Cover Feature Daydream Believers: Black Honey

Ever since Izzy B. Phillips was young, she’s suffered from vivid nightmares. Often so bad she’d spend entire restless evenings awake, the lack of sleep would then cause her to hallucinate. “My dream-space is a really vivid experience for me,” she accepts now, sitting cross-legged in her childhood bedroom in Crawley – a space filled to the brim with dressing-up box-esque piles of clothes, books, pictures and general treasure trove ephemera.

Eventually, doctors suggested that she should start to keep a journal, documenting the figures her overactive imagination conjured up. Finding that it helped clear the clutter of her mind, she continued the practice. Now, she’s got an entire shelf full of them; she’s currently filling up number 43. And though the idea ostensibly began as a logical solution to a problem, it led to a much bigger discovery. “I realised there was a direct correlation between creating something and me coping with my own existence,” she continues. And so it began.

These days, though the exercise remains the same, the contents of those entries has changed dramatically. Instead of the crude, dark drawings that populated those first books (and trust us, some of them are genuinely quite harrowing), nowadays Izzy’s journals are filled with rambling diary entries scribbled from the back of a tour bus. Though they might still just be “normal person dramas”, they’re dramas taken from a world that’s becoming increasingly less normal by the day. And as Izzy, guitarist Chris Ostler, bassist Tommy Taylor and drummer Tom Dewhurst gear up for the long-awaited release of Black Honey’s self-titled debut, things aren’t likely to get any more average, any time soon. But first, let’s rewind a little.