As we catch up in 2026, Rich Fownes looks almost disarmingly at ease. For a man whose life has been built on high-volume, high-impact noise – Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, Bad For Lazarus, a surreal spell inside theNine Inch Nails universe – it’s strangely fitting that the most honest version of him so far emerges from a quiet domestic setting. “I am simply very content and happy right now,” he says, half-smiling. “And that feels like something I don’t even want to say, because it makes me feel so insecure… contrary to all the lyrics.”
Not Richard and Her Majesty
His new band, Not Richard and Her Majesty, and their upcoming record Success and Fulfilment, are the latest point on a long, jagged line: from childhood trauma to cult rock ’n’ roll mythology; from toxic tours and internalised pressure to therapy, gender exploration, and a radical form of vulnerability. This is not a comeback record in the traditional sense. It’s something stranger, and braver: the sound of someone taking all the wreckage – personal, professional and otherwise – and deciding to build with it, instead of trying to outrun it.
London Trauma to Brighton Chaos
To understand where Not Richard and Her Majesty comes from, you have to go back to the kid who arrived inBrighton at around 20 years old, dragging far more emotional weight than gear.“When I moved to Brighton, I was so little, man, I was like 20 years old,” Rich remembers. “I can’t even really remember what I was like then. It all just becomes this huge cluster fuck of one memory – 15 years of quite intense activity.”
That intensity coalesced quickly into a kind of dark fairytale: he joined his favourite band,Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, went straight out withSystem of a Down, and found himself inside one of the most beloved, bizarre corners of UK underground history. “That band was like my favourite band in the world at the time. So joining them was just insane. First tours were System of a Down, and it just sort of kept escalating… Every time I seemed to become friends with a band, I’d just join it. That just felt like, ‘Oh, sure, that’s what life is.’”
Eighties Matchbox weren’t just a good band; they werethe band your favourite band loved. “They were every band’s favourite band. They were kind of like the millennial Velvet Underground or something. The industry feeling in that band… people just open doors for you, and everything’s easy, and you just get fucked, and you’re sloppy and weird, and everyone finds it charming.”
On paper, it sounds like a perfect cult-rock dream. Up close, it was something else. “That was a very negative band, to say the least. And at the time, again, I found it charming, just like the world did… But, for example, you don’t get thrown off tour with Queens of the Stone Age for no reason. Those are pretty heavy guys. So when they’re like, ‘Sling your hook,’ and that’s a thing that that band never even discussed – that’s how toxic it was.”
Nobody wanted to talk about it. No one wanted to ask, “Whose fault was this? What patterns got us here?” They just waited for the next flashpoint. “If you said to someone, ‘Why are you responsible for that?’ – everyone’s responsible for so much stuff – everyone would just rather look the other way and wait to get thrown off the next tour.”
For a young man with “lots of trauma” already baked into his nervous system, this wasn’t just a wild gig. It became his emotional baseline. “Going through all of that and having those as emotional baselines… everything was so piled up that when I just stopped, it was such an overwhelming time that I didn’t really have perspective on how negative everything had been. I’m getting choked up even thinking about it.”
Bad For Lazarus: Intangible Goals, Real Misery
If Eighties Matchbox was like stepping into a toxic comic book, his post-Nine Inch Nails (yes, he was in that band for a couple of weeks) project, Bad For Lazarus was where Rich tried to write his own story – and ended up battering himself with the wrong script. “Once I put to bed the idea of playing for another band – like, ‘I’ve got to do my own thing’ – I was still trying to achieve such weird internal goals,” he says. “The last time I spoke to Trent [Reznor], I was like, ‘Well, I just hope to bump into you at a festival.’… I was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to do that in someone else’s fucking band. I have to make my band be the one where I’m getting all the festival hits.’”
Instead of liberating him, that mindset turned everything into a twisted scoreboard. “Every time you play a gig, and it wasn’t one that’s leading to a bigger gig that’s leading you to a festival, it’s a fucking failure. These are such strange, primitive goals and notions of success that you’re building that can’t really be achieved. It’s so intangible and so, like, foundationally toxic that I was having a miserable time the whole time.”
