From international tours and playing on the same bill as The Rolling Stones to part-time jobs and breeze-block garages, Broken Hands know more than most about the peaks and troughs of the music industry, writes Joe Bill

“We joke about how stubborn we are as a band. But I can’t really imagine not doing it now. We’ve all been doing it longer than we haven’t.” Callum Norton, the drummer for heavy-rock outfit Broken Hands is making light of it, but actually there is an affliction that comes with chasing the rock’n’roll dream.

We are meeting the band in their latest set-up, an empty industrial space in Faversham, which is a fair leap from their tour of the United States and deal with major label Atlantic Records. Not that the quintet are moaning as they get together after a long day’s work at their respective jobs.

“Of course, every band in the world, when they’re trying to make it, have jobs and try to make it work,” continues Callum. “We give as much time as we possibly can, because it’s what we all want to do.”

With everything the group have gone through, you could forgive them for employing the ‘we’ve had a good run’ attitude and skipping off into the world to find something new. But when you hear a Broken Hands track, you know exactly why they haven’t, and why they continue (2020 pandemic aside) to write music and to tour.

“It’s addictive,” says bassist Thomas Ford. “We had been touring a long time. When I first got home I was still keeping my socks in a little fruit box in my room because I was so used to grabbing handfuls of them, chucking them in a bag and going. The transition back to a draw was heavy.”

“We want to burn as hot as we can until we crash out.”

— Dale Norton

To give you some idea of that “long time”, the Broken Hands collective have been operating in some capacity for more than a decade, although the line-up as we now know it wasn’t officially complete until guitarist Dave Hardstone arrived in 2012 or ’13 (we can’t decide). They are all school mates from the now-defunct Chaucer Technology School in Canterbury. It really is the classic tale. And much like their rock’n’roll predecessors, the longer they get in the tooth, so do their locks and facial hair.

“So it’s, like, knowing it’s gonna take another couple of years, but the whole time we can all hang out we’d be hanging out anyway, so we may as well get together and make some tunes,” says Callum.

Sitting in the breeze-block unit and swigging beer, chat inevitably turns to reminiscing. First about meeting former WWE wrestler Chris Jericho at a music festival in a US prison, before a bit about dog-walkers in Blean Woods and eventually coming on to the topic of Split In Two – the new album that has come some five years after their debut, Turbulence.

It’s a story of nine studios, hamstrung record deals, the firing of managers and legal wranglings. We will tell you all the bits we’re allowed to.

TURBULENCE

Playing the Nag’s Head pub in Chatham High Street and being told to get off stage by a disgruntled neighbour who couldn’t hear her episode of X-Factor on the telly is not always the perfect way to start a story, but it is in this case.

In 2013, Broken Hands moved into a house (it has also been described as a commune) in Littlebourne on the outskirts of Canterbury and, having tinkered with their line-up to include Dave, whom they spotted staggering out of the Bell and Crown pub, work began on their first full album, Turbulence.

“We were looking for someone who really had the enthusiasm to want to do it,” explains front-man Dale Norton. “There’s hard miles at the beginning and it was when Dave joined that we nailed down what we all did in the band and it became more serious.”

Turbulence is an album themed on flight, which is both a bold concept for a debut as well as a legitimate heavy-rock record, punctuated by high-octane tracks like Meteor and Spectrum.

“When recording Turbulence, we were still at the point of trying to break through and get signed,” says Callum. “We recorded it all off our own backs and made the best out of everything we could get our hands on. And we met some really cool people along the way like Tom Dalgety (Royal Blood, Ghost).”

Modern music isn’t as it was traditionally and, having a completed album already in their pockets, Broken Hands set about playing shows in the hope of attracting a label.

But it was a decision to go to Texas for the 2013 South by Southwest Festival that changed everything.

“We had almost quit,” says Dale. “We had done four years before that, been pushed around London gigs doing club nights and roadied and all that.

“We thought ‘We could go on holiday to Malaga, or we could spend the money and go and play at South By and we agreed to go for it. We had always wanted to play in America, and it was potentially going to be our swansong.”

Having played a handful of gigs around the various venues that the festival incorporates, the crew also got to have a wild night with Royal Blood and Daniel Beddingfield (in a shell suit).

“We went out there a little bit fringe, paying for ourselves,” remembers Callum. “Our management at the time worked really hard to get us on to a couple of these small shows and you never know who’s going to be there.”

It turns out that So Recordings was there and Broken Hands were signed. A whirlwind 18 months saw the official release of Turbulence, which was finished at the renowned Rockfield Studios in Wales.

They featured on the supporting bill for the monstrous Rolling Stones at Hyde Park gig, while the album got support from the likes of Clash Magazine, NME, The Independent and Radio 1.

