When Rivers Meet - A WINNING HAND

WORDS: Paul Davies

PICS: Laurence Harvey, Will Carter, Jon Sturdy, Richard Davies

Their name is Bond. Grace and Aaron Bond, and they make the kind of heavy blues music that will put lead in your belly, but also the sweetest ballads that fill stomachs with butterflies. Music is their bond and, as in all successful marriages, the harmonious division of labour in creating music, Aaron writes the lyrics and Grace most of the music, riffs etc, is reflected on their third and new album on which they have the licence to thrill. Just ask the fans who voted them Best UK Blues Group of The Year three years running.

Workshopping the songs that make up their raucous and romantic new album - their third in little more than three years - Aces Are High in the studio, confirms that they have cooked up a surfeit of familiar ingredients in their blues kitchen. There’s a lot going on within this tight stripped-back approach as Aaron explains the origin of the album’s title:

“Everything in life is a gamble to a certain extent. We feel that we have laid our cards on the table and we’re literally covering up our trumps with everything that we’re doing. We’re just enjoying everything, and our aces are definitely high.”

This upbeat and joyously confident feeling is a much-deserved result of having taken a somewhat serpentine route to the blues-rock stardom that they are currently enjoying. It’s evident that their personal romantic chemistry as husband and wife translates through the music they create. There’s a crunching freshly laid hot tarmac under steel-capped cowboy boot gritty tone to the riffs. They collide with airily beautiful melodies producing a mash up contrasting feel to Aces Are High’s ten tracks. It’s a compelling blues record of the divine kind.

However, to get here it has been a rapid and hard-earned ride from obscure beginnings as Grace details:

“We were actually called Holmes & Bond previously, Holmes was my maiden name, and when we got married, we felt we wanted to change it. We wanted something a bit more creative than Bond & Bond”, she continues, “So, we kept playing around with the word ‘rivers’ like flowing and everything’s easy. It just moves together in the right direction. Then we went out to Sardinia, to record some music out there, and we were overlooking a ravine where two rivers met, and it just felt like it was the right name.”

Finding the right name to hang their feted music came a little while after their first meeting. I’m curious to know what they were doing in their separate lives before they became one in a manner of speaking:

“I was a PA and a barmaid and that’s where we met. I was behind the bar,” says Grace, “and you were sort of in building work”, as Aaron takes up his part in their backstory: “Yes, and I was also in a rock band or two. The first time we met in the pub, on the jukebox was an Elvis song playing and someone said, ‘Oh, bloody Elvis I can’t stand all that sort of thing’. And we said, ‘hang on a minute’...and that’s how we really got chatting”. So, as fate would have it, the King of Rock ‘N’ Roll, who himself was partial to the blues, brought Grace and Aaron - coincidentally Elvis’ middle name - together.

Although music was their first shared love, it took some time for them to realise their potential as a musical duo as Grace reveals: “Ages! Like five or six years until we started doing music together as we were both on

our own projects and quite consumed by that and neither of us were songwriters; we didn’t write songs and had never written songs. So, when we started doing stuff together, we knew we wanted it to be original. It was a long process to learn to write songs and how we do that together and hone our skills. I do the music now, and Aaron writes the lyrics, and it took a long time to sort of work out our roles.”

Aaron nods in agreement as Grace continues: “We’ve sort of been writing for about fifteen years, then everything really got serious in 2019 when we were finding our sound. We’d recorded loads of music, but we were never that confident to go for it and push it out into the world,” says Grace as Aaron interjects, “Acoustic, wasn’t it”. Grace adds: “We started writing this new stuff, and we really loved it and believed in it. It changed everything because I’m confident enough to now let everyone hear this. So that sort of all changed.”

Everything certainly did change for the Bonds as they reveal the inspiration behind Perfect Stranger, one of the many banging blues tunes that make up Aces Are High: “Perfect Stranger is about when we met,” confirms Aaron, “We both met back in my old local pub in Downham Market, Norfolk. At first, we were strangers just dying to meet someone.”

