PONTIAK // Interview

Hailing from the Blue Ridge Mountain area in Virginia, USA, Pontiak have been forging their own unique brand of rocking guitar-based belters for the best part of 10 years now. Consisting of three bearded brothers, Van, Jennings and Lain Carney, the band has been truly prolific. With each release they have displayed an on going evolution, always with one foot touching on the Zeppelin/Sabbath blueprint whilst the other roams around in search of something quite indescribable. Their latest album ‘Innocence’ would appear to be their best record yet. How I see it is that each track could be dished out live and the audience would love it. From the country-dipped ballads to the fuzz-drenched stompers, it’s feels like Pontiak’s most complete album. I hooked up with singer/guitarist Van Carney while they were touring the United Kingdom to get the full story of just what makes the brothers Pontiak roll. But first I wanted to get a bit of background on him, I knew he grew up on a farm, but I wasn’t quite prepared for his passionate stance against the rise of GMO farming in Northern America. Lost In Rock: How have you found touring the UK this time around? VC: Ah, man it’s been fantastic. There have been some really good shows, definitely exceeding our expectations, which is always a plus, and somehow along the way we have managed to do a little bit of sightseeing which is also a bonus. We played Plymouth last night and we have never played there before, so it was really cool to see the town and especially the Mayflower steps which are not real by the way, I guess the whole Port was completely demolished after the war or something, so now they have the kind of tourist thing going on, but, saying that, it was cool. It was fun to walk around there, and I had a really nice beer that was brewed in a barn that is close by. It was unlike any beer that I’d had before and I’ve tasted a lot of beer. LIR: If we can start at the very beginning, how were you first introduced to music? Can you remember? VC: Well, we grew up surrounded by it from a very early age. We have a pretty musical family, and my dad and all my uncles played guitar. So, I used to watch them play. I was four, maybe five watching them. They would be sitting around playing Chuck Berry songs, and I would be looking at them thinking that is what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to figure out how to do that, specifically with the guitar. It’s such a cool thing to do and now I can do it all day long. In the house growing up though we didn’t really listen to that much music, except for classical and country. Maybe a little finger picking music and some blues from my dad but in terms of coming across new music and having an exploration in it, well, that’s ongoing. LIR: My brother & I, our musical tastes pulled apart from an early age. We didn’t want to be like each other. I guess we were searching for our own individual identities. Did you ever get to that point where if one of you guys got into a band the other one would rebel against that? VC: Not really. I can remember that the first tape I ever bought. I think I was maybe eight; I bought a Fine Young Cannibals tape. That album is pretty fucking cool, and Jennings I think bought himself a U2 tape. I remember being into both of them. It was always a case of “Hey, what are you listening to?” rather than “I don’t want to listen to any of that shit”. You know it all comes back to the Fine Young Cannibals. LIR: With you and your brothers growing up on farms, I wondered if you still follow what’s going on within the farming community. Rural America appears to be full of tight knit groups of hard working farmers that seem to be continually shafted unless they toe the corporate line. Do you keep on top of these issues? VC: Yeah I do, and I should clarify that we did grow up on farms but we were not farmers. Farms surrounded us, but to this day we don’t actually farm. I have a big garden and keep chickens and things like that, but people that farm for a living currently surround me. So, yeah, I can for better or worse bring most conversations back to the finer points of industrialised agriculture, regardless of what I am actually talking about, whether it be Monsanto or some other evil corporation and what they are trying to do. In America it’s fascinating because it’s systematic and insipid, and for a very good reason in popular culture these things have come to light. People have begun to discuss things such as where does our food come from, how is it being produced and who is controlling it, what’s it going through and what is actually in it, It’s the very fundamentals of life which the majority of people just take for granted and don’t really think about any more when they go to a restaurant and eat a plate of food. It’s one of these things that has been pervasive and consistent since the 1950s, and now it’s finally catching up to people. People are starting to talk about it in a big way and starting to see that the USDA, the FDA, Monsanto and Cargill and these other huge agriculture companies are all in this web. There is a lot of trading people back and forth between the government and Monsanto, and now there is a lot of really cool stuff going on in the United States to combat that, even if it’s at a small grass roots community level. For someone like me, well, we have a seed saver co-op, which does everything locally, and everything organic. It’s all about sustainable agriculture and something real that supports its community. I know from being on tour in America that a lot of people are talking about it, and it has become quite a big thing. Personally having grown up around farms in and around Nebraska it’s even worse. Around the mid-west you can read story upon story of individual farmers being completely shut down by these companies, systematically. LIR: In England you have to already have an interest and do a little digging to find out about these things. What about in the USA? Is it more common knowledge over there? VC: I don’t think it is common knowledge yet, but it is becoming one of those things that when people do hear about it and when you do talk to people about it, regardless of political affiliation or anything like that, they will be like, “Hey, that is just not right to happen ever,” but it is happening. The strangest thing is that in America we have a very passionate and vibrant religious and evangelical Christian community. Well, amongst these right wing, conservative religious groups they are very much aware and against GMOs because they don’t want these corporations messing with what God has given them. It’s a really bizarre situation where the far left and the far right are joining together on these really important issues. So, they come at it at the same angle but for totally different reasons. It’s weird that these two usually opposing groups of people have come together as a unified voice throughout the country. We tour a lot in the country, and you can see it from both sides. The middle ground though, they’re kind of oblivious and that’s really interesting. Here in Britain it’s really awesome though. The price of the really good food is amazingly affordable. If you go to the States and want to buy something that is local and organic and not pumped full of antibiotics and chemicals, then it’s really, really expensive, whereas here it may be still quite expensive but in comparison its nothing. Britain seems to have a really good farming community, but in America things have been totally taken over by companies. You guys have it pretty cool. LIR: Your latest record ‘Innocence’ is so dynamic in its approach that it’s as if it was written to make sure that it would work live as a piece. Maybe you would mix the track listing up a bit, but yeah, each song would work in the live environment. Was that done on purpose? VC: That is exactly right. Although we are not playing every single one of them live for timing reasons, we literally wanted to be able to play every song on there live and have it as effective as it was when it was recorded. I do agree with the sentiment of what comes out comes out but there is some editing that can be done as well, so in my mind it depends on how much you want to work at it. For us we play a lot and I mean a lot. We play almost every day. If you do that a lot will come out and none of it is planned, but sometimes it just works. When you approach things this way, you can test things out. You just have to work at it. Man, it’s the same thing with gardening. You have to try something and you can’t predict what’s going to happen. If the sun is going to come out or you’re going to have nine months of rain, you never know. You just keep positive and you keep going. Plus you have to have a good time while you’re doing it. If you’re not, then what’s the point? LIR: Now the record has been out for the best part of a year are you still as happy with it as you were when you initially released it? VC: I honestly haven’t listened to it in a long time. We have been on the road so much, but the last time I did I was genuinely happy with it. It came out as well as I hoped it could do. I know for some people it’s jarring because it has some ballads on it and that heavy raspier stuff, but for me I enjoy that transition. I wouldn’t go as far to say that maybe something more harmonised would be more acceptable, but really that’s not our bag. We like dynamic shit that has got some colour in it. LIR: Even those heavy songs, they all sound different. The fuzzy guitar for instance on ‘Surrounded by Diamonds’ is incredible. What an amazing sound. VC: It was real easy to get that sound too, I use a few different amplifiers but I don’t use fuzz pedals, just a treble boost. I use my Fender Duel Showman reverb, which I may add is the only amplifier Chuck Berry will use, and you just turn it up. Just turn it up, man, all the way to ten if you use a treble booster, and that’s the sound you will get. To be honest, if you take any amp and just turn it up, it’ll get nasty, and that’s usually what I do but with that treble boost it just gives you that glisten. It cuts through, so it’s not totally muddy, it just brightens it up a little bit. I use an SG with some ’57 pick-ups in it that are really dark, putting that treble boost on there, things just get WHOOOOAH! LIR: You have stayed with your Label Thrill Jockey forever and a day it would seem, what keeps you so loyal? It has a great roster of bands, doesn’t it? VC: We have a wonderful working relationship with them. We love them. We are totally supportive of them as a label, and in return they are totally supportive of us as a band. It’s just the right artistic fit thus far. They are just awesome people that are in it for the right reasons, and thankfully the bullshit quota is zero. I couldn’t really ask for anything more. I’ve never worked with another label before, but I’ve talked to a gazillion people who have and I have to say I feel very fortunate and happy to be working with them with all the stories of other places that I’ve heard. LIR: You often get described as stoner rock but there is a whole lot more going on that Sabbath worship within your sound. Does that tag ever bother you? VC: I have to be honest with you though, man. Until about three months ago I had only ever listened to one Black Sabbath record and that was ‘Master of Reality’. Now this was not for any reason in particular, but people would get so offended and shit. “What the fuck is your problem?” I’ve just never got round to listening to them. I’ve never sat down and listened to stoner rock. People will call it what they will and I see why they could call us that, but personally for me it is not coming from there because I don’t listen to it. It’s just coming from the love of playing slow and heavy music, I have no idea where that comes from. Any drone music is what I am totally drawn to. You know people will always label stuff. People have said to me that we sound just like Kyuss, but I’ve never listened to Kyuss and also Queens of the Stone Age. Well, I have heard just a handful of their songs. I would say that I’m not a fan though because I’ve never listened to them. I just don’t know it; they are not really on my radar. I perceive us as being a rock band; I don’t see us as being a stoner rock band. Saying that, people will call you what they want to call you and for me that is totally fine. LIR: You yourself deal with how the outsider sees the finished product of your records; the artwork literally comes from your hands. Art can be a very personal thing. Do you at first run ideas past your brothers, do you take on board suggestions or is it totally your thing and what you want goes? VC: It’s kind of like the collaborative writing process. I will come up with something and they will say whether it’s good, bad or shit or say, “Don’t show me something like that ever again,” something like that. I do usually work for quite a long time on them. When we start recording I am already thinking about it and when it comes to the time where deadlines have to be met, I am like, “Here it is! What do you think?” and we might tweak it here and there, so it’s definitely collaborative. LOR: Finally, Pontiak have been so prolific over the years. Have you ever been close to burn out and thought, “Man, I just don’t know if I can do this anymore”? VC: No, in fact it is the opposite, man. If we are not working on something I get mental; I just can’t not do it and we all feel the same way. We do all our own videos, we do all the artwork, recording projects and, yeah, if we are not working on something we go crazy. I have to be doing something. We have already begun to write the new record. It’s in the works. I already can’t wait for people to hear it. LIR: Thank you. I Originally did this interview for inclusion in Penny Black Magazine.

BLACK MOTH // INTERVIEW

With the stoner rock and doom scene in England continuing to flourish as the decade draws on, it takes a certain quality of band to rise above the heap of fuzz-pedalled Sabbath obsessives. Black Moth are such a band. Since the release of their 2012 debut ‘The Killing Jar’ the group have played shows continuously and have notched appearances at both the Download and Reading festivals onto their collective belts.

Now that there is a high profile support slot with Uncle Acid & the deadbeats booked, plus the prospect of a sophomore album being ready to go, we contacted Black Moth vocalist Harriet Bevan. It would appear that it is perfect timing for me to get the lowdown on the Leeds riff-mongers before they break huge.

LIR: How old were you when you discovered rock music. Did you instantly feel it was for you? What were the bands that turned your head initially?

HB: I distinctly remember my dad getting his record player out one day, and off went the Erasure CD and out came all his vinyl collection from his student days. That was when I heard my first riffs, and I think it was Led Zeppelin. I continued to be obsessed with 60’s pop for most of my youth (Diana Ross and the Supremes was my first love) until puberty loomed and a friend’s cool older sister played me some Nirvana. A mosher was born.

LIR: Black Moth rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the fine Leeds underground garage band the Bacchae. What inspired you to take a heavier approach to your music?

HB: We were already doing some pretty raucous stuff that I would consider heavy in another sense. Our biggest influence was always the Stooges!

But when Dom joined us on drums, the songs we were writing started to get increasingly heavier in line with his drumming style, and we quickly realised that these were the ones we enjoyed playing live the most and a more cohesive sound started to form.

LIR: Who approached who to release the record? I personally think that New Heavy Sounds did a great job with the release?

HB: They did a brilliant job. We’re so lucky to have them as our label as Paul Cox and Ged Murphy are indisputably the good guys of the industry- they’re endlessly supportive and creative and we enjoy a close relationship with them.

I can’t even remember how we met now…I think we played one of Paul’s Artrocker club nights and kept in touch. New Heavy Sounds are a consistent presence as promoters of heavy stuff in London and across the UK.

LIR: ‘The Killing Jar’ is ridiculously solid for a debut LP, yet now you have had time to reflect is there anything you wish you could change?

HB: Why, thank you! Nope, never look back!

LIR: Were you happy with the critical response it got?

HB: Delighted! I didn’t actually see one really negative review, so unless they were expertly hidden from me by the label it was all posi-vibez. It was a dream to finally put out our first album after years of playing together, soe were really stoked when it landed as well as it did.

LIR: The artwork is fantastic on ‘The Killing Jar’. What sort of input did you have?

HB: Ged Murphy takes a big interest in visuals ,and I think it was him who suggested Vania Zouravliov. I instantly fell in love with his work and thought it suited us perfectly. It has a similar feel to John Baisley’s work but with added sinister overtones. The piece we chose seemed like it was made for ‘The Killing Jar’.

LIR: There are elements of doom, horror, classic rock and even grunge on the LP. Belonging to no particular scene hasn’t seemed to have done the band any harm at all.

HB: I couldn’t think of anything I’d want less for the band than to get holed up in a narrow scene. I feel passionately that allying yourself with a genre closes so many doors, and the world of music is far too thrilling and special to limit yourself to one path. It should be a gigantic off-road adventure.

LIR: What did producer Jim Sclavunos bring to the table? I note that the vocals are quite high in the mix, which helps in separating it from lots of the stoner, psych and doom bands around at the moment.

HB: Jim is a fantastic creative force, a formidable whip-cracker and I also regard him as a mentor of sorts. He won’t settle for anything less than our best, and has a very good idea for the bigger picture when we are all bogged down by the finer details.

We’ve just recorded our second album with him and he feels like part of the gang now. I don’t know if the vocal levels are entirely down to him or whether that’s just our style. I guess a lot of bands of the styles you mention use the voice as another melodic layer rather than necessarily leading the melody and most of ours err towards the latter.

LIR: You have achieved a certain level of success but do any of you still have day jobs? You play very frequently now. Has it been difficult to adjust from a ‘normal’ life?

HB: Abso-bloody-lutely! It’s extremely difficult to make a living from playing music these days until you really are one of the mega-stars. It’s extremely difficult, in that case, to balance with any pretence of a ‘normal’ existence.

All of us have day jobs. I was working for a very interesting publication ( http://www.thinking-in-practice.com ) until we were offered this all-too-tempting tour support with Uncle Acid and the deadbeats. Sadly this meant I had to leave. So if anyone wants to hire me in a few weeks time that’d be just great!

LIR: You have had time to reflect on playing Reading and Download now. How do you feel they went? Positives and negatives please.

HB: Positives all round…really. There’s nothing quite like the purejoy of the festival vibe. Sure the sound is rarely as good as indoor venues, but that’s more than made up for with party spirit- the crowds were unreal for both and the power of that interaction is the best feeling…one of the things you chase.

LIR: The upcoming tour with Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats sounds like another of those dream come true moments? How did you feel when you received the call?

HB: It was a no-brainer. Everything else in life just had to sort of stop and make way! They are an excellent band for sure, and we’ve been pining for another European tour since last year’s trip to Italy with Red Fang.

LIR: And the new album. Has it the same feel? Any clues as to what we should expect?

HB: It is officially in the bag! It’s a weirdo for sure, and we had to really “face our demons” and all those cliches to get it done but we’re all super stoked with the results. The “difficult second album” indeed..All the cliches! The label seem pretty excited about it, which I think is a good sign!

