Behind the Scenes: The Byson Family - Angel of the Reckless

Having worked with The Byson Family since their inception, our first experience of ‘Angel of The Reckless’ was when Neil was asked to score a horn section for a performance at Saint Lukes:

It was a hit with fans across social media. Unfortunately when it came to putting the finishing touches to the recording for the album, Scotland went deep into COVID-19 lockdown. We managed to record horns remotely and send them off to Geoff Allan at Cavasound to perform his magic.

Creating a music video remotely produced similar challenges. The band had already sent through footage of each member recording or miming to the song. We’d made a few lockdown videos by that point (Petty Cassettes, Al & The Bad Decisions, Anton & The Colts) and the difficulty is the quality/size of the phone footage and trying to work out how to fit all the band members on the screen at once.

Once the novelty of watching Netflix during lockdown had waned, we were looking further for films and telly content. This led us to watching some older films. The flavour of the month was Hitchcock and similar 60’s thrillers. A lot of them took advantage of vertical lines to split the visual space:

It’s easy with 4 and quarters and an even number, but there’s 9 band members for this video, so it needed a bit of thought. We did some back and forth where Kenneth used CAD software and Neil used a tape measure on his monitor:

We then created a colour combination that gave us a vintage but bright palette to add graphics and dividing lines from.

The album came out around a month ago. You can get it on Assai Record. It entered the Scottish Album charts at number 3 and topped the UK indie charts.

As always, if you like this and you want to see us do more. Like, Share, comment and interact.