Back in 2017, if you’d asked Joe Bonamassa about the likelihood of a fifth Black Country Communion album, he’d have been far from certain. At that time, the band had just released their fourth album, IV, and ostensibly all was going well. Critics loved it. Fans loved it. The band were proud of it. But they still had ‘day jobs’, outside commitments – other lives, in other words – that had always stood between them and the ‘supergroup’ they all loved so much. How much longer could a side project be viable?
“That was fifty-fifty,” Bonamassa says now, looking back on the aftermath of IV. “And after [third album] Afterglow, that was when I would probably have given it a twenty per cent chance of ever firing up again. But then with the fourth record, we just started chatting and said let’s do it, you know.”
IV had its share of obstacles. With Bonamassa having sent up the BCC ‘bat signal’ (it’s generally him who does this), diaries had to be finagled. They ended up with just five days to record. On the fourth day, singer/bassist Glenn Hughes had to fly to the UK to his mother’s bedside (she died a couple of days later). Still, they ended up with a strong album, with standouts tracks like Collide and Sway reminding the world what hooky, meaty anthems they were capable of.
“You hear the word ‘magic’ a lot in this industry,” Hughes enthuses, with notes of awe and gratitude that tend to
