A Family Affair: Bring Me The Horizon Conquers Global Touring (Cover Story)

The story you’re about to read is one of friendship and family. Of relentless hard work and incredible talent; pain and payoff; sacrifice and success. A heavy metal fairytale – genre-defying, yet punk at its core. The epic adventure of four lads from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, who traveled the world, fought demons, survived attacks and conquered hearts and minds. With the help of an alliance of partners, this narrative is driven by a singular transcendent vision: to make great art.

Like many good narratives, it begins with struggle, a child trying to find his place in the world. It ends many years later, with him leading his band onto a stage in front of 45,000 people 6,000 miles away from home. But it’s not really the end. It’s just a snapshot in time, 20 years into one of rock music’s most fascinating careers. And the way things are going, Bring Me The Horizon is just getting started.

“I always knew he had this incredible imagination and that he came here to be creative,” says Carol Sykes, mother of Oli Sykes, 38, singer, songwriter, frontman, creative mastermind, founding member and lead protagonist. She remembers her son being “stood outside the teacher’s office more days than not, and I used to think to myself, ‘What must it feel like to go into a classroom, and be trying the very hardest you can, and being told you’re not trying hard enough?’”

It was clear to her that neither the public education system nor the traditional 9-to-5 career that often follows would provide her son with the outlet for his wild imagination and creativity. So, when he announced that he was going to drop out of college to start a clothing brand called Drop Dead, it may have been “a bit scary, as art has never been considered a safe career path, but, at the same time, it was perfect, because it was what he loved to do,” Carol Sykes recalls.

A child of Myspace, Oli quickly figured out the Internet game. He had a natural knack for presenting ideas and getting people invested in them and sold his first T-shirt in 2004. At that point, Bring Me The Horizon had already formed around its core lineup of Sykes, Matt Nicholls, Lee Malia and Matt Kean, but then were just messing around. The shirts were selling like hotcakes though, Carol Sykes recalls, “Drop Dead did £60,000 (about $76K) in its first year, £380,000 ($481K) in the second year, £1.3 million ($1.6M) in its third year. Online shopping was just getting going, people ordered from all over the world and nobody really knew who it was at this time.” So, as soon as the band started to get a bit of recognition, they began selling Horizon merch in a similar fashion. It became the band’s main income when touring hardly paid a dime. “All the early tours, the visas, the transportation, everything, would all come out of the merch money,” she says.

Myspace was also where the band itself fell in love with metalcore, discovering genre pioneers like Glassjaw and Norma Jean. “It was the U.S. acts that got us into the music,” drummer Matt Nicholls says, adding that it came naturally to the band, to share its early work on the platform. Looking back, Oli Sykes can’t believe the quality of the songs was enough to make them get noticed. “You could hear some of those songs were recorded in a bathroom,” he says. But people loved it. In 2006, Bring Me The Horizon were one of two UK acts to chart on the Myspace Top 100, the other being Coldplay. From the very beginning, Horizon songs had an energy and message that spoke deeply to fans.

That energy can be especially felt at live shows. Carol Sykes recalls one of the early performances of the band, “Oli hadn’t learned how to sing yet, Raw Power had just started managing them and we’d gone to watch a show. I think it was at the Roundhouse, if I remember correctly. Craig [Jennings, Founder, CEO, Raw Power Management] had brought another guy along with him, who was part of the music industry, and Oli’s band were performing. And this guy said to me, ‘I don’t know what it is, but he’s got it.’ Oli was squirming around on stage, and I was like, ‘Yeah, he has got it.’ I couldn’t understand what it was myself, but I could always see that when I went to watch him. Even at the smallest of gigs, Oli had an energy about him that people seem to resonate with.”

Up until Raw Power became part of the Horizon family in 2008, Carol Sykes had organically adopted the role of de-facto manager of the band. “They started getting these little gigs, and me and his dad would use our camper van to drive them and all the equipment to shows,” she remembers. As interest grew, and bookings began to pick up, she sat the band down to start thinking of it as a business, opened a bank account, and started paying out wages.

Bring Me The Horizon signed their first record deal in 2005, with UK label Visible Noise, founded by Julie Weir, who remembers the initial meeting with the band at The Fenton in Leeds, England, “very well. I can still smell the toilets to this day.” Given the nature of the Horizon operation in those years, Weir’s role exceeded that of label head. “We did whatever the band needed to progress,” she recalls, “by the nature of Visible Noise, meaning there were literally two of us, we always went beyond label duties if needed. I was also booking shows for them early on, as we couldn’t get them an agent initially. I remember getting them out to Russia at one point. How the world has changed.”

