When: 7pm on Friday 14 November 2025
Where: O2 Apollo Manchester, Stockport Road, Manchester M12 6AP

We’re excited to be presenting BC Camplight’s biggest show to date, at the O2 Apollo!

Every BC Camplight album has a backstory every bit as compelling as its music. A Sober Conversation is no different, as virtuoso songwriter and pianist Brian Christinzio documents the last two years of his life, finally confronting a shocking childhood trauma while embracing sobriety, to create his bravest and most revealing record. It’s an enthralling, sometimes haunting quasi-concept record marked by ruthless tragic-comedic purging and sublime, intricate melody, knitting lyrical screenplays to dazzling arrangements. It is BC Camplight at the height of his remarkable powers.

First evidence is the album’s lead single, Two-Legged Dog, a classic example of Christinzio’s sumptuous songwriting, juxtaposing raw Rundgren-esque piano punching against moments of sophisticated classical grandeur. It features Abigail Morris, lead singer of (BC Camplight cheerleaders) The Last Dinner Party. A descending piano riff kickstarts a sumptuous Bacharach-ian drama, filtered through Christinzio/ Camplight’s trademark changes of tension and pace, as he looks deep and inward. “I’m starting to understand that I can accept love and help from people, but I need to help myself too,” he says.

A Sober Conversation follows Christinzio’s 2023 album, the critically celebrated The Last Rotation Of Earth (his first top-40 album), a record centred around the agonising break-up of his long-term relationship. It received the most ecstatic reviews of his career – “A masterpiece” (Sunday Times), “Masterful” (Uncut), “An extraordinary record” (MOJO) – and his biggest headline shows up to that point at London Shepherd’s Bush Empire and Manchester’s Albert Hall. But even increased recognition for the man’s considerable talent cannot compensate for the man’s long history of depression, and Christinzio admits it’s been a hard-fought battle to reach this point in life.

“Around the time of The Last Rotation… I realised I was living in this perpetual childhood, messed up all the time, trying to free myself from responsibility and all the bad thoughts I had. It led to a kind of existential crisis… I was craving meaning, thinking about having kids… I’ve been running away from stuff for a long time. You can either try and achieve milestones in life or chase a dime bag – you can’t do both. And I’ve decided not to let myself be defeated anymore.”

In part, Christinzio’s new-found clarity led him back to childhood, to summer camp in New Jersey when he was abused by an adult counsellor. Previous BC Camplight records have referred to it obliquely, but it’s now front and centre of A Sober Conversation. “I had spent 30 years being terrified to open that door, and afraid of the price I’d pay once I had. I’ve opened the door. To some extent this album is what was on the other side. I hope it helps me but this album is also for everyone that is having trouble finding their bravery, finding themselves.,” he says.

As album intro ‘The Tent’ evolves from an ominous crescendo of synths and footsteps into a pensive country-tinged piano ballad into a passage of increasing tonal violence and euphoric choral harmonies, Christinzio sets the scene of the crime. Once past a list of possible calming remedies that might solve his struggle, the narrator reaches a crossroads. “Am I going to face it or let this continue to ruin my life?” Christinzio says.

Much of A Sober Conversation’s lyrics involve conversations, often between Christinzio and himself, as he explores his new reality. In the title track, he notes, “I’m pulling myself to all these places I don’t want to go… At this point in the album, I still don’t want to talk about what happened, so I’m cracking jokes instead.” (As a device to throw the listener off the scent, the narrator’s confession, “Don’t tell anyone. I don’t care for David Bowie” is a big one….)

Like a conversation, the album goes back and forth, across style, mood and temperament. Some lyrics, Christinzio says, have a “Something good will come of this feeling.” But not ‘When I Make My First Million’, one of the album’s calmer moments but conversely the tone is harsher: “More bittersweet, with the emphasis on ‘bitter’. I always thought the next phrase of my life will fix everything – that was my mantra for years. But I never allowed myself to get better.”

At the album’s halfway point, ‘Where Are You Taking My Baby’ is the moment Christinzio accepts, “Please, just fucking deal with it. Don’t worry that it took you so long to address it.” Brian tells his abuser, “I’m ready to not hate you anymore, I’m taking the power back. But I gotta ask; Where did you take that kid? Namely, me. Why did you leave him there?”

After this heavy interlude, ‘Bubbles In The Gasoline’ (featuring Peaness leader Jessica Branney) is, says Christinzio, “a much-needed break.” There’s savage humour in his words, but also an upbeat state of mind. “Rather than wake up expecting something awful will happen, I’m waking up, and I don’t know what will happen, but that’s okay. I can’t keep using setbacks as excuses to extend the self-perpetuating myth that I’m prone to disaster.”

After the break: the reality check. Stunning magnum opus ‘Rock Gently To Disorder’, a kind-of-musical in several suites – and what Christinzio hears as, “a raw version of Sinatra’s In The Wee Small Hours” – underlines how the struggle continues. “I might be owning my life, but it doesn’t mean it’s not going to hurt,” he affirms. “It’s always going to hurt.”

Hurt, alongside its good friends Confusion and Anger, have shaped every BC Camplight record, from his 2005 debut, when he was backed by musicians who would eventually join The War On Drugs. But by 2010, after he released a second album, Christinzio knew he had to leave Philly. “If I’d stayed,” he once mused, “I’d be dead. Period.” So he took a friend’s advice to escape his circumstances and moved to, of all places, Manchester. He found his way to Bella Union, when he began again, releasing the album How To Die In The North. Just days before it was released in 2014, Christinzio was deported back to Philly. He got back to the UK via an Italian passport and made Deportation Blues – but just days before its release in 2016, his father died, triggering the breakdown that inspired Shortly After Takeoff, the last part of what Christinzio calls his Manchester Trilogy.

The Last Rotation Of Earth followed, and Christinzio got through the break-up, started therapy, buried his addictions, and made A Sober Conversation. The album is self-played except drums (shared between Sidonie Hand-Halford and Adam Dawson, who plays in Christinzio’s live band), plus backing singer Jessica Branney. Live band members Jolan Lewis and Thom Bellini make cameos. Christinzio believes that his sobriety, “really comes out in the music. It’s more meaningful because it’s coming from a place of clarity.”

Still, A Sober Conversation’s penultimate track, the exquisitely dreamy ‘Drunk Talk’, attempts to escape clarity by indulging in drunken banter rather than consider the art of self-improvement. The album departs with ‘Camp Four Oaks’, introduced by a tent unzipping, footsteps walking away and the return of the waves of synthesiser, not so ominous this time, leading into a wistful, filmic instrumental, as Christinzio aims to unburden the listener at the end of this intense experience.

So ends another extraordinary BC Camplight album. Christinzio’s live show is considered to be among the very best there is. A powerful and breathtaking affair. This year’s touring begins with solo shows around the album launch and full band shows in November, in upgraded venues yet again, including London’s Roundhouse and Manchester’s Apollo. Has any other artist steadily increased their popularity this way, record by record (this is his seventh)?

“Clearing my head has made me re-evaluate the entire stretch of BC Camplight,” concludes Christinzio. “I mean, what is this thing I’ve been doing? I’m in England, so I rarely see my family – and I’ve never been part of the music scene. I’m just this weird guy in the corner. The way I’m getting more successful is quite unique, I think. I tell myself it’s because I only make music that is important to me. I think people can feel that.”

This is an all ages show. Under 14s must be accompanied by an adult.

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