Bad For Lazarus itself morphed through something like three different bands. The early version, especially, was sheer chaos. “The first one was so fucking chaotic… I remember thinking, this is meant to sound like the Pixies. And I don’t know if you remember that band – it sounded like Blood Brothers or something. Just really raw trash, and it was fun, and it had something. Most people that talk to me with affection for the band actually really loved that first wave, because it had a completely unique energy, even though it was not what I was going for.”
There’s something painfully poetic there: audiences gravitating towards the raw, unfiltered mess, while Rich was convinced that “real success” lay somewhere else – on bigger stages, with cleaner execution, closer to an internal idea of how things “should” sound and look. “Since then, I’ve pretty much been trying to write the same music… but no one acts like this sounds the same. When I was working with Jamie [Hall], I felt like all of my scrappy shit was on the floor, and he just sort of shook the snow globe – so we can kind of just see it in a more romantic way and just sort of let individual pieces fall.”
Underneath all of it, there was one constant: he was punishing himself. “With Bad For Lazarus, I was smashing my head against the wall, going, ‘You’re not bleeding enough.’”
Therapy
By the time we last spoke years ago, Rich was stepping into therapy for the first time. The timing wasn’t neat or cinematic; it was just necessary. “Last time we spoke, probably five years ago, I was probably just doing therapy for the first time. It was all a bit of a mess. I was probably being very non-specific, and I probably struggle with that now sometimes.”
He’s crystal clear on what therapy is not. “I hesitate to say therapy itself [did the work], because I think that that’s a bit of an illusion where you’ve done all of the work yourself. Therapy just sort of bumps you on the ass when you’re sitting there really thinking about stuff… It’s yours to be honest about, and it’s yours to acknowledge, and you have to be there for it on the day that that one little moment hits you and you go, ‘Oh my God, it was all that the whole time.’”
The surprising, practical payoff of all that internal effort? Songwriting. “When I started doing this band, like I say, it was all about, like, ‘Oh, the funky, weird things that I’ve been trying to hold in, I don’t even want to tell the therapist four months in’ – those are the things that I need to make a fucking chorus about.”
That turned into a rule forNot Richard and Her Majesty: “Got the ugliest and funniest truths laid bare. Challenge yourself to write lyrics that you were afraid that certain people would hear, to make choruses on the little things you haven’t brought up in therapy.”
If the old Rich felt crushed by expectations, the new one is learning to chase a different kind of fear: not of failure, but ofhonesty. “I think I’ve already hit that and seen how, if anything, it hasn’t actually been challenged at all… If anything, I’m now just trying to keep that vulnerability up. Go like, that wasn’t vulnerable enough… I need to be scared of the world hearing it now.”
Gender and Image
Anyone who’s seen Rich live – from early Matchbox chaos to later Bad For Lazarus appearances – knows he’s never exactly been a wallflower on stage. But the visual world of Not Richard and Her Majesty is a different thing entirely, and it’s rooted in something he’d never spoken about publicly before: gender identity. “Part of the honesty of it all is addressing my gender identity, which I’ve never even really spoken about in a public way to my friends or anything,” he says. “Now I look back on parts of my life where I got so much positive feedback from being misgendered as a woman… I’d always be like, ‘Oh, wow, thank you.’”
As time went on, those moments became rarer – and that hurt in ways he didn’t have language for at the time. “As I started getting older, there’d be moments when I’d notice my femininity just being taken from me. That’s what the ‘My Twink Death’ song is about. And that’s when I’d go, ‘This was something that was actually so important to me.’ The idea of just being like a fucking geezer is terrifying.” So, where does that leave him now? “I guess I kind of consider myself a girl. And not in any sort of formal way, but also not in an informal way.”
The way he presents himself in Not Richard and Her Majesty – the clothes, the movement, the whole visual energy – isn’t a new persona. It’s an alignment. “To me, it feels like it was always there. And now I’m looking back on what was considered flamboyant in Bad For Lazarus or whatever, I’m going, ‘That just looks like a fucking pair of jeans and a shirt.’ I don’t know how I wasn’t doing this the whole time.”
There’s a nice poetry in the fact that one of his closest former collaborators,Poppi Knight (formerly Dom Knight, of Holy Popes and later Eighties Matchbox and Bad For Lazarus line-ups), has also walked their own path with gender and identity. Different journeys, shared courage.
