Even these subtler songs contain a twist, sometimes literally. I can’t tell if knives is sinister or taunting: “It’s knives out, here,” she sings, “You push a little harder. I haven’t finished yet.”
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Integrating bandmates into her sound has traded some of that old punch for polish, and she flails and jumps less too. But just as there remain occasional flashes of Tor doing Ian Curtis doing Iggy Pop, the Cacti songs are still a power pop rush.
Opener balance is gone is a breakdown (of a relationship certainly, a psyche possibly) in 4/4 time, while vertigo is sinuous like Magazine. Along with spite and blue bones (deathwish), these are millennial anthems-in-waiting.
Maybe it’s the grown-out wolf cut or the defiantly lowercase song titles, the tension between her self-doubt and self-determination, but Tor seems a millennial popstar-in-waiting too. She is utterly charming – at ease with herself and the audience. A story about playing in Margate and visiting its crab museum leads multiple audience members to show her their crab tattoos. If she wanted it, a late-night TV vehicle is hers.
But you know she’s going to do what she wants, whatever anyone says. As she sings in No tonight: “I know it’s bad for business, but I didn’t come to climb ladders like you. I’ll sing when it matters, not a minute too soon.”
In 2025, I suspect Billy Nomates will matter quite a bit.
Main photo: Ashley Rigg
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