Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
About a year ago, I found a t-shirt on DePop adorned with the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer logo. Upon closer look, though, the logo’s text read “Philly Blue Deputy” instead. I am now the proud owner of this shirt, but it could not be further from what the band’s identity has become since the merch’s initial print. Blue Deputy, helmed by Andy Bunting, have found themselves on a new continent both literally and spiritually, shown in their first EP, Reeling, released this past Monday.
The band in its initial iteration was a result of COVID. “I am from the UK, but then I moved over to Philly in ‘09, and I grew up there,” Bunting explains. “My family was still there, but then I went to uni in London, so I would come back over the summer. When COVID happened, I was back with my family in the states, so that’s why that iteration formed, because I was there.”
Blue Deputy initially existed as a duo of Bunting and Brody Hamilton of the controversy-prone Delaware DIY band Khaki Cuffs. They released the double single “New Jersey / I Hate Steven Singer” in the summer of 2020, and according to an interview with Hamilton in 2022, had a full length in the works. However, this would all be scrapped when the pair split up and Hamilton found himself amongst the long list of DIY musicians ousted for (putting it kindly) accusations and subsequent admissions of general sexual deviance. While Bunting’s plan was to move back to the states after finishing her degree, her family moving to Northern Ireland and the split with Hamilton put the fate of Blue Deputy as a project into limbo.
Enter Caoilfhinn (pronounced kee-lan) McFadden and Cathal (pronounced Ca-hall) Francis, whom Bunting met through mutual friends. “I couldn’t be bothered finding new people,” she admits. “But then Caoilfhinn was like, ‘we could actually properly record this, and I’ve got a mate who does drums.’ We got that far for a while, and we were just rehearsing, and not doing any gigs really. Just kind of getting up to speed and playing the old stuff and the one new song, so it was kind of fun just rehearsing with three songs.”
Caoilfhinn and Cathal were a year apart in the music and audio production program at Queen’s University Belfast, and their prowess allowed for Blue Deputy to return. “I didn’t know if it was dead in a ditch per se, but it was definitely comatose for a while,” Bunting explained. “I originally started it as a solo project, and it wasn’t even a project, it was just the name that I released music under because I thought it sounded cool. It’s always been a kind of personal thing, and that’s how it was during the United States iteration of the band. Even if everybody went their separate ways, I’d still have it. I know as long as I keep making music, I’ll probably just release it under [Blue Deputy] no matter if I’m by myself or with other people. It’s less a band who is a certain genre, and more so the music that I like and want to release, or whoever’s working with me likes and wants to release. So in that aspect, it never really died,” she says. In this iteration, though, she’s confident with the trio’s identity. “It feels more like a band now, I guess, like a band identity. We’re not all being pulled a million different directions like we were in the States. We’re more concretely a band rather than four people who just rehearse sometimes and play live.”
Blue Deputy would not be the band it is today without Bunting’s history in Philly’s notoriously gritty DIY scene. “It was full of a lot of people trying to be The Wonder Years or Modern Baseball–trying to step on each other’s shoulders to get up to the prize of national appeal and being able to make [music] a career. It was a kind of funnel for people with maybe not the best kind of personalities who were just trying to get success,” she recalls.
“There were some really lovely people, obviously, who were the majority who were just there to have fun and meet people and support their friends. There was definitely an element of that in the DIY scene when everything went online [during COVID]. It sort of started out as people in different scenes being friendly with each other, but then when that itself became a scene, it was like a carbon copy of what the Philly scene used to be. So alarm bells were going off in my head and I was like, ‘I just don’t think this is healthy.’ So that helped me navigate that a bit when I saw the cycle continuing just on a national online scale,” Bunting explained.
Her experience in Belfast’s scene, though, is uniquely competitive: “I think the third coming of it now is milder, but I think it’s happening in Belfast and Ireland as well. There’s definitely a competitive nature to the scene that’s a bit like Philly, except in Philly if you were just a band who wasn’t big, you could still kind of get on and survive and you could do national tours if you wanted. Whereas here, it’s just make it or break it. You’re really, really pushed if you want to make [music] something that makes money. To be taken seriously, you really have to do well in the UK and the US before they’ll take you seriously here. So that’s created a similar culture to the one in Philly, where it’s just very competitive. A lot of people are quite analytical of all the local bands. They’re looking at your following, they’re looking at your Spotify, they’re looking at your engagement, your release schedule and kind of assessing you, I find. And it’s hard to not fall into that trap as well. But it just reeks of the Philly scene. Philly was like a microcosm of DIY everywhere.”
The songs on Reeling diaristically detail a seismic shift in Bunting’s life–loving, learning, and losing are at the heart of a Blue Deputy song. The jangly, expansive “Big Fleece,” details the increasing bleakness of a one-sided relationship. “The situation I was talking about was where a person was being outwardly mean to me and cruel. I still was like giving them the time of day, which is even more embarrassing to admit actually,” she confessed. “I was quite nervous to show it to anybody, but I just figured, I mean, [the story] is true, even if it feels kind of pathetic to say. Once I’d shared that song with the band and our label and other people, it really broke down a barrier that I had about sharing music because it is so personal.” She alters the song’s final chorus: “I am all hands and knees / I only aim to please / You taught me a green sort of grief / But still I’ll love you for just a little bit too long,” mourning not only the relationship, but the time lost to trying to make it work in the first place.
In the creases and corners of our conversation, there was a present fear that the fans they’d garnered on their initial run have all been lost to time. “A lot of people just kind of gave up on [Blue Deputy], which is fair enough, because we didn’t release anything for four years. Trying to re-engage with that audience is really hard, because anybody in music will tell you momentum is everything,” Bunting says. The DIY ether is notorious for short attention spans, with only the best and brightest able to get away with putting out a project longer than your average Joyce Manor record. Reeling, clocking in at 19 minutes and change, barely makes the cut. It’s a soft reintroduction to Bunting as a songwriter, and an audition for the affection of a new generation of heads. “Coming back meant the stars aligning in order to play a gig or even rehearse, whereas now we’re all here. We’re all moving in together in like two days. So now we have way more access to each other to actually keep the band going. We’re back-er than we’ve ever been. We’re so back.”
Reeling is out now.
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Leah Weinstein | @leahetc_
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