60s Pot Sunshine over Ruin
So whatis Not Richard and Her Majesty? Rich’s own pull-quote-ready description nails it: “This is what happens after 10 bands, five heartbreaks and a few too many breakdowns. It’s me trying to make sense of ruin – personal, professional and otherwise – through a warped lens of 60s pot sunshine.”
There’s humour in there, and bite, but also genuine clarity. The ruin isn’t metaphorical; he’s lived it. The “sunshine” isn’t naive joy; it’s the woozy warmth of someone finally letting themselves feel without immediately weaponising the feeling against themselves. Musically, it carries echoes of the melodic instincts he always chased – the Pixies-esque dynamics he once wanted Bad For Lazarus to embody – but with space, colour and a looseness that just wasn’t available to him before. Working with Jamie [Hall – Tigercub] helped him stop hiding behind noise and roughness. “I wrote this down the other day – I felt like all of my scrappy shit was on the floor, and he just sort of shook the snow globe. So we can kind of just see it in a more romantic way and just sort of let individual pieces fall and start learning how to give them more space and have just the right sound.”
He describes his current mission with a comedian’s instinct for truth: “It’s like a good comedian. You’re trying to hone in on those truths. Jarvis Cocker said that a good pop song is just trying to find this one little idea that we all relate to, that no one’s ever said in a song before. Rather than today, where I think people are trying to say something that you have heard before, so that you go, ‘That’s authentic.’ I just feel like I want to say some shit that you’re not supposed to say – and make that really catchy.”
‘Success and Fulfilment’
Naming the record Success and Fulfilment in 2026, after five years away and in a streaming economy built on numbers, is exactly the kind of move you’d expect from someone who’s finally stopped pretending the game is fair. “I was hoping the irony was quite thick in that album title,” he laughs. “Doing an album in 2026 after five years off, I don’t know if that’s going to be in a results-based economy full of success and fulfilment. And I think that’s what I was setting myself up for – like, this is a failure. Let’s have some fun.” The crucial shift is that he’s no longer confusing charts and tours with self-worth. “If I start thinking about anything, and, you know, where are we stacking up next to the kids, this fucking thing is a disaster.”
He still half-clings to an old, dangerous romanticism – that the most “fucked up” eras produce the best work. “We’ve run the numbers,” he jokes. “We’ve pulled all the art, put it in good and bad corners, and it tends to be the weird shit that’s the good stuff,” he says. “I wouldn’t say I was at my happiest when I was writing this stuff,” he admits. “But right now? I’m simply very content and happy… We’re going to do this. We’re going to write some good sober music, all right?”
Stuff That Actually Matters
In the middle of all this – the bands, the myths, the gender revelations, the therapy – what Rich comes back to most isn’t a career highlight. It’slove in small, concrete ways. “I care about love a great deal,” he says. “I don’t care about any kind of pre-designated deities.”
We end up talking about his first pet, and his voice softens in a way it never quite does when he’s talking about tours or line-ups. “I’d never had a pet before, and the endorphins I get from making sure she’s okay… I don’t know what people with kids do, because that fucks me up. I’d always thought, when I was a kid, having to look after something else was an imposition. I didn’t realise that’s the feedback you get from caring. And I just wish the world knew that.” If there’s a quiet through-line to his whole journey, it might be this: learning to care about something outside himself without disappearing in the process.
The Road Ahead
There’s nothing half-hearted about what comes next. Not Richard and Her Majesty havehomegrown festival shows,Alternative Escape, and, in his words, “a shitload of dates we haven’t been able to announce yet.” Album one isn’t a destination; it’s a launchpad. “We’ve got the album coming out, and then we’re going to do Homegrown Festival, Alternative Escape,” he says. “Then we’re going to drop loads more dates, and then I think we’re just going to go straight into album two. Got a few tracks recorded.”
So what does he say to everyone orbiting this story? Whether that’s an old Eighties Matchbox fan or a queer kid finding something of themselves in this new era, the people who’ve quietly rooted for him – and the ones who still haven’t tuned in? “For the people that have not got behind me – fuck you. Get behind me. Don’t be so silly.”
It’s blunt, but there’s warmth under it. Because for the first time, it feels like Rich Fownes is inviting people into something that is completely, unapologetically his – musically, emotionally, visually. After 10 bands, five heartbreaks and a few too many breakdowns,Not Richard and Her Majesty isn’t just his next project, it’s the version of himself he’s been trying to reach the whole time.