In the mid-1980s, The Bolshoi were one of the most distinctive bands to emerge out of the English music scene. Blending post-punk and alternative rock, accompanied by witty and often wry lyrics, they had a darker edge than many of their peers, as they skillfully showed on singles such as “Away,” “Sunday Morning,” and “T.V. Man.”
Four decades later, two of that band’s members – singer/guitarist Trevor Tanner and keyboardist Paul Clark – have reunited as an indie rock duo, The Bolshoi Brothers. They released their self-titled debut album in late March via Electronic Music Records.
Though their name references their past, Tanner and Clark say that forming The Bolshoi Brothers wasn’t an attempt to recreate history. “It’s definitely a new band,” says Tanner, on a recent video call from his home in Jacksonville, Florida. “We’re not rehashing Bolshoi stuff. We’re doing new stuff.”
The eleven tracks on The Bolshoi Brothers are in a more classic rock vein, with some of the songs even veering into prog rock territory, but Clark says that this wasn’t something he and Tanner deliberately decided to do when they started this band: “It’s important to realize that neither of us had a preconceived idea of how to make the music,” he says, joining the video call from his home in Seattle. “You don’t think about what we’re going to do, what we’re going to sound like; it just happens. It really is kind of mercurial that way.”
One thing is similar to their previous Bolshoi output, however: the clever lyrics. “It was COVID times when we first started doing [this album], so everybody was just freaked out,” Tanner says, “so it’s a lot of weird feelings of alienation. You’re thinking about the fact that the human race could all die off. It was such a weird space. I definitely was affected by that.”
Despite the pandemic and the fact that they were living on opposite ends of the continent, Tanner and Clark had no trouble writing and recording these songs together. “I might have a guitar progression I’d record on the iPhone and send to Paul, and he’d send me back a masterpiece,” Tanner says. “Other times, Paul would come up with a riff and send it to me. We just started off kind of having fun with it, and then we realized it was actually pretty good.”
This is unsurprising, considering that Tanner and Clark each began refining their musical skills about fifty years ago. For his part, Tanner began creating his distinctive lyrical style when he was growing up in England, attending Catholic school. “I liked English as a subject,” he says. “I used to write stories at school, and my teacher, Sister Rosario, tended to read mine out because they were quite funny. Then, some of my schoolmates used to give me treats and stuff to put them in my stories and get their names read out.
“I had a few piano lessons because I was a good singer in the choir,” he continues. “I was always drawn to the early David Bowie stuff and all that. Then I had a few guitar lessons, and I stuck with the guitar.” When one of the teachers asked him to play guitar for a Mass, he had an epiphany: “I sat at the back with my little cheap Les Paul copy, and everyone started looking at me differently and treating me differently, and I thought, ‘This is good.’ And I realized, ‘If I can keep this up, the normal rules of life will not apply to me.’ So I’ve just been doing that my whole life.”
Clark discovered his musical skills in a very different way: “I always used to take things apart. My mum and dad would get a new stereo, and once they’d gone to the pub I’d take it apart, and try to get it back together again before they got back. Most of the time, they never even knew. At the same time, I’d been going to music lessons and Mr. Webb, the music teacher, once said, ‘OK, listen to this piece of music and just break it apart.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, this is like taking stuff apart!’ He was like, ‘You can actually differentiate every single piece in that 32 part piece I played?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ So I basically understood that you could put music together and take it apart just like a machine.”
Clark and Tanner then each played in various bands during the ensuing years. Then, in 1984, Tanner founded The Bolshoi. “We were a three-piece for quite a while when we first started,” he says, “and then I wanted to get more expressive with the music and the colors. I wanted to bring a bit more musicality to it, give me more opportunity to branch out and all that.” When a mutual friend introduced him to Clark, it was immediately apparent that Clark’s keyboard skills were exactly what the band needed.
The Bolshoi released their debut full-length studio album, Friends, in 1986, and it was also recently reissued on white vinyl via Beggars Banquet Records. Another album, Lindy’s Party, came out in 1987.
But by 1988, despite the band’s increasing popularity with both fans and critics, it was clear to the members that The Bolshoi should call it a day. “It’s like anything in life: some things just run their course and that’s that,” Tanner says. Both he and Clark note that the split was not acrimonious.
Post-Bolshoi, both Tanner and Clark relocated to the U.S. and continued their musical careers as prolific solo artists. They have remained friends in the ensuing decades, so it was an easy decision to reunite to form The Bolshoi Brothers when the right moment came along.
And though they’re intent on creating an entirely new sound together now, they also look back at The Bolshoi with fondness – and appreciation that the music they created with that band four decades ago is still adored by fans today.
Tanner has some theories about why The Bolshoi’s music continues to endure: “I personally think it’s because we just stopped. We didn’t keep going and gradually declining and declining. We just kind of quit. And also, at the risk of sounding like a vain asshole, I think we had some good songs compared to some of our compatriots. I don’t think we were seen as cool as some of the people that we were lumped in with at the time, but I think our songs have stood the test of time because we wrote some good songs.”
That assessment is proven not only with the songs that The Bolshoi released during the 1980s, but also with Country Life, a double album that came out on orange and green vinyl in 2024 (the Beggars Banquet label also handled this release). This was the band’s final studio album, which they did not release at the time, and this version also includes all the demos they’d created.
“It’s a very strange experience to hear songs that you wrote and performed 25 years ago that you haven’t thought about or heard since – and then somebody sends you thirty of them and says, ‘This is you,’” says Tanner. “It’s like meeting 25-year-old Trevor Tanner as old man Trevor Tanner. It’s kind of cool. It’s a very surreal but interesting experience for me. I’m really glad some of those songs saw the light of day because I think some of them are good.”
With these releases – and The Bolshoi Brothers album – fans now have the best of both worlds: the song that they’ve loved for more than 35 years, and now an entirely new and interesting musical chapter for Tanner and Clark.