You can listen to ‘Tumbleweave’ online now for a taster of what’s to come!

RIGHT HERE

LIR: Thank you.

Huge thanks to PENNYBLACKMAGAZINE for sorting this out.

UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS // Interview

Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats have been thrust in the spotlight ever since their third album, 2013’s ‘Mind Control’. The album fully succeeded in borrowing the very best from Black Sabbath and the doom and stoner rock scenes that have followed them without sounding like anything else out there at all. How is it possible for a band to do this? Well, maybe if they were not so elusive we would have a much better idea, but as it stands these reluctant rock heroes have etched in their wake a trail of intrigue and misdirection over the course of their first two records. In fact it’s only in the past year that photographs appeared of them at all. Until then who knew what lay behind the tales of horror and 70’s flavoured psychedelic-riffing the outfit produced.

I picked up the band’s trail and caught founding frontman Kevin Starrs on the phone after a lengthy tour supporting the aforementioned Black Sabbath, and what better place to start than at the beginning of it all.

LIR: Do you remember the first time you discovered heavy rock or metal when you were growing up?

KS: It probably would have been listening to bands like Aerosmith from a box set of their 70’s stuff called ‘Pandora’s Box’. I loved that stuff, but then I moved onto Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and a whole load of classic rock stuff, and then obviously I discovered Black Sabbath and, of course, that moment opened up all kinds of doors for me. My taste just got heavier after that. That’s all.

This would have been at school. Everyone was listening to things like Blink 182, and then there was me. I was into Sabbath (Laughs).

LIR: It’s pretty much known now that you struggled to find a band, let alone a scene to be part of in your native Cambridge and yet there was motivation enough for you to write record and release your debut album ‘Vol. 1’ yourself. What was that trigger that made you want to push yourself to do it?

KS: Just because I didn’t have a job pretty much. I had nothing else to do and no real prospects to actually find a job, so I was pretty bummed out about it. I just thought, “Fuck it! I’ve got all these songs, and maybe I should try and record them and see what happens,” and it all kicked off from there.

LIR: I take it you were signing on at that point?

KS: Yeah.

LIR: How did it feel to sign off?

KS: Ha, it was fucking amazing, mate, although I was trying to balance having a proper job during ‘Blood Lust’ (Uncle Acid’s ’sophomore effort), so I was working during the week and trying to gig at the weekends, and then eventually it all took off and became too much to balance everything.

LIR: I’m paraphrasing here but I read that regarding ‘Vol. 1’, well, you want to put it to bed. Is that the case?

KS: Well, no, not really. There are some good songs on ‘Vol. 1’, but everyone always asks me when is it going to come out, when are you going to re-release it, but the truth is that we don’t have the time to do it. We are always going through new stuff and we have a big tour coming up, so it would mean having to find time to do it. It would need remixing, mastering and there is all kinds of problems with it, but it will come out eventually on vinyl at some point.

LIR: Does it bother you that fans can simply illegally download it off the internet in its old state?

KS: With ‘Vol. 1’, it doesn’t bother me because there is no way of getting it otherwise. We only did about thirty copies of it or something, so if people want to hear it, yeah, they can download it. I want it to be perfect before I re-release it. I wouldn’t be happy if it got released the way it is now. There is work that needs doing to it, but of course I understand that people are trying to find it in any way they can.

PB: After the release of your second album ‘Blood Lust’ it appeared to the outsider that day by day your popularity began to grow. Did you have an inkling that when you were recording ‘Mind Control’ that this was going to be a breakthrough record?

KS: I thought it would go one of two ways, I thought it would either be a really good record for us or that it could just destroy us because it wasn’t really what a lot of people wanted. It was different to what ‘Blood Lust’ was. It has different themes, it’s completely different and not a lot of people wanted it. They wanted another ‘Blood Lust’. They wanted it exactly the same and I didn’t want to give them that, so I thought if people didn’t love it they would just think that it was terrible. Luckily though, people really responded well to it.

LIR: Did you get wind of any negativity due to the difference of the record to ‘Blood Lust’?

KS: I did. There have been a few people that had just not given it a chance and they just dismissed it based on a couple of singles that they have heard or whatever, but for me I feel it’s the better album but I guess it’s just what you want to get from our band. There is that thing that happens when a band gets bigger, and that’s not what you want them to be, that thing of, oh no, everyone loves them now, everyone is talking about them so I am not going to like them now. You do get a lot of that.

LIR: I myself am guilty of taking that attitude every now and again.

KS: Yeah, so am I actually.

LIR: Was the themes on ‘Mind Control’ based on any true events? It may be a lazy leap, but the Manson family springs to my mind.

KS: It just came out of my own imagination. I mean a lot of it is based on the events surrounding the Charles Manson case. The lyrics on ‘Poison Apple’, for example, are referencing a lot of things that he said. On the song ‘Devil’s Work’ where the line goes, “I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s work,” that’s a line taken from “Tex” Watson who was directly involved in the killings of Sharon Tate, so, yeah, ‘Mind Control’ references that a little bit but a lot of it is just complete fantasy really.

I put in a lot of effort coming up with the concept and every song had to be strong, a potential hit almost, and of course it had to all tie in as well.

LIR: I recently saw a documentary about the Sharon Tate murders, and to watch the Charles Manson girls walking into court every day singing Manson’s lyrics in harmony was just freaky.

KS: It is. Yeah, it’s bizarre to know that it actually happened.

The artwork, as well, it had to be all brought together as one package.

LIR: That front cover is just something else. Who designed it? Whose idea was it?

KS: That was me. I designed everything and I have to take control of everything unfortunately.

LIR: Well, once you know what the record contains it brings the whole package together. Without that knowledge, maybe not, and it’s just a mountain in a pretty box.

KS: That put a lot of people off, I think. They wanted some blood thing on the front maybe or something really psychedelic or weird, but we went in a completely different direction and even though it does relate to the album it was not what people expected at all for an album called ‘Mind Control’.

LIR: Personally speaking, even though I’ve played it to death now, I wouldn’t want to change anything with the new record from the production through to the lyrics and the structures of the songs themselves. Now ‘Mind Control’ has been out for a good while, have you had the opportunity to reflect on it? Do you think you would change anything?

KS: No, I am happy with it. I think we did a good job. Maybe, and it’s a big maybe, but with the mix I sometimes think that I wish I would have turned that down a little bit or turned this bit up and balanced it a bit better, but to be honest it doesn’t really matter. It came out pretty good, I think.

LIR: Does the record label keep you informed of how many copies ‘Mind Control’ is selling?

KS: Yeah, they have sent me statements recently, but I can’t really remember what it’s done (Laughs); it seems to have sold pretty well. It is nice to sell a lot of records I guess, but it’s the product itself that really matters to me.

LIR: What about your label, Rise Above? Who approached who?

KS: Well, Lee (Dorrain, label boss and Cathedral head honcho – PW) just emailed me one day as he liked the band and said, “Do you want us to put anything out on vinyl?” I said, “Yeah, of course. That’s great.” That was the one thing that we couldn’t afford to do. We could never afford to press our own vinyl, so it was perfect for us.

Obviously though, we didn’t have any idea as to what sort of market there was out there for it. The first press was I think only around 150 copies that they did and that sold out pretty much instantly. So, we kept doing it again and again and again just trying to keep up with demand.

LIR: What a great day that must have been checking your emails with that in your inbox.

KS: Oh, yeah.

LIR: It’s difficult to pin down the Uncle Acid sound. It’s not doomy enough for a doom band. It’s not psychedelic enough for a psych rock band, and you’re not straight enough for the classic rock fans. Yet here you are with this rapidly growing fan base.

KS: Whatever comes out, whatever sounds good we just stick with it. I think that’s the way to do it. You can’t really try to jump on any bandwagon. A lot of bands are doing this whole occult thing; it seems everyone is trying to get onto this occult rock bandwagon and in fact was trying to push us onto that, which has nothing to do with us. Our songs have nothing to do with that. They are stories and have films references and stuff. They have nothing to do with the occult. We get pushed in there, but we feel we are different to that.

LIR: You have just come off a tour where you were supporting Black Sabbath. BLACK SABBATH! What the hell?

KS: I first heard about it in Germany I think it was. I got a phone call from our booking agent who said, “Do you want the Black Sabbath tour?” I was like,
“You have got to be kidding me! “There is no way that should happen, but it did.

It was absolutely amazing when we got on it. Obviously they are our favourite band, so to tour with them and to get so much respect from them as well was just incredible. They are really nice guys too.

LIR: How did their crowd take to Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats?

KS: Europe was a lot more responsive than the UK I think. I don’t want to generalise, but the European audience tends to be more open to new music whereas in the UK it appeared that they wanted someone like Motorhead supporting or Megadeth or a different old band that they knew, those kinds of bands that get the supports in arenas all the time. Newer bands never really get a chance. Having said that there were some great UK crowds. Birmingham was great. There were two Birmingham dates and we weren’t sure how we were going to go over, but they maybe were our best shows.

The reason you want to do it is that it is a chance to try and make new fans and turn them onto the music. That’s the objective really, and because it was Black Sabbath of course.

LIR: And when the tour finished, that must have been a hell of a come down, right?

KS: Yeah, it’s strange. For a month you sort of sit back and think we did this and saw this and did that and reminisce, but then of course you have to move on and accept that it is finished and just hope that we did a good job and know that we had a great time.

LIR: It’s well known that you didn’t want to have photo-shoots done with the band, but now there are a few doing the rounds. It’s inevitable that when your band gets to a certain size that this has to happen. Did you feel like a bit of a berk finally relenting and getting them done?

KS: I did. Yeah. It’s not something that I see being really relevant to the music, but I understand the needs that magazines and online sites and blogs have for the pictures. It is a compromise.

LIR: Rise Above must have been well chuffed with you doing it. It’s pretty hard to promote a faceless band.

KS: Yeah, of course (Laughs). They were quite insistent, telling me that if I want to sell records then you have to make sacrifices. Thankfully there wasn’t any compromising with the music. so I thought the least I could do was a couple of pictures.

LIR: Finally what does the future hold for the band? There must be some exciting times ahead for you.

KS: I have some ideas for the next record. I’m not sure how much I am allowed to say, but we might have a single coming out at some point soon.

LIR: Completely new material?

KS: Yeah, and this will be tying up the whole ‘Mind Control’ era. It is part of the concept and it sort of brings closure to that chapter, and, after that, well, hopefully at the end of this year we will begin to record a new record.

LIR: Thank you.

I originally did this interview for inclusion in PENNYBLACKMUSIC.

MISSION OF BURMA // Interview

(June 2013)

By all accounts Boston’s Mission of Burma should have had their day. Indeed Roger Miller, Peter Prescott and Clint Conley are all in their late fifties or early sixties.

In the early 1980s their first couple of records laid the groundwork for the majority of post punk that followed in their wake. After the release of the ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’ EP (1981) and ‘Vs’ album (1982), Miller’s on-going problem with tinnitus prematurely halted the band in 1983 who were by all accounts on the brink of a breakthrough of sorts, be it in an underground and independent way.

Some two decades later the band reformed, not for financial gain but simply because they could. There was unfinished musical business to attend to, and after the release of their comeback album ‘ONoffON’, released on Matador records in 2004, the band once again found themselves with a fan base that wanted to not only be challenged but wanted to be challenged in the loudest way possible.

I spoke to Roger Miller about Mission Of Burma’s latest record, last year’s ‘Unsound’. It has been greeted with universal acclaim by the press and the fans that have heard it. Now the record has been out a while we wondered what it felt like now that the band has finally been accepted?

RM: Well, we didn’t know what would happen. It was one of those records where we said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! We said we would do it the way we want, and make it a little bit more crazy and out of control than the last one. We were just happy that people liked it so much. We have no idea how people are going to respond, so we are just happy and grateful if you want to know the truth, and with Fire Records behind us we are now touring over in Europe. We were never successful before, so now we can go over and play and get paid and people like it.

LIR: Since the dissolution of the band in the 1980s, it wasn’t an easy journey for you guys to get everything back together, but now that you have you have found yourself in a great position with the band. There is massive interest out there.

RM: Yeah, people know us. We are now established as being some kind of important thing. I am not saying that we agree or necessarily disagree with that, but that is how we are perceived so people pay attention to us, not all the time or anything but enough that we can play.

On the last Mission Of Burma tour we did in December most people knew who we were. We did play in places like Zurich. Now most people in Zurich had not heard of us, so we thought this is going to be the show that bombs. Everything had gone really well and now finally we were going have a bomb, but no… They really, really liked it, and I was selling merch afterwards and this girl came up to me and said, “Where have you guys been all my life?” And she had never heard of us before; how the fuck did that happen? We are just so happy that things like that are happening.

LIR: ‘Unsound’ to my ears is abrasive and caustic sounding, and full of exciting twists and turns. It’s eclectic and yet somehow feels like a single piece of work, a cohesive whole. Do you feel it’s your most complete record?

RM: I think we have made three really good records: ‘Vs’, ‘The Obliterati’ and ‘Unsound’. They are the ones that I really like, but I think ‘Unsound’ to me rivals ‘Vs’ in the amount of variety. I remember when ‘Vs’ came out that some reviewers said that, “It sounds like they are shopping for a style. The first one is like this and the next song is like that”. The thing is we were not looking for an identity. We are just diverse, and I think a lot of that is apparent also on ‘Unsound’.

We have three writers and that helps, but even from the same writer and this is just from my side of the mountain you have got ‘Fell Into The Water’ [‘FellàH20’] which is just a murky but streamlined groove, and then you’ve got ‘ADD In Unison’ which has got psychedelic left turns constantly happening. I think throughout the record there is so much diversity and I personally like diversity. Some people may like something that just has a groove and they can sit through it and it stays the same, but that’s not how my brain works.

LIR: The songs on the new record do not at any time seem forced.

RM: I feel that we were more excited about doing this one than our last album, ‘The Sound The Speed The Light’. We were just out of control. We were having a blast and maybe sometimes we made it to the end of the song by the skin of our teeth, but you can feel that excitement and enthusiasm in it. Everything on there is very honest. Someone may say that we are doing too much of this or too much of that and that’s fine. If we are for you, well, we are not doing it on purpose to provoke you. We are doing it because it’s what we like to do.

LIR: What about the final song, ‘Opener’? The “Forget what you know” mantra at the end of the song could mean just about anything, but I like to think you mean that the audience can forget what they know about Mission Of Burma, and the next release could jettison you into some unknown territory. Sound about right or am I way off base?

RM: Well(Laughs)… There is a couple of reasons that it is last on the record.

Primarily because it’s called ‘Opener’. That’s just our bad attitude, but by saying “Forget what you know” that came about from when we did ‘The Sound The Speed The Light’ and we all agreed that we were not at the top of our game.

So when we started to make this one I brought in a song and Pete [Prescott, drums -Ed] brought in a song, and they were kind of similar to what we had done before. Then Pete said, “If we are going to do a new record, we have to do something different,” so I threw away my song and he threw away his song. The next one I brought in was ‘FellàH20’ and then ‘This is Hi-Fi’ which is pretty different, and then the whole band did that to some degree,It wasn’t hyper radical, but we tried to get out of our comfort zone and to me that’s where the phrase “Forget what you know” comes from.

We had already done that, so we tried to be innocent again and throw ourselves off a cliff. You never know where you’re going to land. If you are going to try and make sure that you land on a soft pillow, then why the fuck are you making rock music?

LIR: And what about writing new material? How do you follow up a record like ‘Unsound’?

RM: Well, I have written two songs so far, and they continue to push the boundaries according to the guys in the band and the people that have seen us play them which is good. Pete has started to bring in one too. Usually we don’t think about making the next record. We just start to bring in songs. and when there is six or seven then we go, “Oh-oh, I think it’s time to make another record.”

