Aaron Bolli-Thompson’s keyboards and stage presence had been a big part of Rosalie Cunningham’s gigs for the past four years. He has recently left Rosalie to work full-time with Colossal Apostle.
The band also feature Stephen Reddan (guitars), Stuart Collins (bass), Reece Greenfield (drums) and Max Thomas (sax). I caught up with Aaron as they prepared to release their single Face Stitcher.
I first saw you back at Thekla (Bristol) with Rosalie Cunningham a few years ago. That was the boat wasn’t it? That was cool.
You were quite magnetic even then on stage. But when I saw you back in Bristol recently with Rosie at the Louisiana, I thought how far you’d actually come with Rosie, because you were very much an important part of the show at Louisiana. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Louisiana – that was with Joe (Davies) on bass as well, right?
Yeah, he did really well, didn’t he? Yeah, I think so. He was just like thrown straight in there and had big, big shoes to fill. So he did well I think.
At Louisiana there were a few little problems with Rosie’s guitar and you started playing some wonderful Rainbowesque kind of Dio era fillings. I appreciate it. That was a fun one actually down in Louisiana. That was a pretty sweaty one wasn’t it?
It was extremely hot – temperature and the band! You also threw in a bit of Grieg’s Hall of the Mountain King at the beginning and end of Duet. Yeah, that was good. That was a good crack. Well, yeah, I guess you’ve seen us a few times over the years. So, thank you very much. It was a lot of fun. I mean, obviously you know I don’t play with Rosie any more?
Yes. I heard after the Louisiana gig that you were leaving and I was very sorry to hear it. You remind me a lot of Jon Lord from Deep Purple. the way you can kind of insert melodies and themes and keep things going. It’s a real talent. Oh, thank you very much. Obviously, that’s a big inspiration for a lot of what I do. So, you know, that means a lot.
Playing for Rosie was a real honour for sure. She’s an amazing artist, and it was great to help her bring her vision to life on stage. But I was just a session musician really. Although the two of them (Rosie and partner Rosco Wilson) really gave me a lot of freedom, so I just made stuff up all the time, which was amazing. Solos that would just go wherever they wanted. It wasn’t just a note for note thing. At the end of the day those were her songs, and that was her art, and that’s great.
So you have left Rosie to concentrate on Colossal Apostle? Yeah, that’s my main shtick at the moment. It was a very, very hard decision to leave. It took a long time to come to it you know. It just became impossible to maintain the two of them. And with her tour that was coming up, Rosie’s 4th, which was going to be even longer. I thought I just can’t. So I guess, maybe, that decision was a little bit made for me.
Moving on to Colossal Apostle I love the wizard in your videos – is it you? Oh no, good guess though. That’s actually our sax player, Max Thomas who’s dressed up as the wizard.
The three songs so far are all terrific and really grow on you. The first one, The Well, has a real kind of happy psychedelic vibe to it. I guess you would agree. Somewhere near the end there’s a lovely part where it changes direction and gets heavier. It’s after a bass lick from Stuart. Yeah, man, that’s it.
It’s really good. I’d seen you doing harmonies with Rosie, but I didn’t realise you were as good a singer as that. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I had to give it a go. So that’s it, really. Yeah, but that’s us. We’re definitely going in sort of heavier directions, but still keeping the psych thing going.
Is it your project or is it a joint project? Joint. So like even just the literary references, you know, Pareidolia. That was Stephen Reddan, who’s the guitarist, that was his idea and it just linked in with the latest song we have out which is called Face Stitcher. But we’re definitely a cohesive unit. It’s not a one man show at all. Not even remotely. Even the songwriting process. We all come in with stuff but it’s never the same, obviously, when it gets to the end of it at all, which is quite nice.
I should imagine it was useful for you going out with Rosie on those immense tours to get an idea of what it’s actually like, apart from being on the stage. The hotels and the travel, the difficult side of touring. That’s a great point to bring up. When I was talking about leaving, that was also one of the things that we talked about a lot – how much crap we’ve been through together.
I think it was a little over four years I was with her. How many vans and hotel rooms – we hit the road hard and it wasn’t done in a glamorous way for a lot of it. Then it got better, and that’s obviously credit to Rosie and Rosco’s success, and it made it more comfortable as we moved along. But yeah, it’s not easy. I think sometimes people get the idea that touring is great, but touring can be terrible. But I do have amazing memories. I learned a lot from those guys, just being out there and doing it.
I’m going to see Rosie in Birmingham in January and I just checked the details and it’s you guys supporting. It is yeah. So obviously things ended really well and I’m really grateful that I get to open for her. It’ll be a lot of fun. It’ll be funny to be like on the other side. We supported her once before, Colossal Apostle, but we didn’t have Max then. It was our first ever gig. I’ve obviously been in the band with her for so long and it’ll be funny to be the support.
