Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy is keeping the faith

Wearing face jewels and mascara with sober workwear and a gaudy tie, Bonnie “Prince” Billy takes to the stage in this atmospheric church in south London with two large mugs of liquid. He’ll finish one, before moving on to the next; occasionally, he will consult a hand-written setlist in a notebook at his feet, while making little ceremonial bows.

Thirtysomething years into a career telling of extraordinary happenings in ordinary lives, the man also known as Will Oldham is adept at revisiting his back catalogue with an impish elan. His first song of the night is In Good Faith, from 2019, a track – apt for the venue – on which this writer of often bleak songs explores more optimistic themes of equanimity and succour. In good faith, he suggests, we rise every day, hoping for the best, but ready for the worst.

It’s one of many songs about the way we live now that resonates tonight. He then rolls back the years to 1994 for Werner’s Last Blues to Blokbuster, a track about how suddenly things can change. Accompanied only by his guitar, he sends out an exploratory leg, occasionally throwing back his head as he sings.

A new Bonnie “Prince” Billy album is coming in March, We Are Together Again, teased here with two tantalising melodies. Why Is the Lion? is one – a gentle tune that likens suffering to a beast that tears at us and won’t go away, and considers strategies we might use to quell it. Mostly, though, Oldham ranges far and wide across his discography, chatting amiably between songs.

He is almost unrecognisable from his intense 90s beginnings, when his silence between songs and startling appearance – he resembled a US civil war soldier nursing a thousand-yard stare – didn’t foretell a future in which he might present a little like Brian Eno in Roxy Music and enthuse at length about a Peter Doig exhibition.

The musician has about 30 albums to his multiple names and a side gig as an actor. (He’s terrific in Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 film Old Joy.) Trading as Bonnie “Prince” Billy since 1999, he has a discography that spans three earlier aliases (Palace, Palace Brothers, Palace Music) and a couple of records under Will Oldham, as well as collaborations. Over time, his sparse, haunting folk has evolved into lush, latter-day Americana, on full band albums full of sociable instrumentation.

Last year’s The Purple Bird was a standout. A country record made in Nashville, it features meditations on how people meet the ills of the world that are delivered with specificity and never obvious. Guns Are for Cowards is a rollicking tune that reveals the absurdity of the lethal US obsession through a series of non-rhetorical questions and oompah. “Who would you shoot in the face?” Oldham wonders. “Who would you shoot in the back?”

The news from Minneapolis hovers over the gig. Later, Oldham will tell of a recent community benefit concert in Louisville convened to help cover a musician’s medical bills, where the beneficiary exclaimed from the stage: “Fuck cancer! And fuck ICE!”

Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s most recent outing, They Keep Trying to Find You, is the kind of Oldham song that makes the hairs on your arms ripple. Music creaks under the weight of songs about pain. And yet his tale of outrunning your demons is among his best. He moves slowly through a story whose beginning and ending we can only guess at. Someone in crisis is holed up in their house, not answering the phone or the door. He considers their options: just lie there on the floor? Or open a window – not to hope, as you might think, but “to torrential rains”. A compassionate and clear-eyed depiction of despair, with no pat answers, the track warns against “Becoming one with the darkness within”.

That word – darkness – is an Oldham keyword. It cannot help but recall his best-known song, I See a Darkness (1999), another oblique short story, both chilling and non-judgmental, that endures like a bleaker gen X version of Hallelujah. Johnny Cash covered it in 2000, Rosalía interpreted it on her little-known first album from 2017. Anna Calvi and Perfume Genius released their version three months ago, lending the song a queer romantic spin.

There’s no room for I See a Darkness tonight. Those hungry for Oldham’s uncomfortable early works get New Partner, a 1995 song whose plotline includes an unnamed “awful action”, and Disorder, a 1996 song with a morally ambiguous narrator who claims: “We die many times, and each new infancy / Is a surprise.”

The overarching theme here, though, is Oldham’s range, and how individuals persist by prioritising community, art and joy. He ends with a cover: Draw Something Beautiful, originally by the US-born, India-raised singer Ganavya. “If I could, I would draw something beautiful into the holes that have been punched into your heart,” he sings. Tonight, Oldham has done just that.

Photograph by Antonio Olmos for The Observer