At this first phase where we are at right now I tend to write the most as anybody who looks through our writing credits sees, not that those songs are the most important or anything but I’m just always writing. At the moment there are no plans to write another record. I believe that we have another really good record in us yet though.

LIR: Does Bob Weston ever bring fully formed ideas to the table for the band to work on, or does it always work in the reverse where he is presented the song ideas and adds his parts from there?

RM: So far he hasn’t, you know. He plays in Shellac and he’s got plenty of a life of his own, so, no, he hasn’t brought stuff in. But when we have a song he will add some parts and they will always be things that we wouldn’t necessarily expect, so he alters the material but he doesn’t bring in the core songs, but in the future maybe he will. I don’t know.

LIR: He’s been in the band now longer than your original song manipulator Martin Swope ever was. Do you still see him as the new guy?

RM: No (Laughs). Besides he was in the Volcano Suns with Peter years ago and he produced Clint Colney’s band Consonant and he played trumpet on my avant-garde chamber ensembles in the early 90s, so we have all known him for years and so, yeah, he is not the new guy.

LIR: Have you kept in touch with Martin at all?

RM: He’s not very communicative. He lives in Hawaii with his family, and he kind of dropped out of the music scene, I think the last time I emailed with him was five or six years ago. I’d be happy to talk to him again, but you know he has his own life and I totally respect that. So I have no idea if he has heard the new record. But if he asked for it I would send it to him. Maybe he’ll see this interview and say, “Wow, Roger said he’ll send me a record”.

LIR: There is a lot of footage online from both eras of the band playing live, and it would appear that with the most recent shows you guys are more fired up onstage than you ever were. What drives you?

RM: Who knows? It flies in the face of logic completely. Why when we are in our late fifties and me at 61 does this band push itself so hard? We just played in New York. and my brother Ben who played saxophone in Destroy All Monsters with Ron Asheton, well, he sat in with us, and a friend of ours that watched us, she described it as “Burma has gone completely feral.” It’s as if we are a bunch of wild and dangerous animals on stage (Laughs). Why is that? I don’t know, but it feels really, really good. It’s one of the most satisfying things that I can do with my life is to play a Mission Of Burma show. It’s so cathartic.

LIR: Well, I think you wouldn’t do it otherwise.

RM: Yeah, right.

LIR: It’s that cathartic release that gets most people into punk rock and hardcore in the first place. Was it the same for you?

RM: Well, I can only speak for myself as the other members will all have something different to say on the subject, but I had a band in 1969 and 1970 which is in fact now reforming called Sproton Layer. We were a very psychedelic band and described as Syd Barrett fronting Cream. It’s with my two brothers, and we are playing gigs this summer and we haven’t played a show for 43 years but…

In 1969 I started my first band. I wrote all the songs with some help from my brothers too, but it was there that I really found my voice and a couple of the songs sound a little like Mission Of Burma actually. Then during 1970 and 1971 rock music had gotten so conservative that by 1973 I had given up on rock. I had no interest in it anymore.

I went to music school, and then when I came back to Michigan after that as if from out of nowhere the first Devo single showed up and Pere Ubu too. Patti Smith’s first record came out and I was like, “What the hell is this?” Then when the Ramones showed up all of a sudden you could do stuff again. It felt like the world allowed for creativity in rock music, and even though by then I was a very skilled musician having been a composition major at music school I loved the Ramones. The Ramones were gods. That’s my opinion, but in some certain respects that should not have happened. They could barely play their instruments, but I found that so much more refreshing than just about anything else.

Because of that I was allowed to become interested in rock music again, and complete what I hadn’t completed at the end of the psychedelic era which is form a band that can actually do something, and that became Mission Of Burma and post-punk and bands like Wire and Television. That was just incredible. ‘No New York’ for instance was just amazing.

LIR: If you can remember as far back as 1981, there was that track ‘Outlaw’ on your ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’ EP that I loved so much. Can you tell us a bit about it?

RM: I have a really good memory for this stuff.

Even though ‘Outlaw’ sounds like Gang of Four, for us Gang of Four did not exist at that point in time. It was very much influenced by that ‘No New York’ stuff like the Contortions, but it was also me going back and rediscovering my interest in Sproton Layer with the disjointed and incorrect chord progressions, but it was that twisted funk from that ‘No New York’ stuff that was the inspiration for the groove. That guitar solo to me, however, sounds like Sproton Layer. There is that psychedelic compression and harmonic intervals, and those lyrics are very, very dreamlike.

LIR: Yeah, if you take those lyrics out of the context of the song and read them on paper they are pretty trippy.

RM: Yeah, super trippy. As we progressed my lyrics got less trippy. I think I wrote that one before we even got Peter in the band. Me and Clinton had just stared to write stuff and we didn’t really have a band yet, but we thought it was good and thought, “Let’s do this”.

LIR: With ‘Vs’, the track ‘Secrets’ really nails down what the band’s core sound is for me? How did that come together?

RM: That was the third or fourth song I wrote for the band, I was very interested in Steve Reich at the time, and he was into gamelan so there was no need for harmonic change. With gamelan music, it is not the harmony. It’s other patterns and things that make the music more interesting. So that is basically a one chord rock song, but it was an ambiguous chord. So that was the idea behind it, I was thinking how can I make something so simple as one chord into complex music and interesting to the ears, and that’s why there is a drum solo instead of a guitar solo. Then I put in all these little variations, so there is kind of a chorus and kind of a bridge, but basically it’s all one chord.

Putting the vocals at the end also appealed to me, and those vocals were totally derived from when Clint used to work as a bartender at a pub called Jacks in the Cambridge, Boston area, and I would sit there drinking for free which was a pretty good deal (Laughs) and watching these people standing around and looking at each other but not knowing what to say to each other, so they were just fidgeting. That’s what that whole song was about – The whole thing of not really communicating, but there is some tension there.

LIR: What about ‘New Nails’? It’s so weird but it really stands out for me., It’s my favourite Mission Of Burma song.

RM: The riff itself (sings the riff) was from a description from my brother Darren. He came up with the phrase ‘hand chords’, where you just put your hands on the guitar and try and figure out what’s there. Instead of saying, “Now I am going to play an A chord,” you just place your hand down. So I picked up a guitar and my hand was in that exact position, and I just played it to see what it sounded like, and it sounded really cool, and that’s the main riff.

It’s basically just a tirade against organised religion, and in this case Christianity and how perverse it has become. I am very much against organised religion, even though there is a lot of things about Christianity that I believe are good. I would say there are a lot of things that are good about all religions, but once they become organised you lose the spirit completely, and when you lose the spirit of the spirit then you’re totally fucked.

At the end there is like this jaunty little ditty where you have Jesus walking round the desert saying, “Please don’t make an idol of me,” and we have Martin doing those loops and it sounds almost demonic. To me that is one of Martin’s greatest tape loop manipulations. Also I played cornet on that one, and Clint always refers to it as Roman trumpets because it’s all set in this Christian environment. It’s like a call to the gladiators or some shit.

LIR: When Clint brought in ‘That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate’, what ran through your mind? Did you know straight away that that song would be on the record?

RM: There was no record to plan for. We didn’t have a record deal at all at that point. We were just making music. The first thing you do is make music and by the time Mission of Burma recorded ‘Vs’ we had 2 or 3 albums worth of material, so it was just a case of whatever songs came out good made it.

I will say that the first ever song Clint wrote in his life was ‘Peking Spring’. He’d never written a song and then he brought it in fully formed, and I’m not a guy without an ego or anything, and I thought, “They’re my songs and it’s my band,” and I had this long tradition of song writing, and then suddenly Clint shows up out of nowhere like Zeus pulling Athena from his eye. This fucking song, honestly, it was devastating for me.

It became a huge radio hit and I thought I was going to be the big hit writer, but very quickly I got over that, and I realised that Clint doing that sort of thing and me doing this sort of thing, and then when Pete starting writing later, that is what makes the band so interesting. Without Clint’s epic rock songs and my avant-garde doodlings and Pete’s rantings, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. It’s how they interact, and we perform with each other that makes this band.

I will say though that when Clint brought in ‘That’s When I Reach for My Revolver’ Pete and I stopped and said, “That’s a hit”. This was before we had even gone through the song once. We knew that that was our biggest hit right there.

LIR: On a commercial level do you think that any of your other songs deserved equal or higher status than that one?

RM: No not really, it depends on what way you look at it, but ‘Academy Fight Song’ and ‘Reach for My Revolver’ are the two biggest. There is a reason that they’re big. They each have a real hooky chorus and they are easy to sing along to. Clint has a stronger pop sensibility than Pete or I. ‘…Certain Fate’ is good too, but it’s just not quite as gigantic.

LIR: Where you surprised at how well Mission Of Burma was represented in the book ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’?

RM: It’s quite possible that it was one of those moments where I broke down into tears if you want to know the truth. Of all the bands that are in that, book we are the least known. I mean, we are nobody. The Minutemen put out a lot of records and they toured a lot. We didn’t hardly do anything. We put out one record and an EP, and then we disappeared. I mean Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers and the Replacements, these groups were all big. We sold less records than any other band in that book, and we considered all these people to be our peers. We never, however, expected anyone else to think of them as our peers, so literally when I read that I cried. There was a release that somebody had finally put us where I always thought we belonged, but dared not think that I should be there.

If you have seen the documentary that’s out there, then you already know this, but what was really weird was that when that book came out we reformed about half a year later and we didn’t intend to. Somebody asked us to play some shows. We were so stunned to be in a place that we thought we actually should be and never expected to be that to us it was unbelievable that after all these years somebody else actually thought that too. People started paying more attention, and somebody said you should play this show, this benefit and I said, “No, we are not going to.” Instead we did something else, and now here we are still playing. It’s really weird how things work out.

LIR: Along with the book, the advent of the internet and downloading, both legal and illegal would have brought your music to an entire new audience. How does that make you feel?

RM: Personally, I would rather there was no illegal downloading. When we released ‘The Obliterati’ compared to ‘ONoffON’ two years earlier, it sold half as many records, but it was the equivalent of selling just as many because sales are down everywhere. It makes it more difficult for the artist to survive, but I’m not going to wail against it because it’s what people do. It’s the new norm. It’s unfortunate for Mission Of Burma because if we made more royalties we would be able to record a new record sooner. Soon enough it will settle out. and I think there will be a new paradigm in its place.

LIR: Getting the band back together and being such a noisy act, you must have had concerns about your on-going problems with tinnitus.

RM: In all honesty. we thought we were only going to play two shows, one show in New York and one show in Boston, and that was going to be it. Then it turned into three shows in Boston and two shows in New York, all sold out. Shellac wanted us to go to England to play ATP and we had never played in England, so we thought, “We’ll just do that,” which of course turned into “And then we’ll do that and that.” We don’t play so much though that it is a massive concern for me. Back in the day Burma rehearsed two or three times a week and played twelve shows a month. It’s a very different world that I am living in now with Burma. We rehearse much less and play fewer shows.

Still, it is a concern and we have a Plexiglas thing round the drum kit, and I don’t use any monitors, and my amp is at the side of me instead of blasting in my ears. I don’t use those headphones anymore, but I have these really, really strong walls of rubber that I put into my ears. They go in really well, and they don’t come out when I am running around and yelling and screaming and shit.

LIR: If ever there was an iconic silhouette in punk rock, then it would be you playing live holding your guitar with those huge ear mufflers on.

RM: That’s a good one (Laughs). The reason I don’t wear them anymore is because they finally figured out a material that feels a bit like silly putty, and when you put it in your ear it doesn’t work its way out. Plus also it sure would be nice to see a picture of me playing a guitar without those things on, and now I can afford to do it.

LIR: What about the artwork on your albums? The recent ones have seemed a little thrown together whereas ‘Vs’ for instance is a beautiful piece of artwork that wouldn’t look out of place on a wall.

RM: A time when we were really involved with it would have been with ‘Vs’ and ‘Signals, Calls and Marches’. We had an artist called Holly Anderson who helped write lyrics to some of Clint’s songs. Well, we were working with her, and we spent a lot of time on those covers. Those are pretty iconic.

The ones since then…

LIR: Until ‘Unsound’, they have been a little bland.

RM: I thought so, yes. ‘The Obliterati’ cover for instance is just a picture I took on an aeroplane of clouds; it’s completely bland and kind of smooth, completely contrary to what the music is. We just couldn’t decide, and we rehearse so rarely we just think, “Yeah, that’s good enough.” But in the case of ‘Unsound’ John Foster, a graphic designer who works at Fire Records, he said, “Well, I’ll do it.” So it was the first time that it was out of our hands, and I believe that is partly as to why it came out better. He was sending us stuff and it went back and forth a lot, so we steered him. I think, however, that is one of the best record covers that we have had since we reformed.

LIR: Finally, back in 2008 Peter said in an interview that due to the ferocity in the way that Mission of Burma plays live that he gave the band a two year life span from that date. What happened?

RM: Well I jump around all over the place. We did a Volcano Suns song in our set last week, and after we listened to the original Pete goes, “Wow man, that’s really fast”. He can’t really play as fast as he used to. It used to be just sheer madness. But I actually think that’s good for Mission Of Burma because some of those early recordings of us playing sets in, say, 1981 have us playing the songs so fast when some of those songs are so complex that it was no wonder that people didn’t know what the fuck we were doing, and now we are forced to play them a little slower it’s just that little bit easier to hear what those songs are about.

But some of the shows this year have been the best we have ever had. It was 2008 that he said that, and now it is 2013 and we are still rocking. Perhaps our age is working to our advantage.

LIR: Thank you.

This iderview was conducted by myself and original appeared in pennyblackmusic magazine. click the link and sit back and read.

SOLAR HALOS // Interview

(March 2014)

North Carolina’s Solar Halos have released a debut album so blissfully fuzzed out this year that a day has yet to go past when I don’t listen to at least one track from it. I came across it thanks to Terrorizer Magazine’s championing of the band early on in 2014 and refuse to put it down and move onto something new. Call me addicted.

I sent of a quick round of questions off to the band in order to find out a little more about the ideas and construction behind this incredible self-titled album. Singer and guitarist Nora Rogers got back with these rather interesting results. As ever… Doom on!

LIR: How old were you when you discovered rock music. Did you instantly feel it was for you, what were the bands that turned your head initially?

Nora Rogers: I remember two moments in particular. When I was 10 and bought a Chuck Berry record and became obsessed with his guitar playing, I somehow found a way to write about him in all my school History reports. A few years later at 13 when all my friends were listening to boy bands and Motley Crue I was sneaking through my friend’s older brother’s record collection and found Fugazi’s first album.  That record really opened up to me the possibility of how music could be structured and how as band every player was really distinct and crucial to the song writing.

LIR: I take it Solar Halos is a relatively new project for you? How long have you been together and when did you realise with this set up that you had what it took to become a fully fledged band.

NR: John and I started playing together in the summer of 2011 and Eddie joined us a few months later.  I think we knew right away that we could work as a band, we have all known each other and admired the other’s bands for many years.  Because we were comfortable we played really easily together and pretty quickly learned how to play up each other’s strengths.

LIR: Who approached who to release the record? I personally think that Devouter have done an excellent job with the vinyl side of things.

NR: We approached Phil Rhodes who owns Devouter about this release.  Our friends MAKE had just released Trephine on vinyl on Devouter and Scott Endres suggested that we talk to Phil about a Solar Halos record.  We sent our demos and Phil and he said he was interested, we really lucked out, he has been fantastic to work with.

LIR: The Self-Titled record is ridiculously solid for a debut LP, yet now you have had time to reflect is there anything you wish you could change?

NR: There are always little things that bug me after recording, but I think it’s best not to point out a problem where no one noticed it before.  I think the biggest thing that we will change next album is to give ourselves more of a solid block of time in the studio.  We broke up the basic tracks, extra guitar tracks, vocals and mixing a few days at a time spread over the course of a couple months.  While this did give us extra time for contemplation and we are happy with the results, it also really drew out the process.

