Plot Your Escape: Billy The Kid Traverses Hope And Desperation On 'Horseshoes & Hand Grenades'

Billy The Kid’s new record is about hope, but not the sort that gets smeared across greetings cards. It’s about the glimmers that surround broken scenes, finding a way to escape and wearing your scars. As the saying goes: “Almost only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

The album’s name is just one part of the story, though. Having branched off from her time as leader of Billy and the Lost Boys, Billy Pettinger’s road has been one of DIY records, crowd funded tours, travel, heartbreak and persistent doubts. ‘Horseshoes & Hand Grenades’ attempts to make sense of that past, with one eye trained on the future. The starting points may not be pretty, but that nagging idea of a change in circumstances won’t go away.

“I’m writing my life and explaining the things that I come across that I’m affected by,” Pettinger said prior to a recent show at London’s Black Heart. “We had 36 songs to pick from and ended up with 13. I think in the final hour they all had something in common; they all had that desperation and hopefulness, which ties into the album title. There’s the visual of hope and destruction, but also having nothing to lose. We really have to go for it. Why wouldn’t I?”

After going it alone for last year’s ‘Perspective’, on which she played every instrument and produced, Pettinger had some high-profile help in realising ‘Horseshoes & Hand Grenades’. The moral of that particular story is that if you get the chance to play a cover of Neil Young’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart with Frank Turner, you should.

Last summer, Pettinger joined Turner on stage in Toronto following a chance meeting. Soon after, with Xtra Mile considering a reissue of ‘Perspective’, her latest demos wound up in Turner’s hands. Those new songs wouldn’t be included on a repackaged record as initially intended. They would become ‘Horseshoes & Hand Grenades’, with Turner in the producer’s chair and the Sleeping Souls’ Nigel Powell behind the kit.

“I felt like a kid in a band, which is how the two of us always want to approach our music,” Pettinger said. “I found it to be quite easy, especially because the guy ‘producing’ the record was standing in front of me holding a bass guitar and I was standing in front of him, holding his electric guitar. It wasn’t somebody pressing a button and being like: ‘OK, now try and sing like this.’ We were too busy making music to be convoluted or think too much about it.”

With Pettinger’s demos forming the backbone of the process, the songs evolved further as time progressed and Turner’s idea to record ‘live off the floor’ took hold.

“The fact that we had a vague outline of an idea really gave us a lot of room to just let things turn out as they were going to turn out,” Pettinger added. “That said, it was his idea originally to approach it a little bit more punk rock and [with] ‘a little bit of dirt under the fingernails’. Because we were all standing in a room, playing together, you were able to listen to one another. We all went in playing and doing things a certain way, but the fact that we were open to the other people being there meant we ended up evolving for a greater good.

“It was good for me to do a couple records where I was the acting producer and a little bit over-involved in terms of the instrumentation. But a) I needed a break and b) sometimes it’s good to have a guy like Frank Turner around to play the piano part that you wish sounded like Bruce Springsteen or the Hold Steady. I’m not necessarily that kind of a piano player, but he is. Same with guitar parts. It was cool to decide what would be neat and then have a couple different people around to attempt that.”

The Springsteen influence extends beyond the odd piano lick on this occasion. Along with its autobiographical flecks, this is a record that finds Pettinger sketching out characters bound by societal roles and, like many of the Boss’s creations, often picturing four wheels and an open road. This Sure As Hell Ain’t My Life, a duet with Turner, is one such piece, while she adds colour to an interpretation of her English, Protestant grandfather and Irish, Roman Catholic grandmother's decision to leave Ireland for Canada on Lord Let Me.

“I definitely was stepping outside of myself more than I had,” Pettinger said. “Just in the spirit of being experimental. Also, I changed how I was writing in that I tried to approach it more like a job, especially when Xtra Mile asked me to send them some demos. I had some ideas that were almost done and some half finished songs that needed a once over, so they had to wait a little bit longer than I thought.

“I sat down every day for a good eight to 10 hours and just recorded and wrote. Initially I sent them 27 songs and they said: ‘Great, we’ll take a listen, but keep writing.’ A couple weeks later I sent them another nine songs and that was just the product of every day sitting down and going: ‘I wonder what’s going to happen.’ Some days I would have a song in five minutes. In fact, a lot of the songs that made the cut ended up being those magical, accidental songs. I wonder how many songs songwriters miss out on because they’re not sitting down and paying attention.”

‘Horseshoes & Hand Grenades’ is out now on Xtra Mile.

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