THE HORIZON GETS CLOSER

Visible Noise rereleased Horizon’s first EP, This is What the Edge Of Your Seat Is Made For (2005), and worked with them until 2010’s There Is a Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There Is a Heaven Let’s Keep It a Secret. It was after the release of Suicide Season in 2008 when Weir “felt like things were beginning to change. The metalcore part was starting to develop into something different on Suicide Season as we introduced them to a young electronica producer called Jamie Kossoff, and then moved further into the remix world with Cut Up where we brought in Skrillex, Shawn Crahan and others to reinterpret the tracks.”

2008 isn’t just a significant year because of the release of a seminal Horizon album, it’s also the year when the team formed that has been on Bring Me The Horizon’s side every step along the way. Raw Power Management’s Craig Jennings and Matt Ash have managed the band together since 2008. UTA’s Josh Kline and Paul Ryan have been Horizon’s agents ever since. Raw Power’s Jumana Brinkley Abbas joined the family in 2019.

“The team formed together relatively early, which is an important part to this story,” says Kline, “we’ve shared a common set of goals and philosophy with the band, in how to tour, how to make decisions. This collaboration has played a big and integral part of this original story that’s only gotten bigger every year for 20 years.” The meeting that brought it all together took place at the historic Howard Hotel in Sheffield in the summer of 2008. “I thought they were great lads and we got on well,” Jennings recalls, “On the evening, I had Gallows playing in Manchester. Matt Kean from the band met me outside the venue with a CD of five songs that were to become the core of Suicide Season. I was blown away by it. Matt, Paul and Josh joined the team and we were off to the races.”

Matt Ash uses the same words when describing hearing that demo for the first time and explains what made the thought of working with Bring Me The Horizon so exciting: “They were making a big splash everywhere they went. In a world of bands that more or less sounded and looked a certain way, the band didn’t toe the line. Instantly, a lot of the metal community accused them of being posers that did it for the wrong reasons. But this band has more punk rock attitude than most punk bands I’ve been around, and they absolutely didn’t give a shit about any of that. They very much went against the grain.”

“They were a real force to be reckoned with,” UTA’s Paul Ryan says. “The vibe around the shows was off the hook, it was wild. There was something about them that set them apart. There was this real fanatical interest in them, which is very intoxicating when you see it. It was very obvious to anyone, who was around it at the time, that something was happening with that band. You could just see it.”

The interest in the band wasn’t limited to the UK. The earliest box office report submitted to Pollstar for Bring Me The Horizon dates back to June 11, 2006, when the band featured
on the bill of Download Festival in Derbyshire, England, an event closely linked to their rise in their home market. But from 2007 onwards, their box-office history became a truly global one.

The reason Bring Me The Horizon were able to string together an entire U.S. tour early in their career goes back to their popularity on Myspace. Fans were listening from all over the world, but especially the U.S. “We had more fans in America than in the U.K.,” says Sykes, who recalls the band’s first U.S. tour in support of Kittie in 2007 when venues would half-empty once Bring Me The Horizon performed their set. UTA’s Josh Kline remembers receiving “so many calls from promoters the day the bands all arrived at the venue, saying, ‘This band should really be playing later.’ But the band always honored the agreement, remaining humble until the day they were actually booked on the headline slots.”

ROCKING VANS WARPED TOUR WITH KATY PERRY

Rock packages like Taste of Chaos or Vans Warped Tour played an important part in conquering the States. Bring Me The Horizon first joined the Warped Tour in 2008. Promoter Kevin Lyman had never seen them perform live but had such a good relationship with Raw Power, so he “trusted them that the band was ready for this tour, and I do remember the first day they arrived,” he recalls. “I did not know about Oli’s other business ventures, and was quite impressed with his luggage. Most of us showed up on tour with a duffel bag or standard suitcase, but he had a full matching set of high-end luggage. It was 2008 and they were playing on one of the second stages. Also on that stage was a young artist named Katy Perry. I used to love to put them on right before each other to watch the reaction of the audience. It was pretty fun since some ran when they came on, but I watched many fans of them and her get into the music of both bands. Extremely powerful show.”

From the moment the band realized it had fans all over the world, they were thinking about how to perform for them. “They had this huge reach,” says Raw Power’s Matt Ash, “which led us to have conversations about touring Indonesia, Australia and South America early on. It was something I found very exciting: the opportunity to really go and take on the world. It was something the guys embraced and were fully committed to. They toured relentlessly for the first five, six years we were managing them, just heads down and tour.”

The band’s Pollstar Boxoffice reports confirm this: Between 2007 and 2013, one is hardpressed to find a month without a Bring Me The Horizon date anywhere in the world, be it the UK, U.S., South America, Australia, Japan or Europe. “It became apparent early on what the band was capable of,” Kline says. “The philosophy of the entire team, from band to management to the label, was to plan as far ahead in time as we could, and within reason, to make sure that the band kept circling the globe.”