LIR: I love the artwork; it’s hazy and murky, bright and dark at the same time. Who came up with it and why?

NR: Thank you!  The cover photo is one I took at Joshua Tree National Park, I loved how the affect of the cacti backlit with rays of sun looks like it could also be coral underwater.  The planetary piece on the back cover, the inner sleeve and the labels on the vinyl are all paintings that I did with dye on silk.  It was difficult to control how the colors would bleed into each other so it was exciting when they ended up really gorgeous.  I think the visual aesthetics go hand in hand with the music and lyrics.  Darkness with pockets of light and color, murkiness, distortion, drone with melody.  Contrasts of scale, a huge landscape with detail, an image of a huge planet drawn on silk where you can also see the tiny scale of the fabric weave.

LIR: My favorite track on the record is also the longest, the slow burning ‘Resonance’. How did you approach the writing of this song in particular?

NR: I remember writing it in three sections: Intro, Main Laid Back Heavy first half, More Intense second half. It all started with that main guitar riff that we all fall into about a minute in after the Intro.  We jammed on that riff and the following parts came pretty naturally as contrast over the course of several practice sessions.  There wasn’t a detailed concept of the song, we just kind of went with it, then realized we were in deep and had to puzzle our way out of the song.  We originally had a different Intro that just wasn’t setting the right tone so I started messing around with my looping pedal overdubbing my guitar to oblivion and John just came in with this awesome drumming.  That song is so long and has so many parts that I exhausted myself of vocal ideas, luckily Eddie heard ideas where I didn’t and we ending up with a nice vocal back and forth.

LIR: You have mentioned in past interviews that you have yet to tour, is this due to work situations or are there other circumstances that stop you spreading forth your rock goodness?

NR: It is really a combination of things that make touring more of a challenge right now, the van that we would have used for touring was totaled last year, we all have work with differing amounts of flexibility and John and his wife are days away from having their first baby.

LIR: Were you happy with the critical response it got?

NR: Yes, when you throw music out into the world you never know if people will relate to it.  It is rewarding as a musician to know that you have sparked something in a total stranger.

LIR: The split on Crimson Eye Records, can you tell us a bit about that?

NR: Ah, the Ever Increasing Diameter Record! This past summer we were asked to do a split 7” with a brand new label in Greensboro, NC called Crimson Eye.  The guy who owns the label, Nick was super excited to get this thing out and the other band on the split, Irata had already recorded their songs.  We were still finishing up the artwork for our Devouter LP and didn’t have any songs ready.  Our songs are usually pretty long, so we figured one 7 minute song could take up a side.  All the music we tried writing under time pressure was just weird and forced.  We finally got something good going but for weeks couldn’t figure out how to wrap it up. Nick met up with us and said he had changed the format to an 8”, so now that we had more time on one side we thought we would do a monster space jam.  Our song ending up being close to 11 minutes long and wouldn’t fit on an 8”.  So Nick changed the format to a 10”, we still had to trim the song a bit and we gave it two titles since it really is more like two different movements.  It actually turned out really great!  The pressing plant had some issues recently and now the split 10” will be coming out in May.

LIR: Just to finish can you list your top five stoner/doom/psychrock records that you love to death and give a short explanation as to why for them

NR:

Sleep-Dopesmoker    Beautiful. Continuously genre-defining heaviness with hilarious lyrics.

Flower Travellin’ Band-Satori   The Japanese excel at assimilating music and showing off new heights of weirdness and perfection.  Love the guitar tone on this album.

Earth-And the Bees made Honey In the Lion’s Skull   I consider this a relaxing doom album.  The music is slow, without vocals and hauntingly wide-open.

Black Sabbath-Master of Reality   I actually think Paranoid is a more interesting album but Ozzy’s vocal melodies are more developed on this one and I probably listen to it more because I love “Children of the Grave” and “Lord of this World” so much.

Dead Meadow- S/T    In all of their following albums I still don’t think they have been able to top “Sleepy Silver Door,” it’s such a monster riff.

Once again, a massive thanks goes out to Nora and the rest of Solar Halos for getiing back. Go on thier facebook and find out more about them here….

SEA BASTARD // Interview

(March 2014)

Sea Bastard are heavier than a sack of shit, a sack of shit that has been weighed down with concrete paving slab and Roland from Grange Hill. What’s more you won’t find a thicker sounding dose of sludge this side of the Atlantic.

On the eve of the physical release of the band’s latest album ‘Scabrous’, Lost In Rock sent off some questions to bassist Ian, otherwise known as Monty McDoom for the current state of play with his noisy friends.

LOST IN ROCK: I know you have spoken about this before in interviews but for the uninitiated can we have a brief description of how you guys got together?

Monty Montgomery:  Sea Bastard was born from the deaths of two Brighton doom bands, Oli’s old band Jovian and Funeral Hag, which Steve, George and I were in. Jovian kinda self-destructed for personal reasons. Shortly after that Jon, the guitarist and founder of Funeral Hag, decided he didn’t want to play live anymore. The other three of us wanted to carry on but didn’t feel right carrying on with Funeral Hag without Jon so we needed to recruit another guitarist and start something new. We thought of Oli almost immediately and thankfully not only was he up for it, things just meshed really well when we started jamming. I missed the first two practices due to being at festivals and when I got back they’d already written Aqua Vitae and Taedium was half-way done.

LIR: What is the scene like for doom bands in Brighton, is there enough doom fans there to entice large numbers to shows?

MM: This is where we often get a bit pedantic, depending on what you think doom means! To us doom is distinct from stoner, sludge and all the other stuff that is often called doom at the moment. So I wouldn’t say there’s really much of a doom scene here as it were, only one or two other bands I’d call doom, but the live scene in Brighton is healthy enough that most shows in that vein will get a good turnout. There’s a really strong punk and hardcore scene in Brighton too and a lot of modern hardcore bands seem to be quite sludgy so there’s a fair bit of audience crossover. And of course there are all our favourite metalheads who’ll come along to any show as long as the bands are good and heavy!

LIR: You have played with some fantastic bands. It almost looks like Sea Bastard are Brighton’s go to guys for support when a doomy band comes through?

MM: We’re starting to get a bit of competition for the bigger doom shows in Brighton now, but for a while we were getting offered almost everything. Depends on the promoter of course, they all have their favourite bands to work with.

LIR: What first attracted you to metal and can you describe your journey to where you are now, what other stuff do you listen to?

MM: That’s different for all of us, but for me my first ‘metal’ song was the Final Countdown by Europe. My cousin played it to me when I was 7 or 8 and I loved it, so started exploring heavier music from there, first major port of call being Alice Cooper. I tend to wander through a lot of metal sub-genres but lately I’ve mostly been listening to death metal, especially tech-death, which is almost the antithesis of doom! I’m in a technical death metal band called Hole in the Sky and a thrash band called Headface as well, so I listen to a lot of different metal subgenres.

I do listen to other kinds of music too, just not as often as I listen to metal. My favourite band is Front Line Assembly, a Canadian Industrial band, and I like a lot of other industrial stuff, though not so keen on the dancier EBM side of things. Not dark enough, it’s just dance music with goth poetry over the top. I listen to a fair bit of the darker breakcore/drum & bass stuff like Bong-Ra, Satan and Zardonic; a bit of hip-hop, mostly either nerdcore or from the UK, MC Frontalot, Kabuto the Python and Dr Syntax are favourites; also weird electronic stuff like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Red Snapper etc.

LIR: Who writes the lyrics in Sea Bastard and what inspires the songs. Each one reads like an overview of a gnarly movie that I want to watch?

MM: I write the lyrics and mostly come up with the stories, though you’ll notice that one of the songs on Scabrous is actually based on a Lovecraft story rather than completely out of my head. Some are inspired by books/movies/computer games and some are allegorical for real life situations but mostly they’re just stories.

LIR: Did you approach the recording of ‘Scabrous’ any differently than you did with your other material?

MM: We decided we wanted to come up with something heavier and more horrible sounding than the previous album, though that was mostly down to writing rather than recording. I think we achieved what we set out to do! We recorded Scabrous at the same place and with the same producer as Sea Bastard and most of the gear and recording setup was the same.

LIR: Tech question now, what gear do you use to achieve those brutal tones, songs like’ Nokken’ sound so cold and evil? It’s such a perfect sounding attack of sludge.

MM: A lot of how brutal the album sounds is down to our mate Paul Winstanley who recorded, mixed and mastered both our albums. The ripping guitar tones come from Oli’s Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier and Sound City 120 combined with Matamp and Marshall cabs, NoiseCGS Ram Rod and Big Muff pedals with added psychedlia from the Wah Probe and Boss Digital Delay. Steve just got a new Gallien Krueger Backline 700 head, that we’re hoping will stand up to him playing it better than my Orange Bass Terror did, which he plays through Oli’s vintage Fender 4×12 and uses a Boss Super Overdrive for the extra filthy sections. George’s drum sound is mainly down to him hitting them really fucking hard.

LIR: ‘Metamorphic Possession’ reaches the 20 minute mark. Can you see yourselves writing even longer songs in the future?

MM: We tend to top out around 20 minutes as it gets hard to keep track of what’s going on for that long. We did write one song longer than Metamorphic once, Dungeon Crawling, but we scrapped it as it wasn’t as good as the other stuff we were writing at the time (totally not because nobody could remember it and we always got lost). We definitely won’t rule out going longer though, after all Steve is in Sabazius who have an 11 hour song out on Earache, The Descent of Man.

LIR: How did the track on the Rock Sound cover mount CD come about and what sort of feedback have you had from it so far?

MM: We got an email from them saying they were doing a feature on Brighton bands and would like a track from us so we offered them their pick of the album, suggesting Nightmares as it’s not too long but quite representative of our sound. So far we’ve noticed a fair bit more interest online and a few more sales through Bandcamp, and we’re hoping it will boost sales of the CD, vinyl and cassette releases of Scabrous coming out later on this month.

LIR: The doom / Sludge / stoner scene in the UK is massive with almost a new band appearing every week that I haven’t heard of before? As a fan it excites me, normally the downside to this is that you have to sift through a sea of shit to find the gold nuggets though.

MM: Yeah, there’s a lot of new stuff out there at the moment that are well worth checking out. It’s great that we get to go around the country and play with loads of different bands, even if we don’t necessarily enjoy some of them as much as others. Some of my favourite bands we’ve played with are In The Hills, Diesel King, Bast, Gurt and Slabdragger who are all UK bands active at the moment so check them out! What is coming up for Sea Bastard? We have the physical releases of Scabrous coming up soon plus a mini-tour with Sourvein, a show with 11 Paranoias and we’ve already started work on some new tracks which we’ll hope to be trying out live over the next few months.

A big thanks goes out to Mr McDoom for getting back with the answers. For up to date info about the band check out their Facebook page here.

QUEENSRYCHE // interview

(July 2013)

In the vast world of classic rock Queensryche are legends.

Both their ‘Operation: Mindrime’ and ‘Empire’ albums are regarded as genre defining works and it should be no surprise to learn that with a career which has rarely let up since their formation in 1982 the band have sold over 20 million records. 

Before those two highly regarded albums, the band recorded an EP and 2 full length records that contained youthful vigour and grand ideas; they laid the groundwork for what was to come. Afterwards though the band struggled to keep up the momentum, eight albums followed ‘Empire’ with varying results. By 2007 the band seemed to have stalled and they released a covers album as bands tend to do when they begin to run out of ideas. A few years later 2011’s ‘Dedicated to Chaos’ found the band branching out sonically but by doing so they alienated a lot of their core fan base. 

Things had to change.

That change has now turned into an on-going soap opera of events that has burst into the public arena via YouTube clips and dozens of message boards around the globe. The information is out there for those that want to know the nitty gritty but the short version is that Geoff Tate’s behaviour on and off the stage gave the band caused enough to fire him. The result of this through court orders is that both parties are now allowed to continue to perform and release records under the moniker of Queensryche until a final decision is made about the rights to the name later this year.

So far Geoff Tate’s Queensryche have rush released a quite poorly received album entitled ‘Frequency Unknown’, the front cover of which displays a fist with rings on the fingers. Those rings are emblazoned with the letters ‘FU’. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand the subtext emanating from within the artwork’s design.

The remaining Queensryche members including founders Michael Wilton on guitars, Eddie Jackson on Bass and Scott Rockenfield on drums have replaced Geoff who seemed like such an essential cog within the band’s sound, with a new vocalist named Todd La Torre who had recently spent time fronting heavy rockers Crimson Glory to immense positive acclaim. Together with Parker Lundgren who plays 2^nd guitar and joined the group in 2009 they have released their latest record simply entitled ‘Queensryche’ via the fantastic Century Media label. Unlike Tate’s record the production is fully flavoured and the songs appear to be completely fleshed out compositions. The only telling difference that the band maybe wanted to release the record before the upcoming court date is that it runs for just 35 minutes rather than the hour mark that fans are a little more used to.

Maybe it’s down to this that the album adopts an all killer and no filler policy, the guitars sound bright and alive once more, the song writing is no longer bloated and in many places you would think that this self-titled effort could have been released the year following ‘Empire’. As for Todd’s vocals, they are outstanding, they keep the feel of Tate’s original blueprint whilst injecting a fresh energy and Todd’s own style creeps in here and there to intrigue fans with a slice of what may come next.

I feel Queensryche are back on track, the new record is hardly off my iPod and we are genuinely excited about the future of the band so needless to say I tracked La Torre down and got him on the phone direct from the United States to talk about the new record and what he feels he is bringing to the band.

Lost In Rock: Queensryche’s first piece of recorded music was an EP named ‘Queensryche’, and this new album is the first to feature you on vocals, it’s also called ‘Queensryche’, why recycle the title?

TLT: Well when we were first talking about what to call the album we had some tentative ideas and names and then finally when we had talked amongst the band we said what if we just called it ‘Queensryche’ and make a very simple but bold statement, no gimmicky artwork, no slogans, let’s just call it ‘Queensryche’ with a big ass Tri-Ryche right on the front. It’s who we are and it makes the statement of THIS IS IT!

So that’s we did and so far I think it’s been received in the way that we intended it to be. I’m not hearing any complaints from anyone. You know, these guys feel like it’s a rebirth for them and that self-titled EP was their beginning and they feel like it’s a new beginning for them so that’s why we called it Queensryche, it’s very simple and to the point.

LIR: I stopped listening to Queensryche when ‘Empire’ was released way back in 1990; personally I just couldn’t get on with Geoff’s over the top and theatrical vocals. I know that the majority of Queensryche fans would say those words are sacrilege but I much more enjoyed the metal flavour running through the bands earlier work also. With the new record I have just that, whichever side of the vocalist fence you sit on, musically this return to form is an utter relief for fans.

TLT: I actually stopped following the band after ‘Empire’ but I think ‘Promised Land’ is a really great record though.  I lost interest due to the musical direction that the band was going in; it was not something that was very appealing to me so I understand why a lot of people began to drop off the radar for them. Now with this album it’s completely different from what the band has put out in the last ten years if not more and the people that have a copy of the record tend to be saying “Wow, this could have come out straight after ‘Empire’”.

The style is more like the first five or six albums. This album seems to encompass the feel from the first EP through to ‘Promised Land’. Songs like ‘Spore’ are a little more progressive and vocally it could have gone on one of those earlier records. Then you have songs like ‘A World Without’ or ‘Open Road’ which are sort of ‘Promised Land’ or ‘Empire’-ish type songs. I’m really proud of this record but are we trying to compare it to ‘…Mindcrime’ or ‘Empire’? No. Those records and ‘Rage for Order’ were phenomenal, they are masterpiece records that deserve every bit of credit they have ever gotten and more and they were able to capture magic back then. What we are trying to do now is create our own new magic in 2013.

We are already writing songs for the next record, I was just recording tracks for a new guitar part for a new song that I have just last night and I’ll be doing that again tonight.