Would there be a possibility to get up with Rosie on the night for a song, do you think? Well, it’s up to her. I never would close the door. It would be nice that, they’re great, all of them so it would be fun. And if we ever did something together in the future, it’d be super fun too.
So what did you do before Colossal Apostle and Rosie then? You’re from Birmingham aren’t you? That’s an interesting question. I’ve lived in Birmingham probably the longest out of anywhere now, but that’s only quite recent. I was born in London but I grew up in the States. Because of my accent people sometimes get a bit confused where I’m from. Then I came back here and I’ve probably been here almost a decade now.
In London I was in a band called the Flightless Birds originally we just went under the front man’s name Dook Dootson. We put a little EP out. Anyway the bass player lived here, who’s now our guitarist, Stephen Reddan. I was around London, just doing that shtick and London’s so expensive. I basically had a series of situations where people just tried to totally rip me off. My friend Duke lived in Manchester, and Stephen lived in Birmingham and both had open places to live.
I’ve always liked Birmingham, we played the Flapper (& Firkin) a lot, so I moved here. And I met a lot of cool people. And right when I got here, I ended up working at PMT (Play Music Technology). I did that and a few bands and stuff playing organ. Just a bunch of random stuff really. Different bands I kind of popped in and out of – Holy Mountain, 5 Seconds. I played with High Horses for a second.
Then I got picked up to do some session work for people and I ended up playing with this guy called Arkansas Dave, which was super fun. The first gig was Montreux Jazz Festival. That was the gig. so that was super cool. That was actually because this guy called Nick Foley got me the gig. He couldn’t do it for some reason. So I just went out there and I met Dave. I played with him for a bit; he was like a proper cowboy from America and I was playing Hammond. So it was a lot of fun and it just kind of like spiralled into loads of different things.
So how did you get the gig with Rosie then? That was quite funny. I was doing loads of bits and pieces and playing in bands – purely sessioning. Then Sián (Bobbie Dazzle)- this is quite funny – called me up and she said: ‘Will you be my keys player?’ And I was like, ‘Nah, I’m only a session player. I’m not willing to join a band.’ So the irony of that’s pretty funny. We weren’t together at the time.
Then she passed me on to Rosie because, like I said, I’m a session player, Rosie is a solo artist. But in my opinion, it became like family. I mean, you get stuck in tin cans for so long. That’s what happens. But it started off very like a session. The first gigs for her were Cropredy and Herzberg (in July 2022, also the first gigs with Claudia Gonzalez-Diaz). I think Cropredy that year had 16,000 people, so that was a hell of an audition.
Obviously down the road, Sián is my partner, we’ve been together for years now and I play the organ on the Bobbie Dazzle records. I’m not the keyboardist. I just play the organ (though she let me co-write the track Jack Rabbit on her new record). The keys player is Chris Dando, who’s amazing, who produces and helps her write.
Tell me about the other guys in Colossal Apostle. I started a band just before Rosie to try and get it off the ground. That was a band called SEM or something. The drummer. Reece Greenfield, was in a band called the Mother’s Earth Experiment (ironically Stu was also in that band and the drummer before him).
They were cool, like psych/ prog, and ironically they opened for Purson (Rosalie Cunningham’s pre solo band) back in the day. I played on the bill on their last show. Reece and I became friends and he joined the SEM band as it was, which is totally different from Colossal Apostle.
We had a few different members. Steph was in that too but it kind of fell apart. After that fell apart, Reece was in another band which was sort of the leftover bits of the Mother’s Earth Experiment plus Stu. It sounded like they had somehow smashed Neil Young and Prog together. I don’t know how he did that, but it was cool.
Through a bunch of twists and turns, we ended up being Colossal Apostle, which was a three piece and then Steph came back into the fold. Reece said he was working with a guy named Max who played baritone sax, who was a classical guy really initially. He plays jazz and everything – a proper conservatoire kind of dude. I enthusiastically said: ‘Tell him to join the band!’ Reece told me to calm down, but I wanted to see what baritone sax would sound like in a heavy rock setting. And that’s how the band happened really.
Who came up with the name Colossal Apostle? That was Stu. It went on for ages and ages. I don’t know if you’ve ever come up with band names, but it was like tit for tat, tit for tat, and it went on forever and ever. And then, after months, I said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna have one last look.’ I said, ‘Who came up with Colossal Apostle?’ And – classic bass player – he’s always really quiet. He said, ‘Oh yeah, I did that ages ago.’ I said, ‘Man, that’s ******* brilliant. Why haven’t we chosen that? That is it! I’m quitting if we don’t do this name!’ So that’s how we became Colossal Apostle.