Grace vocalises further: “When we first saw each other, we thought we’d met before. It was like we were strangers, but it was weird as our first conversation was, ‘So where do I know you from’? We just spent ages trying to work it out. So, we thought it was like a perfect stranger.” And they recall the first song that they tried to write together: “We used to love a programme called Ice Road Truckers”, chuckles Aaron and Grace, “and we wrote a song about these truckers.” This humorous memory instructed Aaron and Grace in their songwriting process as I enquire into whether they argue about their roles as Aaron ponders: “We did for a long time to start with and to get our actual way of writing together took a while. Then we discovered that we could have an idea and then separately do our thing, come back together, and then try it out. And if we liked it, we carried on and if we didn’t, we scrapped it.”

Grace concurs: “When we were first writing, you’re sort of weighed down with insecurities because you’re throwing something creative out for someone straight away to have their opinion on. You can easily become quite tetchy. It was getting through that and getting used to it, sharing stuff and not being too precious about it.”

There’s a visceral raw energy throughout Aces Are High as Aaron details their sound working method: “I think one of the things that we always wanted was the raw sound. It’s kind of like throwing it back to the old-school way of recording in an open room. Getting guitars done in one take and the vocals and things like that. Using old-style reverb literally walking away from a microphone.” Grace adds: “It’s all-natural reverb. There were no vocal booths as we were in The Boathouse Studios that’s got the windows open. You can hear the birds singing,” she continues, “We don’t like a lot of overdubs. We like it almost like a Garage Band sound. We want it to sound real because there’s nothing that beats live music. We don’t want anything too polished because it loses the energy.”

Although busy gigging their headline shows, the flow of songwriting appears to have come quickly: “We were writing, on and off, for the whole end of 2022; about three months,” Grace shares, “We were in the studio for about three months and co-wrote some of the songs with our producer Adam Bowers.”

They both share a funny story about this album’s final song 5 Minutes Until Midnight: “We had this song, and we were going with it and then gradually we just didn’t like the song. It got to the day before the masters had to go to Abbey Road and we sat there and our producer said, ‘You don’t like it, do you’? And we were like, ‘No, we have never put a song on a record that we don’t love,” they add further, “Adam said, ‘Let’s do another one’. So, Five Minutes Until Midnight we worked on it all the way through the night. If we put something out that we don’t love, then we might as well just give up.”

As well as the crunchy and raw bite to most of the ten tracks, there is an Americana feel to the ballads - Trail To Avalon, Golden, By Your Side - which is something they are keen to explore further: “One of the genres that really inspired us over the years has been Americana’” states Aaron, “In fact, we were kind of in the Americana scene before 2019 with bands like the Civil Wars and the kind of the stuff that they were doing, which was so amazing. We really wanted to emulate that a little bit before 2019.” Grace continues: “We’ve got mandolin and violin and also a lot of harmonies that just give it that flavour. I guess all our influences just leak into whatever we do. They’re just there. So that’s cool.”

Spinning back down the years, Grace reveals the moment she became aware of the powerful effect her outstanding voice has on listeners: “I’ve always been music-obsessed, mostly singing, right from day one I was obsessed with singing. Then I started with flute, clarinet, saxophone and piccolo and went through the woodwind family as a kid. I started playing the piano at age four. Then in my 20s, I started playing violin, then landed with the mandolin, because it’s the same tuning. I’ve stuck with them. I’m not classically trained. I’m mostly self-taught with both of those. As long I can translate something as I’m singing it, then I just want to play it.”

Grace opens to me about finding her voice: “If we go back very early, I remember having a Stylistics tape in the car when I was a kid that I used to sing along to and, in primary school, I was known as ‘Grace the singer’. So, it’s part of my identity, to be honest.” She admits that Paul Rodgers is her all-time favourite singer. On the other hand, Aaron strums a mighty mean guitar as he shares with me his guitar influences: “John Lee Hooker is my favourite to start with and Slash from Guns N’ Roses, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson. All the greats as they’re all so inspiring.” Originally a singer, Aaron eventually picked up an acoustic guitar for a few years then, back in 2019, he got his first electric guitar and started playing slide straightaway. With three garlanded albums under their belt, including Aces Are High, and with Grace’s sister now managing them making it a tight family bond, there is no bluffing onstage or on record.

When Rivers Meet continue to play a strong hand holding all the aces.

When Rivers Meet’s new album “Aces Are High” is released on September 8th via www. whenriversmeet.co.uk