LIR: So you have already begun to plan the next album?

TLT: Yeah, there are already four or five songs that are in the works for the next record. Personally what I would like to see on the next record would be to have a few songs that are even heavier than anything that made it onto this record. I would personally like to have at least one song in the six to eight minute mark, something that is like a ‘Roads to Madness’ length, that’s an intense 10 minute song, it’s something that can really morph into another animal and does it seamlessly under the one song title.

Also I’d like to be able to experiment with some of my higher screams that are a little more edgy and grittier. I think with this album there was some quantity of playing safe; I didn’t get real scratchy on it, I tried to sing it cleaner. It’s a very delicate balance you have between introducing a singer when all these people want to compare me to the great days of Geoff and I get that so I can’t be too different but I can still sing my way but there were some songs where I really wanted to get it super dirty and do some Rob Halford type of high gritty screams but the song content wasn’t terribly heavy so I guess the songs didn’t dictate for me to do that yet. So if we get into something that is a little heavier perhaps I can introduce a cool growl that goes into a solo or get into some really evil sick shit like something off of Fight or Halford and just make it pure evil, that’s the kind of stuff that I like to do.

This record is a really good starting point for the band and for me, I’m really happy about it and overall I have no complaints.

LIR: Over the years I have found myself drifting away from listening to Queensryche, the songs were not holding my interest as much as each album was released. As a fan listening to this new self-titled album for the first time I have to tell you, it was pretty exciting. It sounds so fresh. I also noticed that you have song writing credits on there, how accepting were the band of you contributing to the Queensryche model.

TLT: Well ‘Don’t Look Back’ was the first song that I ever wrote with Michael and he loves it. Out of the nine songs that have lyrics on the album I wrote the lyrics for six of them. Parker wrote ‘Where Dreams Go to Die’ and Eddie wrote the lyrics to ‘Fallout’ and ‘In This Light’. A lot of the drumming that you hear on ‘Where Dreams Go to Die’ was mine that I wrote as well and the outro for ‘Open Road’ was taken from a guitar solo that I wrote for that song. I had an idea for this solo and I just though fuck it, I’m just gonna track it. So I recorded it and gave it to the guys. I said “Hey Michael, I hope you’re not going to be upset but I put a guitar solo in the song and if there is any melody or inspiration that you can take from it and then do your own thing with it then great and if not then you can throw the whole thing away”. I have a heavier style of bending so he ended up taking the notes and he kept the overall vibe and melody for part of the solo and used it and looped it for the outro of that song.

So yes they were all very gracious and everyone was integral to the song writing from letting me come up with drum ideas to guitars. Scott wrote guitar parts, if fact when ‘Fallout’, ‘Spore’, ‘Open Road’ and ‘A World Without’ were written, well, Scott wrote those, he did all of those parts, all of the guitars and all of the drums and once we said yeah, that’s cool Michael then laid down his guitars with Parker and then he made it his way, he was making it how Queensryche would play this on guitar, he would then make some changes to arrangements and that’s how it would evolve, it was honestly a true band collaboration.

The beauty of a band like Queensryche is that they have songs that can just kick you in the balls and then have a beautiful song like ‘I Will Remember’. To have that flexibility today makes the creative process a lot more fun because you’re not boxed in.

LIR: Being in the recording booth and laying down those vocals must have been an exciting time for you?

TLT: It was exciting but there were times when my voice just sounded like shit and I would have to just say well, not today guys, I’m burned out. I would have to go back to it the next day because I was really horse and there was no way that I could sing the chorus’ clean, we would have to go onto something else. So there were stressful moments for me but when it was all finally done there were moments where I was like “Holy shit, I’m in a vocal booth and I am singing songs that are going to be on a new Queensryche album and I am the new vocalist”. There were moments where it was very surreal and it’s very gratifying. It’s hard to put it into words just what that feels like but it’s definitely a wonderful experience and I’m beyond thankful. If I never got to do this again for the rest of my life, well, I could actually say that I made it, I’ve done it and I did something historical in a legendary band’s career. To be the new singer of this band is monumental.

LIR: Having record labels vying for your signatures in this day and age must have just been icing on the cake for you. It so rare that happens these days.

TLT: It really does; now, I don’t know what kind of offers they were getting during the last couple of years but from what I understand a lot of new doors have opened that were closed for several years. We have an awesome new management company who are one of the best artist management companies in the world and Century Media as our record label which is great and they are really pushing this album well. All of the people’s resources that are connected to our team are awesome so it definitely feels like things are reinvigorated and there is a new enthusiasm amongst the band members that just didn’t exist before.

LIR: You can hear that in the songs.

TLT: That’s what we wanted.

LIR: Now at the moment you guys are in the midst of a court case with the original singer Geoff Tate primarily to gain control of the name Queensryche. Now I imagine the worst case scenario for you is that Geoff wins and gets to keep the name, you must have discussed it as a band so if this was to happen what would your plans be?

TLT: Well, that’s a very fair question… I have two answers for that.

Number one would be that we haven’t entertained plan B that much. These guys really feel confident enough in their corporate contracts that they are the majority and they had every right to fire a member of the band and there will have to likely be some sort of financial compensation for that person’s percentage of the corporation or the band name or whatever it is.

The second part of my answer would be that if infact these guys are not awarded the name then I assume we will still 100% continue to keep playing and make records. We would probably have to go out under another band name and then it would really be up to the masses to determine how they are going to support us. Certainly there is a lot of value in the name Queensryche from a business perspective, however there is also a lot to be said for the guys that are playing and it has to be said that there is also a tremendous value in that as well.

Because there is two versions right now, that’s kind of a testament to the value of who you are going to see, two bands using the same band name. So our album has been released just now and we know what those sales figures were for the other sides’ album and we are hopeful and quite confident that our sales for the first week will certainly exceed that and that in itself is a testament to the fans and what they want to go and buy.

I am not telling them to not go and see Geoff; I think that if they loved Geoff in the band then they should go see him. I would never tell people not to support him and that band, it would be completely unethical and very wrong; these are not good qualities to have. I have my own personal views about what I think but I if they can find music from him that they love then I want them to support him, if they can find it in us then obviously I want our support. If someone likes it all then that’s great, that’s what it’s all really about, it’s about the music.

You know, Michael and Eddie have also worked their entire life and are the song writers of these songs and they have every right to carry on with this name as a majority and Scott has always said in interviews that Queensryche has always been about the collective group and not about any one person.

My personal view and this is not just with Geoff but it goes out to any other band and it will probably be condemned due to me saying it out loud, but for one person to call themselves the band’s name is not really fair… Look, these are the guys that not only wrote the songs but these are the guys that performed the songs, nobody is going to play these songs better than the guy that wrote it, nobody is going to sing Johnny Cash better than Johnny Cash. I can’t sing Geoff, I am not Geoff Tates’s voice, I am just trying to do the best I can at representing the old stuff and that’s why it’s so important for me to create new music with the band. Nobody is going to play Eddie Van Halen’s parts quite like Eddie Van Halen, they might do a hell of a good job but people want to see what is authentic to them.

Geoff has a lot of great musicians that are playing with him but I don’t think the music is being played accurately and he’s even been quoted as saying that he enjoys their interpretation of the music so they are not playing it perfectly like the records and the guys I play with are because it’s their music. These fans are very critical and I think that that matters, I really do.

LIR: Have you ever met Geoff?

TLT: I have met him two times. I met him once when I was eighteen years old. I drove to a music store and had the band sign my ‘Warning’ CD cover and I have a photograph with Geoff and Chris DeGarmo. I also met Geoff about two years ago when Queensryche played their thirtieth anniversary show in Clearwater, Florida and it was the last show of that tour. I was the last one in the line and I went through and met Parker and Michael and Geoff and Scott and I talked with Geoff for about a minute and I said “My name’s Todd Le Torre and I sing for a band called Crimson Glory, I just wanted to say that you are a huge vocal inspiration to me and largely responsible for the reason that I sing in this style. I think you sounded great tonight, it’s really a pleasure to meet you and thank you for all that you have done vocally throughout your career”.

That was pretty much it, he looked at me and smiled and said thank you and he didn’t say another word to me. He looked around as if to say is there anyone else to talk to and then I had my picture taken with him and I still have it. That was my only verbal interaction with him, it wasn’t a conversation it was just me complimenting him and him saying thank you, that was it.

LIR: What a great story.

TLT: I’ve never told that in an interview by the way, until now.

LIR: That answers my next question which was going to be were you ever a Queensryche fan in your youth? Obviously you were.

TLT: Yeah, my sister used to date this guy in high school and he was a really good drummer and he gave me a tape of ‘Operation: Mindcrime’. I remember putting it into my tape player, I was fourteen I think. I played the first song which was an introduction so I just thought okay and then I pushed fast forward and I didn’t have that little selector where it would smart select the next song so it went to the end of the tape and I thought “Okay, let’s flip it over and try it again” and then it did it again, so I realised I would have to listen to it properly from the first song. So when I did I sort of liked it but I was fast forwarding again and I got frustrated and said “Nah, forget it”.

A few nights later I was lying in bed and I thought that I really wanted to know what was so great about this band so I put my headphones on, turned the lights off and just hit play. That was my first real listen to Queensryche and I loved the vibrato as I was a huge Iron Maiden fan.

Then I went to the record store and that when I found ‘The Warning’ record, this was an older one but I had to see what it was like and that became my favourite album. Because I was a drummer and learning I loved it, Scott wasn’t doing these drum fills that were (fast drum roll) ‘bdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbd’, I loved his placement of the drum fills and the time signatures they were doing on songs like ‘Before the Storm’. It was really captivating to me and that’s when I became a fan of the band.

LIR: I thought ‘Roads to Madness’ was the game changer on that record.

TLT: Oh, totally. It’s such a great song and we have so much fun playing it. If you go onto YouTube it’s there. I think my best performance of that was in Regina, Canada. If you type in “Queensryche Roads to Madness” there is one where I played in a casino and that is probably my best vocal performance of that song. We play it in its entirety, beginning to end in our set, even that fast, heavy part at the end; it’s really such a great song.

WNW: So you were a full time rocker in your youth then?

TLT: That vocal, the “ohohohohoh”, that real heavy vibrato always captivated me and then when you get into the overall song writing of Queensryche they were very much ahead of their time but Maiden were my first and then Queensryche, then I got really into Stryper. Even though I am an atheist I just loved Michael Sweet’s singing and his scream, not forgetting the guitar harmonies. They were just a really great band with great songs. After that it was Helloween, Testament and Dokken I was also a big fan of, also Fates Warning were great and these are the bands that I still listen to today that I very much love.

LIR: Queensryche were always a bit different, even with their artwork, gone was your typical metal “leather look” and devil imagery and in was that ‘Operation: Mindcrime’ cover which looked like an art movie poster or something.

TLT: Completely, even ‘Rage for Order’ was so ahead of its time, they were talking about computers even back then. Some of their stuff was way out there with those lyrics too. The lyrics to ‘Roads to Madness’ for example are completely crazy. I remember asking the guys in the band if they even knew the words to the song and they were like, “No?” So I told them. “Stay on the course to pass. You’ll never find the answer to a place where darkened angels seemed lost and never found” and “Scream to see the light of forming figures fast behind you. Lay the past in the wind to spin and your fate will sail beyond the open plains” Wow, it’s like that is pretty deep shit.

LIR: Finally Todd, before you were in Queensryche you were the vocalist for Crimson Glory…

TLT: I joined them in 2010, yeah.

LIR: Now were you a fan of theirs before you joined, the ‘Transcendence’ album from 1988 was one of those that I just loved. I would have thought that Midnight’s vocals and vocal range would really appeal to you before he passed away a few years back.

TLT: You know what, I’d never heard of Crimson Glory until two weeks before I met the band in 2009.

LIR: Wow!

TLT: No shit, but yes, ‘Transcendence’ is a masterpiece, in fact their first two records of which ‘Transcendence’ was the second are without question two of the best metal records ever written. Midnight’s range was ridiculous, I wish I had his range, it was so amazing but his emotional delivery was just phenomenal. Songs like ‘Painted Skies’, ‘Burning Bridges’ or ‘Lost Reflections’ were amazing and of course Jon Drenning’s writing and Jeff Lords’ bass playing, that whole band and those two albums in particular are truly amazing.

It’s funny you should mention this because I haven’t listened to Crimson Glory’s music in eight months and now I am tempted to just put it on, I really would enjoy it again.

It’s a bitter-sweet thing for me actually; I didn’t want to leave the band but the fact is that they just weren’t doing anything.

LIR: Yeah, they are so slow.

TLT: Dude, you don’t even know! I tried so hard to get song writing going and Jon would blow me off and I would go for months without hearing a word and I just thought that we were supposed to be making a record here. The fans of that band were just so amazing so I really wanted Crimson Glory to put out a record for those fans way more than for me because those were the people that had been with that band for so long and they deserved a really great album and when I decided to resign from the band it really bummed me out.

I have some nicely framed tour posters in my house from some of those shows but the whole thing still makes me angry. It pisses me off to be honest with you Paul because we had so much potential to come back and do some really great things and all of those fans accepted me which is unheard of. I never expected the fans to accept me in the way that they did and that felt so special for me. I even got to wear the iconic mask during ‘Lost Reflections’, in fact I am looking at it as we speak, it is sitting right here in my studio. You know what, it was all part of a bigger plan, not a plan that I had but part of the evolution of my life. It was a wonderful experience and an amazing opportunity and I have no regrets about it to this day. I am very thankful to Jon Drenning and Ben Jackson and all the guys in the band but it’s led me to where I am now.

I wake up every day, I make my cup of coffee, I check the email and then I fire up my studio and then I work on music and I am the singer of Queensryche. For the first time in my life at the age of 39 years old I am able to earn a living as a musician doing what I love. I don’t have to be a millionaire, I just need to be happy and personally for the first time I feel 100% gratified.

LIR: Todd, thank you.

thanks to John @ Pennyblackmusic for setting me up with this interview.

ACID REIGN // Interview

(April 2013)

Acid Reign were a thrash metal band that were active from the mid 80s until 1991 when they went their separate ways along with what seemed like every other thrash band from the United Kingdom. During their short tenure they managed to release a clutch of singles, an outstanding mini-LP and two stunning full length albums.

Along with Sabbat who were my other favourite UK thrash band I followed them religiously in the press and bought anything of theirs I could get my hands on that featured their ridiculous ‘United Kingdom Apple Core’ logo on it.

This interview was done for utterly selfish reasons; I am simply a huge fan of the band. That is all. I chased up singer H myself, organised the time and date for our chat and come the moment when he picked up the telephone I spent over an hour with one of my childhood heroes.

Yet this was not done for nostalgic reasons. My main motivation was to get the lowdown on a band that over time has been criminally overlooked by both the press and many thrash fans of today. Their records are not just dusty time capsules of an era that is best left in the past, each release stands up against any of the current crop of long haired thrash puppets out there at the moment so with no more to do, join me as I ask the horses mouth just what the fuck happened to Acid Reign?

LIR: If I may I would like to start at the beginning.

H: Yes

LIR: So you guys came from Harrogate and all I know of the area is that it’s considered to be quite an affluent place to live. It’s an unlikely source for a thrash metal band. How did you guys meet?

H: We all went to school together and we were all into thrash, it’s that simple.

I am the only original member of the band that started to rehearse and went on to become Acid Reign. That doesn’t mean I’m the Dave Mustain of the band and kicked everybody out, it just grew and grew. The band didn’t really take off until Ramsey (drums/keyboards) joined, he came from another band.

LIR: All in the same school still?

