The 2 Billies

Biography

The 2 Billies is a collective of musicians from far and wide who didn’t give up the day job.

Tracing its origins to a garden in North Norfolk, the band has undergone various line-up changes, including a legendary non-performing group in the late nineties.

Many members have parted amicably to pursue solo projects such as Arctic Exploration, Headmastering, doing the screams on computer games, and even working at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales.

Now the band’s bright flame has been rekindled by their original bass player and the things he keeps in his shed. The 2 Billies now adopt a DIY approach to producing one-off home-grown tunes to a secret family recipe, of the kind you might pick up at the village fete if they were jams or pickles.

The 2 Billies were inspired by the calls of the pipistrelle bat which you can hear in the woodland at St Fagans: National History Museum.

About the track, Trevor Bailey of The 2 Billies:

“On colder days, bats can go into a state called torpor when they’re cool and inactive – so I thought this justified some weird snoring sounds at the start of the track.

I recorded pipistrelle bat echo-location calls using a bat detector that shifts sounds to lower frequencies where we can hear them. Bats can map their surroundings and catch insects in the dark by listening to the echoes from their calls. They sweep from low to high frequencies and back - I tried to do something similar in the background of the track by bashing on guitar strings.

About halfway through the track the bat flies into a cave to feed insects to its baby. A pair of pipistrelles raise only one young each year. It has its own unique squeak so the parents can tell who’s who amongst all the nattering at a roost site. Pipistrelles actually prefer to roost in trees and buildings, but I needed an excuse to add some river sounds I had, and turn the reverb up to 11.”