BEFORE & AFTER SEMPITERNAL

According to Oli Sykes, Bring Me The Horizon’s story so far can be divided into two decades, separated by the release of Sempiternal in 2013, the album Metal Hammer once described as “the most influential metal album of its generation.” The first decade was four kids finding their sound and voice. Literally, as Sykes only began singing in earnest on Sempiternal, the first album he wrote after going through rehab.

“He’d been in a bad place before he went into rehab,” says Carol Sykes. “When he came out, he said, ‘I don’t want to scream anymore. I want to sing.’ Emotionally, he was getting somewhere with his demons, and I knew that if he can pull off singing the lyrics that he writes, which are so powerful to so many people, then this band is gonna go somewhere.” To this day, she says, Oli is “religious about having vocal coaching constantly.”

The second decade is when the band was finally in a position to execute its vision at a level it couldn’t before. Sempiternal, for which Raw Power’s Ash and Jennings had signed the band to RCA, reached the third spot on the UK album chart; its successors, That’s The Spirit (2015), and Amo (2019) went to number two and one, respectively.

Bring Me The Horizon aren’t ones to play it safe. They switch up their sound on every new album. The urge to innovate is conscious, says Oli Sykes, everything else “just happens. We don’t sit and plan out what the next Bring Me the Horizon album will sound like. If you asked me, how we came up with Sempiternal, I really couldn’t tell you.”

THE ‘BLEEDING EDGE’ OF PRODUCTION

Just like the music, their tours evolve from cycle to cycle – not just by adding markets and bigger rooms, but by “always being on the bleeding edge when it comes to new, original, exciting, and unseen aspects to live music production, and presentation, from stage design to video, and the flow of the show,” as UTA’s Kline puts it.

The band’s front-of-house engineer, Jared Daly, confirms, “The band has always been at the forefront of trying out new speakers and tech. As soon as the band realizes that something’s possible, they just lean into it. When they, for example, toured the first version of d&b’s GSL system it was still in beta, and the system engineer at the time, Jack Murphy, was sending back notes on the software, working with the company to bring the product to market. They’re always pushing for the next thing to get the studio sound out there live. After the [Summer Sonic] show in Tokyo, I had a note from Oli, who watched back the broadcast mix and wanted to tweak a snare reverb at the start of a song. That’s how minute he works. He said, ‘This snare drum needs to sound longer, and it needs to be brighter for the start of this, it needs to explode.’ I wrote that down, and it’ll be in the next revision of the show.”

Every Bring Me The Horizon show has a cinematic storyline brought to life on screens, accompanied by sound and lighting elements. One example is a computer glitch simulated on screen, with sound and lights glitching out accordingly. In this example, explains Daily, “Oli sits with me, and we place automation cue points that mute the sound and ramp it back up again. The band rehearses quite intensely at the start of every run. They will play through the set a couple of times, I’ll record every pass, the band will leave me for half an hour to an hour to make my settings, and then they’ll sit with me, and dissect it just like you would in the studio.”

It’s important to the band, adds tour director Rob Highcroft, that, “once their performance starts, nothing else in the world matters. You’re there right now, and they’re going to tickle every sense you’ve got.” The band tweaks the show according to the environment it performs in, he continues. “There are multiple variations of the current show so that the audience always get to experience it at its best in the environment that they’re in, whether inside an arena tour, at a festival, or a stadium.”

A Bring Me the Horizon show, says Highcroft, “is a monstrous team effort. The band’s music is so diverse, it crosses multiple genres. Rather than having someone that’s OK in all genres, it’s a case of getting the best people from each individual genre, and let them design different songs. The show itself flows. You’ve got people involved that design EDM shows, heavy strobes, lots of lasers. We’ve got people that do a lot of pop shows, nice scenic lights. And then we’ve got a couple of guys involved that just do heavy rock and metal shows.”

GOLDEN BINGO BLAZERS

Raw Power’s Jumana Brinkley Abbas says, “The band are genuinely one of the most creative and hard working acts I’ve ever had the joy to work with, while still being so down to earth and humble.” She remembers one of Horizon’s self-curated festivals – of which they do quite a few: the Malta Weekender 2022, “a huge undertaking as we considered every aspect of the experience: from the line-up to the production value to the drinks and food offered, ensuring non-alcoholic and healthy/vegan options were provided; to the sideshow entertainment, where members of the band even dressed up as bingo presenters (dressed in golden blazers) calling out numbers and handing out prizes for fans. I genuinely have never known an act to be so hands-on in so many elements of a project. Oli literally doesn’t stop for a moment, constantly creating and pushing the band’s narrative in multiple outlets while also not taking themselves too seriously and knowing how special this is that they are still getting to do what they love after 20 years and that it’s still continuing to get bigger and better – it honestly inspires you as the team to continue working at your optimum to realize the potential and the vision.”