H: Yes, when he joined the foot really went down on the accelerator. I brought Gaz (original guitarist) in, I played with him in a different band called Snakebite, I sang at just one rehearsal and then they split up and Ian, our original bass player was in that band as well so Me, Gaz and Ian we stayed together under many different names. The last piece of the jigsaw was Ramsey coming in and that was when we really kicked on. Kev (Guitars) did not go to our school though; he was someone we met through the heavy metal community. There was a place called Adam and Eve’s or Scrumpies as it was also known in Leeds, it was a heavy metal nightclub and we knew him from there and asked him to come along and audition because we needed a second guitarist. The first guy we tried took a whole practice to learn one riff but then Kev turned up having learned everything already as we had a copy of the Moshkinstein demo already out there so he came along, played away and we thought, “That’s fucking marvellous.” That was on the Sunday and then on the following Tuesday we had the phone call from Music For Nations saying, “We want to sign you.”

As affluent as it is we are proud to come from Harrogate. A certain huge band who claim they come from Leeds actually have ¾ of them coming from Harrogate. They like to keep quite quiet about that, those Kaiser Chiefs.

LIR: Really?

H: Yeah, and Ricky, the singer was given by his auntie an autographed copy of Moshkinstein when he was a kid. My mother knew his auntie so when our first album came out my mother gave her a copy and she passed it on to her rock music loving nephew so basically if you like Kaiser Chiefs, we influenced them and if you don’t then we have nothing to fucking do with it. It’s not our fault.

LIR: They played here last week and I was surprised at the amount of metal heads and hardcore kids that went along to the show?

H: They are genuinely a surprisingly good live band, they remind me of a grown up version of Acid Reign actually because they are kind of daft and they have a great sense of humour and funnily enough are from the same neck of the woods.

LIR: That’s odd; when I was growing up down south there were only a couple of metal kids within my school, definitely not enough to form a band, let alone two bands.

H: And we had enough people to attend gigs. Back then and we are talking the mid to late 80s; I think there was still a North/South divide regarding metal. I remember there was a lot of metal heads around, even mods were in a minority compared to the amount of us.

Let’s not forget it was born in industrial Birmingham, when you look at big metal bands, you had Judas Priest from Birmingham, Black Sabbath from Birmingham and even, and I hate to mention them but Def Leppard were from Sheffield. All you had down south was Iron Maiden. Whether that theory stands up, hmm… I don’t know and I can’t be bothered to follow it through to be honest. People may read this and think “That’s a load of bollocks and it might be. I didn’t think this through (laughs).

LIR: So UK thrash history tells us that after one listen to your Moshkinstein demo tape Under One Flag (the thrash subsidiary of Music For Nations) signed you, it seems ludicrous that it could happen as simply as that, is that story true?

H: Entirely, and I am not going to be the shrinking violet about this, it was all down to me, simple as that (laughs).

I had played my mum a lot of music that I listened to like Metallica and stuff and she is still a huge Metallica fan to this day and she is 77 now. She’s been to see Billy Talent twice and saw them on their last tour; I get her on as many guest lists as I can. She is well into her heavy music. So I played her rehearsal tapes just to show her that we were not shit so she had a frame of reference to see if we were shit or not. Obviously we didn’t sound like Metallica but my parents were convinced enough to stump up the money for us to record a demo. So I took that money and allocated half of the budget that to the recording, so me and Gaz went over to Ric Rac Studio in Leeds to suss it out and chat to the guy who ran it and the other half of the budget I put into packaging and I came up with the character of Moshkinstein. Evesy was my best mate and lived on the same street as me so I asked him to knock up some artwork and then I found a place that could produce cassette inlays and mass produce tapes so when we finished recording the demo and mixed it I went out to Hull with my dad and handed over the master tapes and the money.

So when I got all those back I sat at home and got all my thrash albums out and put them all on the floor and it was as simple as; Right, what is Noise Records address, Music For Nations, London Records, Roadrunner, Metal Blade, you know any label that I could find. So Roadrunner and London turned us down. Noise Records called us up and offered us a deal over the phone but by that point we had already been approached by Music For Nations. Even back then I knew that Noise Records was bad news, there had already been rumblings about them being rip off merchants.

So I sent all the tapes out and I came home one day from selling a load of tapes to Red Rider records in Leeds and my mum said that I had missed a call from a guy called Gem Howard at Music For Nations. All I could think of was the inner sleeve of Ride The Lightning which said Tour Manager: Gem ‘Fat Bastard’ Howard!

LIR: Under One Flag had such a great roster…

H: Exactly, Metallica left, we arrived. We seemed like a perfectly logical replacement really.

LIR: They had the UK licence for Bathory if I remember…

H: Yeah… and Possessed… um who else… fuck, everybody was on that label.

LIR: Sacrilege, Dark Angel… oh and my absolute favourite was Holy Terror

H: Oh yeah I think the singer or the guitarist from Holy Terror recently died from Cancer. [The incredible Singer Keith Deen it turns out passed away December 2012, RIP chap.]

LIR:  Oh shit, I didn’t know that…

H: Yeah, you know I never turned my back on thrash metal. I’m the Mille Petrozza of the band, I’ve always listened to this kind of music and to be fair I met up with the lads a couple of weeks ago, well, all bar Kev and all of us still listen to the same kind of stuff. Ramsey has got three kids and Adam, well he is the Richie Blackmore of the band, he’s done some folk projects and stuff and Kev… He’s more into his rockabilly these days than his metal but my roster is pretty much the same. I just bought the new Soilwork album so it’s all thrash and very heavy where I am concerned.

LIR: For me I didn’t really stay true to metal although I did delve now and again. After thrash I ventured into the Hardcore scene and stayed there for years, putting on shows and organising small tours, dealing with hundreds of pounds at a time rather than thousands, It was very low budget and DIY.

H: Not the sort of money that would get Acid Reign back together then?

LIR: (laughs)

H: I know that question’s coming.

LIR: And it will but not yet… I want to talk about what attracted my friends and me to Acid Reign in the first place. We used to have a great record shop in Margate called Funhouse Records and until we found Moshkinstein we thought that the UK didn’t have a thrash scene at all.

I had an LP by a local band called Obliteration which wasn’t much cop and my mate had Pray For War by Virus…

H: …And so you thought the UK scene was still pretty rubbish (laughs).

LIR: Well, yeah… But with Pray For War we thought it was so bad it was great. It was such a mess.

H: Let’s put it this way then… Rice is a tasty meal to a starving man. Yeah, they are mates of mine and we played loads of gigs with them, but that doesn’t make those albums good.

LIR: On buying Moshkinstein and a few days later buying the Sabbat album we discovered that yes, the UK not only had a scene but there were some cracking bands in it to boot. Did you feel part of it when you got your album released?

H: Definitely and don’t forget we invented our own scene; Apple Core. It was like how can we be the biggest band on the scene… Easy! Make up the scene, so we made up our own genre.

Don Kaye in Kerrang’s death vine reviewed our demo saying that he thought it was the best thing that he’d heard from the UK, along with Sabbat this is kicking arse. At that point the envelopes started tumbling through my front door. I had to go back to that guy who had made 30 tapes for us and order 300. It was that fucking mental. It got to the stage where I actually got a promo copy of the upcoming MOD album from Megaforce. It was actually from Scott Ian who wanted to trade a copy of the MOD album for a Moshkinstein demo tape.

LIR: I hope you said no…

H: Yeah then I heard Among The Living and I thought “You ripped us off you cunt”.

So our first gig in London and probably our second gig ever were supporting Sabbat at what was The Clarendon and Andy Sneap had a surprise 18^th or 21^st birthday party. His girlfriend rang me to say you guys are invited. It worked out quite well as we were playing London the following night with Death Angel, so yeah we were the surprise guests. We got on well with Sabbat and we got Re-Animator signed – they were our buds and D.A.M were a laugh but there were bands that we didn’t gel with that we played with and they would be Xentrix and Onslaught. Don’t get me wrong, I MC’s Onlsaughts last UK gig when they played in London at the end of 2011and it was great to hang out with Nige and Sy and catch up and they are absolute top fucking blokes. Infact I would say Sy Keeler is one of the nicest guys you would ever meet in metal and we had a right laugh but for me, back in the day there was the UK big four and that was Onslaught, Sabbat, Acid Reign and Xentrix in that order and us and Sabbat got on really well because we were so different musically and image wise that there wasn’t any real rivalry there.

LIR: I felt that by the time they released In Search Of Sanity Onslaught were trying to Americanise their sound, it didn’t come across as true. I always thought Acid Reign were “for real”.

H: The reason we formed the band because we loved thrash, we all went stage diving and got pissed and went mental and that’s what we wanted people to do at our shows so when we got our chance to play those gigs on the stage instead of being in the audience we just carried on the same, acting like knobs.

LIR: Yeah, I’ve seen the footage (laughs).

H: Around the time of the Obnoxious tour a lot of the reviews were saying things like “They are still great fun live but where is the future in this?” and “Are they a comedy act or are they a proper band?” Journalists have always got to find an angle and that was their angle for us. It may be very fucking lazy but that was their angle, ultimately if you don’t fit in their pigeon hole then people are going to have a go at you. But we were never a comedy act; people never bought tickets to an Acid Reign show or bought shirts and came along saying “This is going to be hilarious, I don’t care what songs they’ll play because this’ll be a right laugh”. No, people came along thinking “I wonder what they’ll open with? I hope they play Goddess” If we were a comedy act nobody would ever give a shit what songs we played.

LIR: When I would make compilation tapes for people of my favourite songs I would always include Chaos (Lambs To The Slaughter). That intro part is so incredible that there was no way that after a listen to it people would think you were a comedy act, there was some serious musicianship taking place.

H: Well I’m glad you said that, that song was the beginning of the next era of Acid Reign,  that is the closest to anything that appears on The Fear and it was the last song to be written for Moshkinstein, that was a good choice.

LIR: Before we talk about The Fear I have to say that Acid Reign was meant to be the first band that I ever saw. My first gig was at Folkestone Leas Cliff Hall seeing Celtic Frost and Destruction and as I recall, in the press the concert was advertised with you opening up. What happened, what did Tom Warrior do?

H: Um… He heard our album and thought we were a fucking joke and thought we were shit and British and he didn’t want any British bands on the tour. Get them off! Nah, I’d love to say that was the case but it wasn’t.

What happened was that it was the Cold Lake tour or as I like to call it “The Gay Tour” and Tom Warrior was grudgingly, and I stress grudgingly prepared to tour with Destruction but given where Celtic Frost were going and what they were trying to do they didn’t want another thrash band on the bill. We could have been anyone, it wasn’t personal and there was no malice in it. The sad thing is I know for a fact that when they played Liverpool Royal Court, when they went off for their encore the crowd started chanting for Acid Reign which apparently didn’t go down very well with the band. But yeah, we were meant to be on that tour, I had all the tour dates in my diary and I was all set to go, it was reported in the press and everything and then we got blown out. It was at that point the Acid Reign phrase was born “Believe it when you’re on the bus”.

LIR: Any search of Acid Reign on the web always links you to the tours you did with Exodus and Nuclear Assault, it must have been incredible for a thrash fan such as yourself to find out you are touring with these huge bands?

H: if you watch Acid Reign TV on YouTube you’ll see there is a clip there with John Connelly playing with us on guitar. I bought Game Over (1986 Nuclear Assault album) via mail order from Shades Records (incredible but now defunct rock and metal store based in London) from an advert I saw in Kerrang and in fact I have all my gig tickets on a wall (takes a second or two…) here it is; Nuclear Assault and Atomkraft on Wednesday 1^st July 1987, I went to see them at Sheffield University and within 14 months of that we are touring with them, It was amazing.

And Dark Angel as well, me and Gene (Hoglan, Drums) got on really well. It’s funny, if you look at the thanks list on Obnoxious he gets a mention and in brackets after his name it says “Who won the war?” and on their Time Does Not Heal (1991) it thanks H from Acid Reign and in brackets it says “We did”. So yeah, we became firm friends and one of the things I remember is at sound check one day Ron Rinehart (vocals) wasn’t there and I was just singing along as they sound checked and  Gene was saying “Get up here” so I got up on stage and joined Dark Angel for 2 songs.

LIR: Did it ever click in your heads that you were up there with these bands and that you yourselves had become an integral part of the thrash movement?

H: Thing is was that although it was great and exciting and all the rest of it, without wanting to pour cold water on it, we were in a band that had internal politics going on, we didn’t just walk around with smiles on our faces every day. We had two line-up changes, 3 if you include Adam leaving and us going on as a four piece. We had our trials, I mean the reason John Connelly was playing rhythm guitar in that clip is because Gaz fucked off at the end of a UK tour. He left a note with one of the roadies and we had to play Holland the following day, we had to play as a four piece so it wasn’t all cake and jelly. We had our own internal squabbles to deal with as every band does. I heard a brilliant quote that Kim Thayil from Soundgarden said the other day; he said that “A band is like a marriage, admittedly you are not fucking each other but you are fucking with each other”, that is a very good way of describing what being in a band is like.

LIR: Did musical direction choices ever cause strife within the ranks, with say the more technical approach of Moshkinstein’s follow up The Fear for instance?

H: No never, choosing a direction maybe something that happens now because bands have to be concerned with things like marketing but we never did that, we were never that clever. We just carried on writing songs and they just turned out like they did.

LIR: I think if people had taken the time to read through the lyric sheets on your albums they would be surprised to see that you were far, far from a comedy band. Reflections Of Truth for instance covers some heavy ground and some (myself included) would say that the lyrical content surpasses the likes of what Metallica, Dark Angel and Exodus were bringing to the table at that time. Did this lyrical style come naturally to you or was it something you had to work and chip away at?

H: Everything came naturally to me (laughs). I always get a little bit disappointed to hear what people’s influences are. For instance when you hear Rush and you think wow, they are amazing and they say they are influenced by Chuck Berry. I just thought “but he is shit” and then Metallica will say Diamond Head is a huge influence and then when I heard them I thought “Fuck me, they’re shit”

LIR: Easy!

H: People will probably be disappointed to hear from me that the big inspiration for me with my lyric writing was Fish from Mariliion, so it’s his fault. Marillion were the first band that made me fall in love with music. Black Sabbath got me into music but falling in love with music that was Marillion, Script For A Jesters Tear and Fugazi in particular. They weren’t metal but all the way through being in a thrash band I was still a big Marillion fan.

My first ever live gig was Marillion on the Fugazi tour at Leeds University and it was so good that we bought tickets straight away to see them at Sheffield University again. It was great to see Fish play University shows with a small crowd, it was fucking brilliant. Then I got to see him fronting the same band on the same tour In a City Hall show which was a massive stage show in a massive venue and that was equally brilliant and he made both venues seem like he was playing in your front room just the same way that James Hetfield can make it feel like he is talking directly to you even if you were at the O2 or at a festival.

Fish’s lyric writing totally blew me the fuck away. He made me realise that you could use big words in lyrics and that you could really put your heart and soul out there. To be honest that was the big influence and I am incredibly flattered and pleased about what you just said because ultimately that was what I was always gunning for. I wanted to write lyrics that meant something, sometimes they were just from the heart like with Reflections Of Truth which was about the boyfriend of my girlfriends mum at the time who was a complete dick. I would write about things that had happened to me in my life and things that I cared passionately about, you write what you know so yeah. That’s incredibly humbling to hear, I am stood here with a huge smile on my face, which really means a lot so thank you for saying that.

LIR: It’s odd to me what breaks big and what doesn’t. You had songs like Humanioa with a huge chorus and with The Fear that title track was up there with Metallica in regards to its technical prowess and hook laden moments. Did you ever wonder why the band didn’t break through on a major scale?

H: Not really, no. We always felt like the home grown, poor relations of Onslaught and Sabbat and to be honest none of us made it big. The reason we didn’t is fucking obvious, if you look at any form of music that originated in the UK then those bands go huge, especially in The States. If you are going to make it in America it’s going to be by being British and being quirky or being different, by playing music that could have only come from Britain, that’s why Kaiser Chiefs are big in the States and that’s why Oasis did well over there. It’s uniquely and quintessentially English but what Americans can never buy into is Brits playing American music because it’s considered by them as a cheap knock off.

