BC Camplight uses his one-man-band musicianship to craft brutally honest, heart-rending pop music. Disarmingly candid about his mental health struggles, Camplight opts to battle it out through the medium of his music with breathy, introspective lyrics laid over soundscapes, and influences ranging from synthwave to ’50s rockabilly. It’s a potent sound and one that demands to be heard.

I'm Alright In The World

BC Camplight

austerity records presents 'Seaview' - A new alt-music festival on the South Coast with WARMDUSCHER, BC CAMPLIGHT, HEARTWORMS, AIRCOOLED, PALE BLUE EYES, SNAYX, WINTER GARDENS, OFFICE FOR PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT & JAMES ENDEACOTT (DJ Set)

The inaugural event, taking place on DLWP’s South Lawns beach-side plaza on 8th July 2023 features a day of live performances from iconic artists & acclaimed up-&-coming acts alongside established DJ’s, various food vendors, local beers/ales/gins/cocktails, Ice Cream, crate-digging at the Music’s Not Dead record store & a special appearance from the Bella Union Records pop-up shop.

14+, All under 18s should be accompanied by an adult

Seaview Festival ft. Warmduscher, BC Camplight + more

Warmduscher - I Got Friends

Winter Gardens

Snayx

Pale Blue Eyes

Aircooled

Heartworms

Gigs

Bexhill-on-Sea

De La Warr Pavilion

We’re so excited to unveil our first wave of bluedot 2023, a unique carnival of music, space and environmentalism beneath Cheshire’s iconic Lovell Telescope. A weekend of escape and exploration at a stunning UNESCO World Heritage Site just 30 minutes from Manchester.

Grace Jones, Pavement (only UK show of 2023), Roisin Murphy and Leftfield join the already announced Max Richter and the BBC Concert Orchestra at the iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory from 20–23 July 2023. Also announced are Mercury prize winners Young Fathers, art rockers Django Django, feted post-punk four piece Dry Cleaning, Malian desert blues pioneers Tinariwen and experimental rockers Black Country, New Road, plus a Sunday Closing Party headlined by the iconic Annie Mac.

Nubya Garcia, Georgia, Max Cooper (3D AV), David Holmes, Beak>, Gwenno, Teleman, CMAT, Lava La Rue, Big Joanie, Skinny Pelembe, Scalping, Belief, Pictish Trail, Divorce, Madmadmad and Radiophonic Workshop also join the first wave of the festival’s music line-up.

Visit discoverthebluedot.com to explore the arts, culture and science line-ups, including Adam Buxton's Bug, Brett Morgen presents Moonage Daydream, BBC Sky At Night's Maggie Aderin-Pocock and much more.

This is a 16+ event

bluedot 2023

Grace Jones - Slave To The Rhythm

Pavement

Grace Jones

Róisín Murphy

Leftfield

Dry Cleaning

Manchester

Jodrell Bank

We’re so excited to unveil our first wave of bluedot 2023, a unique carnival of music, space and environmentalism beneath Cheshire’s iconic Lovell Telescope.

Grace Jones, Pavement (only UK show of 2023), Roisin Murphy and Leftfield join the already announced Max Richter and the BBC Concert Orchestra at the iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory from 20–23 July 2023. Also announced are Mercury prize winners Young Fathers, art rockers Django Django, feted post-punk four piece Dry Cleaning, Malian desert blues pioneers Tinariwen and experimental rockers Black Country, New Road, plus a Sunday Closing Party headlined by the iconic Annie Mac.

Nubya Garcia, Georgia, Max Cooper (3D AV), David Holmes, Beak>, Gwenno, Teleman, CMAT, Lava La Rue, Big Joanie, Skinny Pelembe, Scalping, Belief, Pictish Trail, Divorce, Madmadmad and Radiophonic Workshop also join the first wave of the festival’s music line-up.

Visit discoverthebluedot.com to explore the arts, culture and science line-ups, including Adam Buxton's Bug, Brett Morgen presents Moonage Daydream, BBC Sky At Night's Maggie Aderin-Pocock and much more.

This is a 16+ event

bluedot 2023 - Sunday

Annie Mac

Young Fathers

Max Cooper 3D AV

Georgia

We are thrilled to welcome lo-fi extraordinaire BC Camplight to Boiler Shop on Thursday 9 November.

Spanning a myriad of influences from Pavarotti to the Beach Boys, Brian Christinzio - the behemoth behind BC Camplight - exists somewhere between classic 70s song writing and synth rock.

This is a 14+ event.

Newcastle

Boiler Shop

BC Camplight

This is an 14+ with accompanying adult event

Leeds

Leeds University Stylus

BC Camplight today announces news of his new album, The Last Rotation Of Earth, out 12 May via Bella Union and available to preorder now. To accompany the announcement BC Camplight has a shared a lyric video for the LP’s title track and first single. A November UK tour has also been announced including performances at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire and Manchester’s Albert Hall.

Is there a curse that says Brian ‘BC Camplight’ Christinzio cannot move forward without being knocked back? That the greatest material is born out of emotional trauma? Whilst making his new album, The Last Rotation Of Earth, Christinzio’s relationship with his fiancé crumbled after nine inseparable years. The album follows this break-up amid long-term struggles with addiction and mental health. The outcome is an extraordinary record, with Christinzio describing it as ‘more cinematic, sophisticated and nuanced than anything I’ve done before’. He goes on to describe how the separation altered his creative focus and caused him to ‘scrap 95% of what I’d already recorded,’ finishing The Last Rotation Of Earth in two months and making what he believes is his most vital album.

Ticket price includes a £1 venue levy.