But did he tell you where the name comes from? No, he didn’t go into all that stuff. I was like, that just sounds brilliant. But obviously there’s meaning behind it.
I think it can mean whatever you want it to mean, doesn’t it? So it’s not necessarily tied into St. Paul. No, I must ask him if he had any thought on that. So far it’s been fine – I got colossalapostle.com. Don’t even know how I did that. I thought that would have been gone ages ago.
So can we talk more about The Well? It’s a great song and a great opening gambit. What is it about? It’s sort of about a person not really changing, and their friends are moving on and stuff. Everyone starts to grow up and they’re changing, having families and trying to do different stuff. But then someone’s stuck there a little bit.
So I’m guessing that probably you’re aware of that in your own world? Yeah sure. That’s right. I think when you get to my age, some people have been investing in that time in their life. They’ve been working since the early 20s and doing loads of stuff. And then all of a sudden they’re proper adults and you’re like, oops. Obviously it doesn’t really help with social media and stuff like that. So it is pretty relevant to my life, although it wasn’t really written about one person.
It’s not necessarily distasteful, but you know that kind of thing where someone’s partying and they’re way too old to be partying and doing whatever they’re doing? And then all of a sudden the friends start dropping off. Most of us kind of move on, but there’s always someone left. And sometimes that story doesn’t really end that well. I know loads of people that it didn’t really end that well. It’s almost like they woke up one morning and finally realised, – that kind of world, it’s like end of the day.
I love the intro to The Well. I did laugh at it. It made me smile in a good way. I thought it was very amusing. Thanks, glad you enjoyed a bit of tin whistle and harmonium.
I didn’t get in the rest of the song what I thought I was going to get from the intro. What did you think was going to happen? Out of interest.
I thought we were going to go into some kind of mystic kind of… fairies dancing round the Stonehenge Spinal Tap thing, but instead we tear off into this psych-out vibe. I was surprised how different your second release Eat Your Head was to The Well. Eat Your Head was just this great riff and we thought it would be an intro song. We were joking that we wanted it to be like an intro song for WWE, like our first sync license. We thought that would be great.
I thought let’s just write some silly lyrics about aliens taking over. That’s it. It was funny because Rosie called me and she said, ‘What does it mean?’ I was like, ‘Oh man, it’s not going to be a great story’, because she thought it was something deep and it was not. It’s just a fun song, to be honest. Nothing else is really like that in our catalogue. It’s actually quite serious a lot of it. But that was just a bit of fun and we thought why not?
Again, some of us thought we’d never record this as a single and it would just be like an intro track or an intro track for live shows. But then we thought that riff, for lack of a word, slaps. Let’s do it. Let’s make it into a single.
It reminds me of early Black Sabbath. There’s a lot of different passages and melodic shifts going on in the music. It riffs hard, but there’s lots of details that you can pick out and mood changes in it. I thought that was really clever. Yeah, it’s not just a stupid riff. I’m glad that came across. We are influenced by Sabbath. Obviously all the boys are Brummies, every single one of them except for, Max whose from the South. We all have so much respect for Sabbath. That’s great. It means a lot, you saying that, so thank you.
I know you’re a big Zeppelin fan too. I haven’t noticed much of Zeppelin creeping in yet, but are there any other bands that you are influenced by? Like I said, it’s very much a collective, so we actually are influenced by a lot of similar things. Crimson is a big one. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. But it’s a mix. It’s not just older stuff. Radiohead’s a big one. Because I play keys, sometimes I have to make sure we don’t just rip off Radiohead. But stuff like Radiohead, Mars Volta.
You’re in this really fascinating period in a band where it’s still kind of new and it’s just evolving. You’re not maybe sure where it’s going to go? You know, at the moment you’re dead right. I mean, that’s the cool thing that everyone’s on the same page. We’re not like, ‘OK, we want to be a Zeppelin band or we want to do this.’ We’re just making art and seeing how that unfolds within the context of, I guess, our canvas. We’re not afraid to use retro stuff because I play all the retro instruments. But we’re not a retro band. It’s just sort of forming and actually through each track. We started recording them and it’s really starting to form and it’s a strange combination.
Obviously the sax has brought in a huge element and it’s got like, kind of jazzy jammy elements and some of the other stuff, but also just heavy stanky riffs with a six string bass, and it’s just weird. And there’s like Clav and Rhodes. Instead of trying to copy something at this point, it’s like trying to find our voice and not really being afraid to see – by just throwing a lot of paint at the canvas – see what sticks.