Just go onto Blabbermouth.net and look at comments made by people about British thrash bands, everyone weighs in there and when a British band comes up it’s like “Who the fuck are this lot?” There was no way a British thrash band was ever going to break through because America had its own thrash bands thank you very much. People ask me why the thrash scene died, why it didn’t last and I have got the definitive fucking answer. The big 4 in the UK was Onslaught, Sabbat, Acid Reign and Xentrix and the big 4 in the states was Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax… Ooh, maybe that’s why. It’s blindingly obvious. Those bands from the states are multi-platinum. The UK bands were all great bands but let’s just look at the success of those bands. Xentix’s biggest single was Ghostbusters, Acid Reigns biggest single has Hanging On The Telephone and even Onslaught’s biggest single was Let There Be Rock, all covers, not even our own fucking songs!

The whole “Why didn’t you break big?” thing and the “Did comedy hold you back?” questions are interesting. Basically it’s all bullshit, ultimately in Acid Reign we made our own decisions, management would suggest that we should do something and usually we would say “We suggest you fuck off”. We did everything our own way. For example the management wanted us to get The Fear remixed and had a producer ring me at my home, Kit Woolven, remember him?

LIR: Yeah, he produced Cradle Of Filth and that weird Vow Wow album.

H: Yeah, he rang me at home and was telling me what he would do with it and we told him to fuck off. In fact we listened to everyone’s advice and then told them to fuck off. We were like the Brian Clough of thrash. We would have a discussion with anyone and then afterwards we would decide why they were wrong. At least we can look back on our career now and say at least we did it our way.

If we had thought they were right and that we should have lain off of the comedy lark then our career would have died anyway, they all did because thrash died.

LIR:  Obnoxious turned out to be your final album. Did the record company object to the next album cover?

H: The weird thing about the obnoxious cover is that Music For Nations had already turned down the original artwork we wanted so then Ramsey said the most obnoxious thing he could think of was cyan on pink because when you look at it it makes your eyes go funny. Then Mez at Music For Nations came up with the artwork and we thought it looked suitably disgusting and horrible. It looks obnoxious, get it! Nope, come 2013 and some people still don’t get it. Someone said recently that they couldn’t believe we kept that pink cover for the re-masters but I think that I can’t believe that they would think we wouldn’t. The only number one we ever had was ‘The worst heavy metal artwork EVER’ as voted for by Terrorizer Magazine in 2009. That was 19 years after we had brought that album out and it is still the worst that anyone can do, how proud are we of that? The answer is very proud.

LIR: There was a time when some elements of the press were out to get you. I remembered one Metal Forces review that slammed Obnoxious. The negative press must have affected you? I know that review in particular swayed a friend of mine to give Acid Reign a miss.

H: It’s funny you should say that, the one thing I really mentally struggled with in the band was that when Moshkinstein came out, Kerrang had the big review and they said it was a great album but the singer is not really up to it and then when The Fear came out the same reviewer said the album was great but they need to lose the singer entirely if we want to get anywhere and that in particular mentally ruined me. So I thought that maybe I was the weak link in the band and that I would get kicked out any minute and also I felt bad for the other members because I thought I was holding them back. Being young kids we never sat down and talked about that shit you just bury it deep down. On a purely personal level those 2 reviews completely trashed me.

When I met with the band a couple of weeks ago shit came out in that meeting that we never talked about, all sorts of stuff which will remain private but it was a real eye opener.

I have to pick you up on something though, what record companies will always tell you is that any review whether its 5/5 or 1/5, it is just 1 person’s opinion and people don’t read it and go “Right, now that’s my opinion” I think people will think fair enough that’s one opinion, I don’t think they will go around slagging a band off because of one bad review.

Our management went shopping for a US release with Obnoxious and took over demos of Hanging On The Telephone, Creative Restraint and I think Phantasm as well and reaction was really good. MCA were interested and Atlantic were interested. They liked our version of Hanging on The Telephone and thought it would be great to break a thrash band, so we got this really good feedback but by the time Obnoxious was finished and we went over the States with it, all those same labels said “Thrash is done, see you later”. They wouldn’t give us the time of day.

If you watch Acid Reign TV the final bit of footage we are going to put out is also the best footage which is a whole headline set from the Obnoxious tour, it’s about 1hr 40mins and is filmed from the sound desk so you get a full panoramic view, it’s us at our absolute fucking peak. We are tight as fuck, we’re having a laugh, its head down, crowd goes mental insane and when Blind Aggression comes on the whole building goes round in a big circle. The weird thing is the following night we played the Marquee and before we went onstage we had a meeting in a restaurant next door with our management and they said that Obnoxious wasn’t getting a release in the States and that was pretty much the beginning of the end.

We were really proud of Obnoxious and thought it had enough of a mature sound to maybe impress a few Americans as well, we felt it was nothing like the ‘’Bay Area sound’ and that we had discovered ourselves a bit more and created a really fucking great record and to hear that news we just thought by not releasing it there it had put a time limit on our career.

LIR: What was the final straw that made you guys call it a day?

H: We announced we were splitting up the following week that Sabbat announced that they were splitting up and two weeks later Onslaught split up, that’s the answer, we were all doing it. Stick a fork in this because it’s done.

LIR: Did any of you want to stay together?

H: No, it seemed like the most obvious thing to do in the world. Towards the end on The Jokes On Us Tour we played a fucking nightclub and when we played The Marquee which we usually sold out it was around half full. It was winding down, packing up, it was just done.

LIR: Other members of the band found themselves perusing other rock related endeavours after the split but you did a complete left turn and tried your hand at stand-up comedy.

H: Before that and after Acid Reign I was in a band called Strange Thing which I gave a couple of years to, we recorded a couple of demos and we sounded like a cross between Primus and Fishbone. After that I was done with music and I turned to comedy. It was the most logical step for me, between Acid Reign songs when we played live that was basically me doing stand-up. I had always been into comedy, there was always a lot of it in my house, my dad was a big Spike Milligan fan and we all loved Monty Python, that vibe was always there.

I responded to an advert that was on the back of a stage newspaper for a crash course in the London comedy circuit, you know “How to get into stand-up”. So I applied to that and of course sent away a copy of The Worst Of Acid Reign with it as part of my comedy heritage as it were. Pretty much the morning after Strange Way split and I thought “That’s it, I’m done with music” I went down stairs and there was a letter on the doormat from the comedy course telling me that I had got the place.

LIR: Was the change in audience a shock to you, any hecklers?

H: No, it happened very gently. To be fair comedy is not really like that, unless someone is really outstaying there welcome and fucking shit then hecklers are not a representation of the audience. Hecklers are in a massive minority, if any at all. When I am doing Keith [Platt – H’s comedy alter ego] if anyone heckles me then they just get absolutely fucking ruined. For instance last week I did a show and there were three guys there that I asked to go home and never reproduce, if they did have children then they should go home and kill them. It is amazing what you can get away with. When you do a character it’s a lot easy to do that as people are just not quite sure what the fuck is going on.

The biggest adjustment I found was that it’s a lot easier to get laughs when people are coming along expecting music than it is to get laughs when people are expecting them in the first place.

LIR: You mentioned that the other Acid Reign members met up with you a couple of weeks back, was that at one of your shows?

H: No, we just met up to have a few beers.

LIR: Right I’m gonna do it, here it goes. Every fucker and their cat is reforming, why are you not back together, there has to be a pay day in it for you, c’mon?

H: (Laughs… a lot) I think what has happened in the music industry over the last ten years must have passed you by. There is no fucking money in it for any of us anymore.

LIR: I spoke to Gerre from Tankard recently and he mentioned that the current thrashers that were reforming are only now making money, thanks to the European festival circuit.

H: To be fair those bands he is talking about were most probably on Steamhammer and Noise, 2 labels that were notorious for fucking their bands in the arse. So the solution there is not to sign a ridiculous fucking contract in the first place which we didn’t, I had a friend in the family who worked for Island Records so I got an Island Records lawyer very cheap and we also made sure that all copywrite got reverted back to us after 10 years, that’s how we were able to re-release and re-master the records, we own that copy-write.

LIR: So, when you met up did getting back together even come up?

H: The answer to that question lays to who was at the meeting, I drove up from London, Mac drove over from Northampton, Adam came over on the train from Leeds and Ramsay still lives in Harrogate and Kev, he’s in Australia. It’s quite difficulty to do a gig like that.

It makes me laugh when people say, well, Onslaught did it and Xentrix did it, these bands can exist because they have members that live reasonably close to each other. (Sarcastically) We all live in Bandland, where there is a rehearsal room 10 minutes from where we live and it’s all set up and our family’s, kids and responsibilities and jobs just go “Go on, off you go. Go off on tour because there are a load of people who want to rediscover their childhood and you would be depriving them of that if you didn’t”

Bandland does not exist, this is the real world. I live in London and Kev doesn’t even live in fucking England, which rehearsal room are we using?

LIR: From this, I take it that it’s not a case of not wanting to; it’s more logistically that it cannot feasibly happen?

H: Over the years when I’ve been asked this my response has always been, “Ask Kev”. Kev has never wanted to re-learn the songs, I totally understand, put yourself in his shoes. If we reformed Acid Reign, ultimately what would be the best we could do? Headline some shows and maybe get to play Download and what has Kev already done? He’s headlined some shows and played Download. That’s the answer. Full stop.

LIR: Well, thank you so much for giving up part of your day chap, it’s been a pleasure and as Abba once elegantly sung, thank you for the music.

CONVERGE // Interview

(October 2012)

How do you follow another album that for anyone else would be career defining?

‘Axe To Fall’ was an album that took so many musical turns that a gambler might lay odds that Converge were hedging their bets and giving themselves multiple options about where they should head next. As it turns out, not so. “The point was, and has always been, to follow whatever inspiration comes our way, and to take that inspiration to its fullest potential. The songs for the last album shaped up in a certain way because that was the best we could make those songs at that moment in time.  

The same holds true for this batch of songs and hopefully any other songs we write in the future. We don’t ever sit down with a plan of what we want an album to be. We just make the best of what we have to work with, and as long as it feels honest and with a sense of urgency and potency, we’ll be proud to call it a Converge record”

Guitarist Kurt Ballou presents as a surprisingly huge figure of a man; tall, broad and deadly serious in his composition. He has a mischievous disposition about him that whilst fleetingly charming simply dares you to ask him the wrong question, a stance no doubt earned over the previous decade given that the man has had to explain the unexplainable countless times. What makes Converge tick?

Today, with the recent release of ‘All We Love We Leave Behind’ now on record shelves we find him in a jubilant mood. A steadfast belief that with the music business years deep into a streaming and MP3 frenzy there is still room for a band to generate the full artistic package fills him with enthusiasm. “I love that feeling of excitement about getting a new album, and diving into it and learning it from front to back. Having a great package to go along with it just furthers that experience. Holding it in my hands and pouring over the lyrics, images, and liner notes while listening makes it feel all the more real”

“When I was a kid, I used to buy tapes through those BMG and Columbia house clubs because they were cheaper. But a lot of the time, they sent me special pressings of those tapes that had no packaging other than the front cover and I felt so ripped off. It felt so temporary, like MP3s feel now. I like having something real I can hold in my hands.”

With those words Kurt looks into space, smiling, total silence. It gets a bit weird. I really like this guy.

He engages again when I mention how effective it was to include the cleaner vocal style Jacob Bannon delivers to open the album. “I think there’s quite a bit of precedence for this type of vocal. ‘Dark Horse’, the first song on our last album had it. Lots of older material had it as well – ‘Distance and Meaning’ from Jane Doe for example. Anyway, I think this song draws quite a bit from the 90’s Dischord Records-type influence that has always been a crucial part of Converge’s music. I think a lot of people don’t realise what a huge impact the bands on Dischord, Gravity, Troubleman, Vermiform, Art Monk, etc. had on us.”

Now he’s two questions ahead.

“And as far as where it fits into the album goes, the decision to put it first pretty much consisted of “We like it…. Yeah, ok, put that one first.” To me this album is more of a collection of self contained songs on equal footing than it is some grandiose flowing concept record. In that sense, it reminds me more of ‘You Fail Me’ than it does of ‘Axe to Fall’ or ‘Jane Doe’.

“At this point, I think we take more influence from regular life and what we’ve done together in the past than we do from contemporary metal and hardcore bands. We don’t put any pressure on ourselves to live up to anyone’s expectations of us. The only pressure we feel is the pressure we put upon ourselves to give 100% to every record we do.”

 

And that’s where we leave it. With one firm shake of the hand he walks back to the dressing room. There is little doubt that Kurt Ballou and his band of brothers in Converge have influenced hundreds of bands along the path to where they are today. But it would appear that those thoughts do not enter their minds, they are too focused on the here and now, creating the best art they can at every step. That’s how they walk.

Leaders, not followers.

 

FISH // INTERVIEW

(April 2013)

Born Derek William Dick, Fish has since the very early 1980s brought his unique lyrics and vocals to many a progressive rock classic. His career has flourished both in the years he spent with Marillion and since 1989 when he embarked on his adventurous and vast solo career. This momentum halted in 2007 during the release of his fine ‘13th Star’ album when his life dismantled after a series of disastrous relationships and career-threatening throat operations.

This month I join Fish on the phone from Scotland. We talk to him about the years in between his last release, and what is happening with the yet-to-be-released new album ‘Feast of Consequences’. We also focus on the Marillion years, and just how the man prepares and executes his live show.

LIR: My discovery of your music was quite different than many others I expect. Although I was aware of Marillion and the huge hit single ‘Kayleigh’, I didn’t listen to your music until I received the ‘Bouillabaisse’ compilation double CD as a Christmas present from a friend in 2005. He was annoyed at me for never giving you a chance. After hearing it I was hooked and started to pick up your back catalogue.

F: Well, that’s nice to know. It’s the one thing I kind of hold faith in, and in these days especially I like to think the whole word of mouth thing still exists and it can it still move people.

LIR: How difficult is it to compile those things? You have to keep in mind lifelong fans and then people like myself who don’t know your stuff. It has to be tricky.

F: I think that is why you put the best ofs together. When I go to a new label I tend to launch with a new best of because it seems to make the most sense and yes, the whole idea is to capture those people that might think, “I know ‘Kayleigh’ and it’s the right price. It’s got nice packaging.” Then they go away and think, “Right, I want to try this album and then that album.” That is what it’s all about.

But it is hard putting them together. The ‘Bouillabaisse’ thing was a little bit easier because I nominated the ‘Balladeer’ and ‘Rocketeer’ thing where one album was just the ballads and the other was just the rock and heavy duty songs. It did bring some people into the fold, but again it never did as much as we hoped it would.

Things have changed so much. The whole idea of selling albums, moving albums and promoting albums has just completely changed. There’s a whole different process now.

LIR: I think it’s strange that in this day and age with YouTube, Spotify and iTunes just a click away that a compilation album could still affect anyone, let alone myself.

F: I think as well, in all honesty that if you look at ‘Misplaced Childhood’, which sold 3,000,000 albums or something and what I am selling now which is around 50,000 units, that is a big gap of people that are happy with the old albums but they just won’t get into the new stuff. So compilations are important in that regard because those kinds of fans are not necessarily part of the download generation. They are used to having physical products, and it is getting harder and harder to put the physical products in their hands what with the demise of HMV etc., and the whole of the independent retail scenario going out of the window. It’s harder to catch browsers, you know? But you just adopt it and I don’t get bitter about it. That’s just the way it is but then again I run my own independent label which has just me on it, so it’s very much a cottage industry now.

With Marillion we would get something like fourteen pence per CD on a full priced CD, and when you put that into context you find that you are shifting a lot of albums, but you are not making very much whereas now you can make a lot more depending on how much effort you want to put into promotion. But then again with promotion what do you do? Buy a page in ‘Classic Rock’, get a page in ‘Prog Rock’ or whatever and aim it at your demographic? What else can you do? Most people skim through adverts. They are blind to them.

