“Paul McCartney having an argument with Bernard Black”: Inside the world of Novelty Island
Tom McConnell trained at Abbey Road, plays Glastonbury, and builds papier-mâché stage props. His band shouldn’t work. It absolutely does.
Tom McConnell describes his musical project in six words that tell you almost everything you need to know: “Paul McCartney having an argument with Bernard Black.” It’s a joke, but it’s also the most accurate elevator pitch in British indie music. On one hand, there’s the melodic gift: rich, layered pop songs built on harmonies that would make the Hollies weep, dressed in mellotron, cello, harmonium, and horns. On the other, there’s the delivery system: papier-mâché stage props, a name that sounds like a theme park that never got planning permission, and a sensibility that treats grandeur and absurdity as the same thing.
Novelty Island shouldn’t work. It absolutely does.
From open mics to Abbey Road (and back again)
McConnell arrived in Liverpool at sixteen from northern England with an acoustic guitar and a habit of playing open mics. By 2018, he’d enrolled at the Abbey Road Institute in London, the recording school housed in the most famous studio complex in the world. It was there that Novelty Island took shape, not as a band but as a vehicle for McConnell’s songs, which were already too odd for the singer-songwriter circuit and too tuneful for the noise scene.
What’s striking about the music that followed is how little it sounds like someone trying to impress Abbey Road. McConnell clearly absorbed the technical knowledge (the arrangements on his records are deceptively sophisticated, with instruments layered and balanced with real craft), but the aesthetic choices run in the opposite direction. The production is warm and slightly scuffed, closer to a well-loved cassette than a mastered digital file. It’s the sound of someone who learned the rules and then decided which ones to break.
The records
Novelty Island’s debut album, How Are You Coping With This Century?, arrived on Think Like A Key Music in October 2021 and announced McConnell as a songwriter with a rare combination of melodic confidence and lyrical sideways thinking. One reviewer called it “a joy because of what it lacks: ego, anger, regret,” noting its “achingly beautiful harmonies” and sublime use of mellotron. The songs feel simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary, as if someone had discovered a lost Brian Wilson session tape in a charity shop in Wallsend and decided to finish it with whatever instruments were lying around.
The second album, Wallsend Weekend Television (March 2023), pushed further into the surreal. The title alone conjures a world of regional broadcasting, test cards, and half-remembered Saturday mornings, and the music delivers on that promise: dream pop filtered through the static of a cathode-ray tube, with McConnell’s voice floating through arrangements that are lush without ever being fussy. Shindig gave it five stars. BBC 6 Music picked it up. Mojo noticed. And yet, in the wider world, Novelty Island remains one of those artists that people discover and immediately wonder why nobody told them sooner.
Captured at the iconic Glastonbury
The live thing
McConnell has taken Novelty Island to Glastonbury, toured as support to Sea Power, The Pale White, and China Crisis, and built a reputation for live shows that lean into the project’s theatrical instincts. The papier-mâché props are part of it, handmade set pieces that transform a stage into something between a school play and a psychedelic happening. It’s deliberately low-budget and all the more charming for it: the DIY aesthetic isn’t a limitation, it’s the point.
There’s a lineage here that runs through the more eccentric corners of British pop: Julian Cope’s shamanic performances, Robyn Hitchcock’s surrealist stage patter, Half Man Half Biscuit’s deadpan absurdism. McConnell isn’t imitating any of them, but he’s operating in the same tradition: the British songwriter who understands that being funny and being serious aren’t mutually exclusive, and that the best pop music has always had room for both.
The argument continues
McConnell is still in Liverpool, still making records, still building the world of Novelty Island one handmade prop at a time. The McCartney half of the equation keeps writing melodies that burrow into your head and refuse to leave. The Bernard Black half keeps sabotaging any attempt at respectability. The tension between the two is what makes the whole thing work, and two albums in, there’s no sign of a truce.
Both How Are You Coping With This Century? and Wallsend Weekend Television are available on Think Like A Key Music.