Brinkley Abbas joined the Horizon family in 2019. Not long after, the world locked down. As tough as it was for the band to go without touring for so long, it was also a “standout moment that helped continue to move the dial for the band,” as she recalls, “When a lot of acts naturally struggled to write music knowing touring may never come back, the band turned their writing process on its head, and decided to start documenting that whole process of themselves learning to navigate their ‘new normal’: living in isolation, learning to write and record remotely, all while experiencing the fear of not knowing what was happening in the world…and released it in real time on YouTube as part of a series. Fans were brought along for the writing and development of ‘Parasite Eve,’ capturing that wild energy and fear that everyone was experiencing being stuck at home.”

When the lockdowns lifted in the UK, the band returned as a bona fide arena act, with five sold-out arena shows in September 2021, including Utilita Arena in their hometown Sheffield (12,531 tickets sold, $657,582 grossed), and The O2 London(16,864 tickets, $973,535 grossed).

Other standout live shows in Bring Me The Horizon’s career include their 2014 performance at Wembley Arena (10,752 tickets; $378,327 gross), when everybody realized “this has gone beyond anything to do with the scene,” as Matt Ash puts it; the 2016 performance in support of the UK’s Teenage Cancer Trust charity at Royal Albert Hall, which, according to Sykes, stands out from a creative standpoint, as the band performed with a full orchestra; their 2023 headline performance at Download stands out, as it felt like their first proper headline slot at a major rock festival steeped in so much history. They headlined Reading & Leeds in 2022, however, says Sykes, “Arctic Monkeys were the real headliners then.”

A PERFECT CIRCLE

Speaking of Reading & Leeds, it’s impossible to forget their infamous 2008 performance. Slipknot had pulled out of the event and Bring Me The Horizon were asked to fill their main stage slot. When the crowd was informed that Avenged Sevenfold had to also cancel their Reading appearance on relatively short notice, Horizon became the scapegoat for pent-up fan frustration. Bottles, sawdust and even digital cameras were launched at the band for their entire set. It would have been enough to make other bands throw in the towel.

Guitarist Lee Malia recalls, “It wasn’t like it didn’t faze us. But we made a conscious decision to continue on our path.” Adds Sykes, “We’ve always taken criticism seriously, if it was reasonable. When people at one point said we’d become sloppy on stage, we said, ‘Fair enough,’ and drank less. But the hate we got at Reading wasn’t reasonable. And there were just as many people that loved us, which was an important reason to continue.”

Has there even been a band, says Raw Power’s Jennings, “that goes from there to headlining Reading festival 14 years later? I certainly can’t think of one. We’ve had so many amazing times together over the years, it really does feel like a family. Many emotional and heartwarming moments along the way. Trust, friendship, belief, respect. if you have those four things with an artist then you can’t go wrong. And we have it in abundance with the Horizon guys.”

Bring Me The Horizon played their biggest concert yet on Nov. 30, 2024, at Allianz Parque in São Paulo, Brazil, in front of some 45,000 people. Horizon’s first box office reports from Brazil are from three headline shows in 2016: two at the 1,200-cap Carioca Club in São Paulo, one at the 2,200-cap Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro. Matt Ash recalls playing Lollapalooza Brazil in 2019 when the band was up against a pop and alternative-heavy lineup: “I was concerned how that was going to go. But there was a huge crowd for us. We played Knotfest Brasil in 2022, on a lineup with Slipknot, Sepultura, and other heavy bands, and we were holding our own there as well. There’s not many bands that, in a three year period, can play Lollapalooza and Knotfest and feel at home at both of them.”

Reflecting on how far the band has come, Sykes is lost for words, “I don’t know how we ended up here, really. It still blows my mind that we would have this many fans in South America come to our shows. We’re just four kids from working-class backgrounds in Sheffield. We love being rock stars, that’s all great, but I don’t think any of us will ever think of us as a big band.”

A band of brothers, one might add, seeing that neither the bottling of a lifetime, drug-induced setbacks, nor the many stresses of constantly touring the world have managed
to break them apart. It’s only possible if you have something to keep you grounded, says Sykes, adding that being “best friends” with your bandmates helps. Having family around does, too. The Bring Me The Horizon headquarters in Sheffield, which contains rehearsal spaces, room for the band’s gear and merch and a vegan restaurant, is managed by Oli’s father. Carol Sykes only just now stepped back from her day-to-day running of the Drop Dead clothing brand, which is going strong as ever.

“It’s an amazing place,” she says, “because everyone, the band, the Drop Dead staff, the management, the agents, they come here and meet, we do videos here, everything. It’s like a real family affair at the end of the day. And because it’s 20 years in the making, it all just feels very normal to us now. I think it means a lot to the band to have somewhere to come that is like a community.”

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