The latest release is Face Stitcher. Face Stitcher is more of a prog journey. It goes through different stages and key changes. There’s a jam section but there’s still heavy riffs.
If Colossal Apostle fancied a cover version, what would you pick? Oh man, that’s a difficult one because we have this discussion a lot you see. There’s one opinion that’s been said a lot and it’s like, okay, if we do a cover, let’s do a cover that is so far out from our genre and make it our own, I think Perfect Circle did a covers record or even Cat Power – all these people where they just totally stretch it. So instead of doing something that would be obvious, like let’s do King Crimson. I did suggest Effigy by CCR. I just love it, the way it just hits that low string, it just flaps around and it’s amazing. But again it’s not far enough away from our genre. We haven’t really figured it out yet. I mean, we’re thinking like how far out can we go. Pull something like Britney Spears out of the bag and make it our own, totally just flip it on its head – a pop song into something dramatic. Wouldn’t it be good?
I Want To Dance With Somebody would be great as there is a lot of emotion in the lyrics. Right, that’s exactly the kind of thing. Dead on. Well, that might be it. I’m going to take that down. That’s the kind of stuff that we’ll probably look at doing. But it’s been a debate, a heated debate. I wouldn’t say it’s on the same level as the band name, but it’s up there.
So by the time I see you in January, there will be this Pareidolia album out? Yep, that’s correct. And then there’s another EP hopefully planning for May as well. So there’ll be another one then too. Basically we’re just streaming stuff out one at a time for now and culminating into stuff. The cool thing with that one too – I probably should do a little plug here – is that there’s a bonus track and a load of bonus content on the actual CD and vinyl. Bands and artists that we grew up on used bonus tracks. We felt we should throw some gifts to the people that are supporting, give them something back because they’re actually buying our stuff. Do something that only they get.
Do you have an idea of what Pareidolia is going to be like overall? It kind of sounds consistent to be fair. The lyrical content is quite reflective in a lot of ways. The album culminates in a track called Oliver which is cool. It’s sort of like the grunge bands of Seattle and stuff, which often gets labelled as being simple. But if you listen to early Soundgarden, I mean, that’s broad to me. It’s far out man. Time signatures and weird tunings and guitars. So it’s kind of in weird keys and parts and stuff, but it’s got that kind of attitude.
And then there’s a bonus track at the end of it. It’s all of us singing harmony with pianos and we got Max to make an orchestra out of all his woodwinds. So, the album sounds like it’s from everywhere, but it still has its own sonic stamp that still feels like the same band. So it’s art rock, I guess, but a little bit heavier art rock.
I’ve got to say, whoever’s doing the production for you is doing a great job judging by the songs so far. Yeah, we’re quite blessed. The chief behind that stuff is Steph, the guitarist, whose mixing it, and mastering was Peter Dowsett of Mixden Studios, who’s amazing. He did live sound for a lot of the Bobbie Dazzle stuff. But for mixing and the recording, Steph was running the shop and we did it all DIY. I think the organ was recorded behind a pub because that’s the room that we had, which was nice of them to lend it to us. Then we had two different lock-ups for a while, which kind of slowed us down. It’s a bit of a sad thing, but you probably know this, music venues are closing down a lot, but also so are the rehearsal spaces.
We are one of those bands that are embracing new gear now because we have to, but we’re also one of those bands that has a lot of old gear and likes to set up and have these spaces to play in, not just plug and play kind of stuff. So it was recorded in a few different lock-ups.
But yeah, Steph is a bit of a genius really with mixing and he kind of came up in that world to be honest. He’s been in it for a long time and studied it and we’re really lucky that not only does he play guitar amazingly, he’s a genius behind the desk.
Thanks so much for your time Aaron. I am looking forward to seeing you in January. It’s great when you discover bands like yourself at this time of life. Thank you very much. I feel like it’s a tough act to follow, being in Rosie’s band. So it means a lot you saying that.
You’ve got an amazingly talented band there Aaron. I think you could achieve quite a lot with this band. I hope you do. Yeah, I’m so lucky to play with these dudes. I always say, and I think everyone else says it, everyone’s better than me. And I guess that’s the situation you want to be in where you feel like everyone’s better than you because it feels like everyone’s working to keep up with each other. It’s very inspiring.
I bet they feel lucky to be with you as well. Depends on what kind of mood they catch me in I guess. It’s a great situation. They’re awesome guys.
I’ll keep in touch. Thanks so much for your time Aaron. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.
For more on Colossal Apostle :
Instagram: colossalapostleband
Music:
Eat Your Head (Official Video)