This is a 14+ event. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult

Albert Hall Manchester

Is there a curse that says Brian ‘BC Camplight’ Christinzio cannot move forward without being knocked back? That the greatest material is born out of emotional trauma?

Whilst making his new album The Last Rotation Of Earth, Christinzio’s relationship with his fiancé crumbled after nine inseparable years. The album follows this break-up amid long-term struggles with addiction and declining mental health. The outcome is an extraordinary record, with Christinzio describing it as “more cinematic, sophisticated and nuanced than anything I’ve done before.” He goes on to describe how the separation altered his creative focus and caused him to “scrap 95% of what I’d already recorded”, finishing The Last Rotation Of Earth in two months and making what he believes to be his most vital album.

That Christinzio has bettered his previous album is an achievement, given that Shortly After Takeoff received the best reviews of his life. “A masterpiece,” said The Guardian’s 5 star review, “a half hour or so that roils with anxiety, stuns with beauty and, occasionally, provokes laughter.” Even then, fate intervened when the album was released in April 2020, just as Covid and lockdown kicked in, so he was unable to tour the record until late 2021. The Philadelphian then joked, “I can't wait to make an album that isn’t surrounded by some awful tragedy.”

BC Camplight is a marvel' - The Guardian

This is a 14+ event (under 16 to be accompanied).

BC Camplight 

Brighton

CHALK

Fired by his ongoing battle with mental illness, Shortly After Takeoff is the final, and finest, chapter of what Christinzio calls his “Manchester Trilogy”, following 2015’s “How To Die In The North” and 2018’s “Deportation Blues”. All three albums were created after the native Philadelphian had moved to Manchester. Like Deportation Blues, Shortly After Takeoff spans singer-songwriter classicism, gnarly synth-pop and ‘50s rock’n’roll, with Christinzio’s similarly distinctive, flexible vocal carrying a fearless approach to lyrical introspection, but the new album is a major leap forward in songwriting sophistication and lyrical communication.

“It’s important to stress that this isn’t a redemption story,” he says. “I'm a guy who maybe lives a little hard and I’m in the thick of some heavy stuff. But as a result, I think I've made my best record.”

The “heavy stuff” has come thick and fast for Christinzio. Just days before How To Die In The North was released, he was deported and banned from the UK because of visa issues. Estranged from his new home, his girlfriend and his dog, unable to promote his album and back home with his parents, Christinzio sunk deep into the dark. An Italian passport, care of his grandparents, eventually allowed him to re-settle in Manchester, but then just days before Deportation Blues was released, his father Angelo unexpectedly died.

“I went into a spiral that was worse than any time since my twenties,” he recalls. Hence the title Shortly After Takeoff: the feeling of being suddenly thwarted by what life throws at you. Making matters worse was a neurological disorder that returned after years in remission: “I see TV static, and it messes with how my brain interprets everything from sound to my own feelings.”

One way to process tragedy is comedy, which elevates Shortly After Takeoff to a heightened plateau, from grief-stricken vulnerability to armoured bravado, from the black dog of depression to gallows humour.

Bleak comedy is evident from the album’s first song. ‘I Only Drink When I’m Drunk’ features Christinzio’s trademark ‘keep you on your toes’ style. ‘Ghosthunting’ similarly changes tack, between serene melody, classical harps, and pounding passages. Though the Nilsson-esque ‘I Want To Be In the Mafia’ (Christinzio’s favourite lyric on the album) and the elegantly sombre ‘Arms Around Your Sadness’ are less changeable, the way ‘Back To Work’ trades dreamy AOR and robotic funk, “sums up this record perfectly,” Christinzio feels. “The verse seems to make sense, then out of nowhere, boom boom…just when you think you have it figured out… It’s the never-ending cycle of mental illness.”

Christinzio says his love of stylistic shifts is also linked to a, “pretty low attention span. I’m always stirring the pot, I never let it settle.” His personal life is similarly restless. Few might risk everything and abscond from the safety of home in Philadelphia, where he had released two albums, occasionally played live with local faves The War On Drugs - whose current members Dave Hartley and Robbie Bennett were part of the original BC Camplight live band - and guested on Sharon van Etten’s Epic album. “If I’d stayed, I’d be dead. Period,” he once mused, and what was Philly’s loss became Manchester’s gain.

There, Christinzio has his friends, and his band. On record, Shortly After Takeoff is “95 percent” Christinzio, plus Adam Dawson (drums) and Francesca Pidgeon (backing vocals, sax, clarinet) and guests on cello and violin. Dawson and Pidgeon are also members of the current live BC Camplight, alongside Tom Bellini (guitar), Stephen Mutch (bass) and Luke Barton (synths, acoustic guitar).

Christinzio couldn’t tour How To Die In The North because of his deportation, but the shows following Deportation Blues played to increasingly larger audiences. Christinzio’s bombastic and intense live performances have earned him an ever-growing legion of devotees (and a recent nomination for Best Live Act by the Independent Music Awards) that see Brian as an “anti-rockstar”, an unfiltered talent.

“I’m pretty sure the BC Camplight live experience isn’t something you can find elsewhere,” he declares. “It is a journey every night. One moment, I’m basically doing a stand-up routine and the next, the band and I are playing like we plan on dying that evening, giving our everything.” One regret is that his father never saw Christinzio experience any level of success. “I wish he could have seen what I’ve started to do here,” he says. “I certainly gave that guy more grey hairs than he deserved. He would have liked to see this.”

Shortly After Takeoff ends with the gorgeously tender 93-second ‘Angelo’, “a little fleeting moment for my dad. I wanted his name on the album, and something that sounded like a goodbye. It ends with the drums, like a heartbeat stopping…” That’s Christinzio and Shortly After Takeoff: his best, most honest, open and frequently heartbreaking record.

This is a 14+ event.

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