Divorce's Felix Mackenzie-Barrow on grounding himself and finding stillness with debut solo album 'Book Of Churches' • Interview • DIY Magazine

“B-E-N-D - like a bend in the road,” spells out Felix Mackenzie-Barrow, as he speaks to DIY with the crisp winter sun of Bend, Oregon behind him. Half the world away from his Nottingham home, Felix - also co-vocalist in Divorce, and about to release a debut album solo, as Book Of Churches - is midway through an extended North American trip, one which has already included sessions on the band’s follow-up to last year’s debut ‘Drive To Goldenhammer’, and left him with enough time to catch the spring migration of birds when he heads to Vancouver within the week.

“Today I’m going to drive down to a wildlife refuge, read a bit of the history and get my head around the place,” he explains. “Whenever we’re on a big road, me and Adam [Peter-Smith, guitarist] look at each other if we see a cool bird, which is a nice reminder that there’s a world outside playing shows. You can’t really feel like your job and music is that important when you’re looking at a wild animal, fully in the place that they’re in.”

Despite describing himself as an “amateur” bird-watcher, Felix knows his herons from his storks. Second Book Of Churches single, ‘The Quiet Was A Heron’, immortalises the moment he spotted one flying over the noisy chaos of a music festival, finding comfort in the idea that there was someone else also “feeling a little overwhelmed”. In this digital age that can often feel shielded from nature, Felix feels uneasy if he’s not grounded within an ecosystem, always searching for those therapeutic pockets of wilderness that help him get by.

“The human world that we’ve built, a lot of the drive behind it is to insulate ourselves from the wild,” he ponders. “I try and resist the temptation to insulate myself as much as I can. The other thing is that it takes money to be in a place where you can find those pockets of nature. It involves travelling, having equipment or a car, and it’s not possible for everyone. I would never want to seem preachy, but it feels like I should be grateful for the opportunities that I have to do that.”

“[In] the human world that we’ve built, a lot of the drive behind it is to insulate ourselves from the wild. I try and resist the temptation to insulate myself as much as I can.”

It was from similar pockets of downtime that Book Of Churches came into existence. As Divorce’s existence became ever busier, Felix’s natural instinct to write music helped ground him in a similar way to going for a walk or birdspotting, facilitated by the folky simplicity of a guitar, microphone and GarageBand. “I could reach a state where I was able to [create], lose track of time and shut the world out,” he explains. “It was an exercise in grounding myself, doing what I can and not overcomplicating it.”

With no plan to release these tracks - or if he’d even have permission from the band’s label - it was the top and tail of the process that helped Felix realise an album was afoot. Opener ‘Song By A Stranger’ “felt like a good blueprint for how I was going to do the rest of the record,” he explains, ditching his sunglasses as he sits behind the wheel of his hired car. “Things slotted into place: I discovered where I was going to place the two mics, I could hear the sound in the room.” After wrestling with fragile closer ‘Stones In Your Bag’ for hours, he realised the sense of finality in lyrics like, “Just me and you / In a hotel at the end of the world”.

Reluctant to let too many voices into the process, Felix worked with trusted faces, including mixing engineer Richie Kennedy and his partner, Klara Szafrańska, who sculpted the heron bones on the LP artwork. “It all felt pretty homemade,” he notes. Self-titling the album as ‘Book Of Churches’, he suggested that the moniker gave him the “freedom” that releasing under his “long and relatively convoluted” birth name would have lacked.

“I had the title knocking around in my head for a few years,” he offers. “The church reference, that’s partly about reclaiming my idea of what churches [mean]. I’m not a religious person, but I do feel spiritual in some ways, and that probably has roots in some of the things that I grew up with. But also I have a real frustration and an anger towards the church, in terms of the way that faith is used to control people and [used] for bad. It was about reclaiming that, in some ways.”

“I had to learn that commodifying my art was only going to make it worse. If I want to make good art, I have to just do it for me.”

Carrying the wisp and depth of a Bon Iver record, ‘Book Of Churches’ feels fundamentally separate from the alt-country twang of Divorce, but undoubtedly linked to the persona of Felix Mackenzie-Barrow. Admitting there is a grey area between the two, he suggests that much of the writing he does for Divorce bears co-vocalist and bassist Tiger Cohen-Towell in mind. And although Book Of Churches is purely for himself, its existence is intrinsically linked to Divorce’s story so far.

“I had a solo project under my own name when I was 16, but I was young, trying to figure out what I was doing, and I really wanted to be a full -time musician,” he reflects. “I could only really have written this record and attempted the whole Book of Churches thing because Divorce has given me a job, for now, and a sense of the music industry and how I want to approach that as a solo artist.

“I didn’t come from a background where art was just for art’s sake. My parents run a theatre company, and they’ve made a living - not a big one - from doing plays and from getting people to pay for tickets. My first experiences of art were, ‘Okay, I need to make this a business,’ but actually, I ended up making music that I’m not really that proud of.

I had to learn that commodifying my art was only going to make it worse. If I want to make good art, I have to just do it for me.”

‘Book Of Churches’ is out now via Gravity Records / Capitol.

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