Festival appearances at the Isle of Wight, Reading, Leeds and numerous others were followed by a tour with The Cult, of She Sells Sanctuary fame, culminating in a gig at the Brixton Academy.

“That was the biggest buzz so far for me,” says Dave. “I remember running around backstage and thinking that last year I was there in the crowd. You know the acts that have been on that stage.”

With the trajectory that Turbulence sent the group on, it was never going to be long before another offer came calling.

“We ended up going into a label battle, basically,” explains Dale.

“A load of labels talked to us and came over to watch a show at the Oslo Hackney in London. It was rammed and a really good atmosphere, the album had just come out, we had done all this light-show stuff and had these silver parachutes to go with the theme of the album. It worked. And that’s when we hooked up with the Atlantic lot.”

To paraphrase, that’s where things got “tricky”, with So Recordings and Atlantic trying to broker a handover deal.

“It was a year and a half stuck in legals,” says Dale, followed by some expletives.

Having eventually signed over to Atlantic, Broken Hands set about writing their second album, named after the title track Split In Two, having achieved what looked like the rock’n’roll dream.

STOP TO THINK

Sitting under the mezzanine, perched on a classic Austin Healey for the shoot, we got to talking about those heady days of first signing the deal and whether there was a moment in which they felt they’d ‘made it’.

“We went from Littlebourne to New York in two years. We went from having none of the industry back-up to having everything and being sold to a major label – we didn’t have a chance to stop and look at it.

“And I think that sometimes that can be dangerous anyway because some of the best stuff you can do is in the momentum and in the run. Now we have been around longer we can think about it and chat to you about it.”

“It’s all in the moments of clarity,” says Dave and they all laugh because they have a list of their moments of clarity.

“Yeah, I remember thinking ‘F**k, we’re sitting in Arizona sweating our balls off waiting to get into a gig’,” says guitarist Jamie Darby.

Playing shows to tens of thousands of people at a time – the largest venue being bigger than The O2 – constituted the biggest tour of their lives, of course. The band also continued with the recording of the album.

“It ended up being recorded across nine different places,” explains Dale. “And it was done between touring and stuff. With a second album you have all the other engagements to fit writing around, whereas the first one was done together in one go in the Littlebourne house and we smashed it out. You don’t get that luxury when you’re out playing gigs as well.”

For fans of Broken Hands, the time between Turbulence and Split In Two was starting to grow significantly. And the band knew it.

“We were touring the record and it couldn’t be released,” explains Dale. “We had been playing it for two years.”

The very nature of Atlantic meant there was lots of competition for support and Broken Hands were in a pool of acts waiting to get their big push. And it didn’t arrive.

“What’s difficult for people who have a bit of drive and aspirations is that there’s always a bigger fish, and the music industry is like Billingsgate Fish Market,” says Dale to everyone’s amusement. “I mean, we’re sitting under a mezzanine in Faversham – we weren’t that big a fish!”

A week before Christmas 2018, Broken Hands were handed back their master copies of their new album and they parted company with Atlantic Records.

That could have destroyed lesser bands and lesser characters, but not Broken Hands, who still had good ties with the team at So Recordings (Placebo, Enter Shikari, Band Of Skulls, Demob Happy, Dinosaur Pile-Up), and they re-signed.

“So that’s twice we’ve slammed a record down with them and said ‘Here’s another one’ and we haven’t worked with them on it,” says Jamie. “And hopefully they’ll keep us for a third.”

“We massively appreciate the So guys,” says Dale. “They took a band who lived in a house in Littlebourne on tour and looked after us a lot. We love those guys.”

While their second album was once again finished off at Rockfield Studios, the release of singles Can You Feel It, Friends House and title track Split In Two finally allowed the band to express themselves once more. And fans not fortunate enough to get to one of their previous tours got to hear the new material.

“Releasing this album wasn’t the usual hop, skip and a jump,” says Jamie. “It was hop, hop, hop, hop, jump, graze your knee and get up again.”

The full album was eventually released in August 2020, more than four years after their first. And despite a worldwide pandemic, it has been brilliantly received, with its tracks occupying all of the band’s ‘Most Listened’ slots online. The title track alone has bagged more than 300,000 listens, already proving, if it was necessary, that Broken Hands have a swell of support to be envied.

Getting back out on the road to tour the album is the next goal and the group are looking forward to playing their music to people who know it.

“It will be so nice when I get to go out and play again because at least people will have heard it,” says Callum. “It’s always weird playing new stuff to an audience as you’re never sure how it’s going to go down.”

As for the future, well, Broken Hands knows more than most the risk, rewards and strains of making it in the music industry.

Dale adds: “We want to burn as hot as we can until we crash out.”