LIR: Do you see a lot of young kids in the shows?

F: There are some, I’m not going to lie to you and say a large proportion of my audience is under 20 because no. It’s not. If I look at my Facebook demographics, it’s all the 35-50 age group. But then again when I got a bit older I picked up on artists like Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding that I was never exposed to when I was a kid, but then there maybe the argument that because I am a musician in a world of musicians that I would have a duty to examine what they did because of the legends that they were.

I know about my daughter’s generation and my daughter is 22. Her favourite bands are Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and Free, and a lot of her friends have discovered what I’m doing. They are aware of tracks like ‘Kayleigh’ of course, but they have also been switched on to some of the other stuff. So that’s all very well. It’s nice to have people into your music, but you still need to sell that music to make it work and to keep your mortgage paid. Selling this music is becoming harder and harder, and again I am lucky that the people that make up a huge part of my fan base are people that like tactile items. That has been the spine of my entire existence.

LIR: Well, you have adapted incredibly well with technology. Your fan base is always kept up to date with goings on, often with daily updates in fact. It keeps people incredibly loyal, but do you think because of this you have lost a little mystique, a little mystery about yourself that fans often love about their heroes?

F: Yeah, but I don’t think there was much of a mystery about myself in the first place; I was never a Bowie of a Ferry or anything like that. I’m the sort of guy that goes to see Hibs [Hibernian football club-Ed] play on a Saturday, and I am far more comfortable in a pub than I am in a nightclub.

My character has been one that is always open. My lyrics have always contained an openness about my life. Sometimes I am a bit too open for my own good perhaps, so I wouldn’t say that I am particularly a man of mystery.

So when the internet really hit I enjoyed the communication between fans. In fact that was one of the problems I had when I was in Marillion in those latter days. We were becoming more and more distant from the people. When you play a 3000/4000 capacity hall you can still have a tangible contact with the audience. So if somebody shouts something from half way up the hall, people can hear it and they can hear my answer, but when you go up to a 15,000 and somebody shouts out and they are 20 yards away from me then the guy at the back can’t hear a damn thing he said, so he can only hear the response.

So suddenly a certain dislocation went on, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the light show and the production was such that I would walk onto the stage and spend around 70% of the gig blinded by a super-trouper. I couldn’t actually see and get an awareness of the depth of the crowd, to feel the back of the hall. Adding to that I was in a band that with all due respect, well, they were quite happy to run straight through the sets, run through the same solos and the same songs every show. For me it became monotonous, and added to that I was coming offstage into a backstage area that was populated by people that I really didn’t want to know. We were the ones that were buying the champagne and the beer. We were the ones paying for it. A lot of the people there three years before hated our guts but because we were selling papers and magazines we were in favour ,and we had to press the flesh of people who owned huge record store chains, and at the end of the day they were making more money off the albums than we were.

Add to even that, we had gone up to that division, that level where we had managers, tour managers, assistant tour managers, tour accountants, assistant tour accountants etc. etc., that there was an entire tribe moving with us. By the end we only managed to get the manager down to 20%! Towards the last days for me in the band I just thought, “Why am I doing this? It’s just crazy.” The phrase I always use to describe it is that fame is great as it will get you the best table in the restaurant, but the waiters will always expect more tips. I got so sick of it.

When I went on to ‘Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors’ (Fish’s 1990 debut solo record-Ed], there were certain pangs to get the record up to that level and it was for a while, but then I had the big legal wrangle with EMI after my first solo album when I went to Polydor. It was then that a huge undermining of the foundations went on, so I had to change and it took me a long time to adjust to where I am now and I am quite happy with my lot. I never wanted a Maserati, or have been somebody who would drool over having a villa in the south of France or something like that. I have my organic vegetable garden and I am quite happy pottering about in that, going to football and going for wanders down the beach, I am happy with that. I am sitting here in a house right now, and if I look out the window I can see snow-capped hills that are just three miles away that I can wonder around in the summer. To me that is cool.

I find celebrity a bit uncomfortable; I’ve been through the heavy intrusions of privacy like when just after my very short second marriage I was subjected to a 4/5 page article in ‘The News of the World in Scotland’. I was very uncomfortable with that.

LIR: What about today when you speak to the press?

F: I have got absolutely nothing to hide. Obviously I do have a private life and I don’t talk about my family that much… Saying that, my daughter, she’s a model now and goes under the name Tara Nowy. She is getting quite successful now and is currently auditioning for a big Sky TV ‘X- Factor’ type thing to do with models and she is no stranger to celebrity. She has been brought up on it. She’s very cool. I remember one time we went out to see Queen in Holland, and we were sitting in the hotel after. There was Brian May, Roger Taylor and I chatting away with some of the other Queen guys, and my daughter was holding court, and at the time she was only about 14 years old, so she’s not daunted by celebrity or phased by famous people.

For me, when I was at the Prog Awards last year I found myself talking to some people that were heroes of mine like Peter Hamill, and I was even sitting on a table with Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. I would never have believed as a teenager that a) I would be at such a thing as an award ceremony that celebrated progressive rock and b) that we would all be sitting there together at a table. It was quite surreal, I expected somebody to wake me up and tell me that I had my O Levels to do tomorrow.

When people ask me if I miss it [the celebrity status], I say not really. I still play big gigs. We have a gig that we are organising at the moment that I have found really exciting, and that is at Mogadishu Airport. I have friends of mine that were in the army and are working with the UN training people, and one of them phoned me up and asked if I fancy a gig there as there is a bar that can take 500 people, and that that the flights will be taken care of and I said, “Yeah. Why not?” We’re not going to make any money from it, but I want to do it and be able to put it on a T-shirt and say we played Mogadishu. How else would I ever get a chance to do that? That’s the sort of thing we never did with Marillion, I’ve been to Bosnia and Kosovo with the army doing gigs, and they were the most enjoyable gigs on the most exhilarating tour I ever remember doing. I don’t think of playing the Ahoy in Rotterdam in front of 18,000 people as anywhere near that category.

LIR: It’s odd you should say that as I think you are one of those rare frontmen that can connect with an audience whether you are playing a small hall or a big stadium. The way you communicate with the audience it’s as if they are in your front room.

F: That’s just the way that I was brought up, that’s one of the things I abhor about these ‘X- Factor’ or ‘The Voice’ types of reality stars. You can take a monkey into a studio and make a recording if you teach it enough tricks, but that doesn’t mean they are going to be able to hold the centre of a stage.

It’s really strange, I think I was born a decade too late. A lot of my peers have told me that if I had been around in the 70s… well, you know. The Marillion I joined in January 1981 went out and played pubs and clubs. We played in front of 30 or 60 people some nights. That’s how you learn your trade. You play in front of people that are not interested in what you’re doing. It was a struggle, but we had to try and pull people in to examine what we were doing. So I learned through technical failures with the band when things went wrong on stage. Being young we didn’t have that back up so when things went wrong I had to deal with it, and I think having that apprenticeship has stood me well over time. I feel comfortable on most stages. It’s all to do with projection, my self-confidence and my ability to wield some kind of control, but it’s like working with tigers sometimes. If you are not careful, they will rip your arse off (Laughs).

I have seen some guys on stage that are big names and the way they are with the audience makes me think, “Why are you doing this? Don’t even bother talking!”

LIR: Keeping on the subject of communication with fans, it was no secret that you had problems with your voice recently.

F: I had two vocal operations, one in 2008 and the other in 2009. With the first one there was a lot of dark shadows and questions hanging over me pre-op and I didn’t even know if I was going to have a voice when I came out of it, and the second came really quick on the heels of the last one. It was like taking two hard Muhammed Ali punches straight to the face.

LIR: I take it this was the main reason behind the six year gap between the new album coming out and ‘13th Star’ back in 2007?

F: Yeah, in 2007 we did ‘13th Star’, and it was a great album, and we worked real hard on it but at the time that we were recording the album I was going through the blender. I was about to get married, and then the woman basically walked out on me just before the wedding. This was just before that album, so then I went on that tour, and by 2008 for every five gigs I was doing there was one great gig and two average gigs and two dreadful ones; it was all to do with the voice. It got to the point where at 9 ‘o clock at night I was dreading having to go on stage because I didn’t know what would happen. I could never tell.

I had a cyst in my throat so some days it wouldn’t be as rampant as others; it would deflate in a way but I didn’t know that. It got mentioned in the press and I would get stressed out. I came very close to walking away from everything at the end of that tour. Then I had the op and went out in 2009, and then I got married. That lasted all of six months. Three days after my second operation she disappeared as well, so I had really taken a serious kicking. I couldn’t sing during 2009. I only did five shows, and there was no way I was going to get anything written at that time because of all of my problems. For me the first six months of 2010 every morning was full of I Love You’s and every night was like a mortar attack. I’ve never known a more emotionally confusing time in my life.

At that point I decided to go out on an acoustic tour, trying to re-find my voice, to find out how to deal with a crowd again and get my confidence back. I had to re-examine exactly what I do and it started to work. I really enjoyed going out with the acoustic format. We were playing to everything from 200 people a night to doing 500/600 a night in parts of Poland and Germany, and everything seemed to balance out for me. We managed to get to play in places that we would never have been able to play in with the electrical band format. We ran it like a guerrilla style operation and slimmed it right down, so we could get into areas that we could never had done with the “This is what we must have” kind of attitude.

That finished in 2011 and I wanted to distance myself from that darkness that I was in. I didn’t want to write about a shitty marriage or writing about the “WOMAN”.

LIR: So no classic break up album?

F: Exactly. So I wanted to put some space between me and that time. So then we got to 2012 and Foss Patterson [pianos and keyboards-Ed] and Frank Usher [guitars-Ed], who had been on the acoustic tour with me began to talk about writing this album. We did some festivals and stuff but just had no new material coming through. So I just thought I had to bring a writer in. Before that I was really getting down about it and questioning whether I could even make another album.

Now, I had a major fall out with Steve Vantsis [Fish’s long-time collaborator-Ed] in 2008. It was over a lot of little things though, just business crap, and we had been friends for such a long time that when he came along to a couple of gigs on the acoustic tour it felt right to shake hands and make up. It was obvious that we had both changed over the years, I had got rid of the demons that were with me in 2008 and so had he, you know?

So when Steve came up last year in the first couple of weeks he was there we had managed to get the skeletons of six songs together, so that spurred it on for us and he was getting involved in the writing. But it just wasn’t coming together quickly enough for me.

LIR: Yeah, the last I heard was that the new album was going to be called ‘Feast of Consequences’, and it would be released either late 2012 or early 2013.

F: I just wasn’t ready; there was no point in just rushing in and doing this, I would never want to put anything out half cocked. If I am going to put out an album that would be my first in five years than another six months isn’t going to matter. Financially I am aware I have to get something together and put it out as the log pile is beginning to get thin and is bark now, but at the same time I am not going to put out shit. I’ve never done that. I’ve never put out an album just to make money; it has to be a statement, a piece of creativity that I am proud of and I think that ‘Feast of Consequences’ falls into that. I am really pleased with the lyrics.

LIR: Lyrics are so important to fans of yours and one of your simplest and most effective lyrics was in my mind ‘Sugar Mice’ from the ‘Clutching At Straws’ LP you did with Marillion in 1987.

F: That was the single that went missing; it’s a fucking great song even if I say so myself. To me it’s like country and western. In 1987 when we started to put ‘Clutching At Straws’ together that was when creatively the band started to fall apart in as far as if you listen to the album it’s made up of lots of bits that we joined together. Some stuff like ‘Incommunicado’, ‘White Russian’ and ‘The Last Straw’, they are songs that have recognisable song constructions. We got ourselves a little bit of swagger and became a lot rockier, and that was the direction that I wanted to go in. So if you look at a song like ‘Sugar Mice’ or a song like ‘Incommunicado’ or even ‘The Last Straw’, you can easily see the link through to the ‘Vigil’ solo album. The best version we ever had of that was actually a demo that we made in Maidenhead and the tapes got lost or damaged. It was one of those moments where we were just playing together and everything fell in to place.

I love playing it because we can play about with it on the stage, that middle section… you can jam and put that Van Morrison jazz scat vocal on top of it. You can play about with it and bend the dynamic of it which is a wonderful thing; it’s a really great song.

Lyrically it was inspired by going to Milwaukee, and I think we were supporting Rush, and we ended up in this shitty Holiday Inn in the middle of the projects there, and there were some skag dealers outside in the car park, and it was snowing and cold. My Samsonite suitcase just exploded in the elevator, and I got up to my room, and it had an aertex ceiling that had scrawled on it stuff like “Kenny Loves Linda”, and all there was to do was to watch wrestling on the TV. It was terrible. So I went to the bar and there were these sad bastards there, and a Trivial Pursuit machine that had just sex questions on it, and an old jukebox that contained nothing but ballads, I also spent around $70 on the phone having an argument with my girlfriend at the time so I was gutted. This was meant to be Milwaukee, and that was the vision that kind of inspired that song. That vision of someone leaving Edinburgh for the promise of somewhere like Milwaukee and why is he running away? Is it from his family or has he really gone over there to find a better life and bring them over? There is a very melancholic Scottishness to it.

LIR: You have just posted new lyrics to a song called ‘All Loved Up’ on Facebook. Is this track going to be included on the record?

F: Yeah, it is. Now we have eleven songs. I have eight completed lyrics. There is only one though that I have no lyrics for, and that’s called ‘The Layman’. There is a song called ‘Perfume River’, and I finished that two weeks ago. For some reason I just wasn’t happy with it. It didn’t feel good and I wasn’t comfortable with it. The lyric fitted well and it worked with the melody, but something just felt like it was just not right. So I texted Steve a few days ago, and I said, “I think it needs another verse because the story isn’t complete. It’s not rounded out properly. There is no act three in it”. And so I just sat down with it and basically it was just four lines, four lines that didn’t sound right, so I deconstructed it by taking all the words out and putting them back together in a different way and then low and behold… Bang! It all made sense.

“The fetid smell of stale revolutions” was the line that did it. That was the one line in the verse that just made complete sense of the chorus. That is how I work. I self-edit so much and I love working with words. Years ago with ‘Perfume River’ I may have just let that go, and allowed it there or written another verse, and it would have been flabby over three verses. So in the last month or so now that I am coming to the end game with all these new lyrics. I’m loving doing the final bits of polishing and tidying up before I put them out there on the exhibition floor.

I do love writing and that book that has been held up over the last three years [Fish’s long overdue autobiography-Ed] just has to be managed next year. People always come up to me ,and say you have to write this book, and explain all the lyrics or write a biography or compile all your blog entries together into one big volume. I’m just like, “For fuck sake” (Laughs). I mean I am under no real pressure. One of the problems with living where I do on a farm in East Lothian, two miles out of the town and on my own is that sometimes getting the discipline together is hard. It’s all too easy to switch YouTube on, and spend two or three hours just watching drivel or kidding yourself into thinking you are doing research (Laughs).

LIR: Finally you are going to be doing a tour in May. Are you excited to be getting back out on the road?

F: I am very daunted by the tour, We are going back to the old formula. It’s just like in the old days when you wrote the songs, and you put them into production rehearsals. Back in ‘83, ’84, and even ’85, we took new songs out on the road and played them live, and this is what I’m doing on this May tour. I am in the situation where the album is pretty much finished, and the band starts production rehearsals next week with all the new material. Then after a week off we go into full on rehearsals, and then go and play twelve shows where we are planning on playing roughly six new songs a night. I’d never be arrogant enough to think that we should play the full brand new album, and you should have to sit there and listen to it, that’d feel like you’re in a study group. The fans are paying ticket money to be entertained; you have to provide old material as well, especially now that ‘Script for a Jester’s Tear’ (Marillion’s 1983 debut album-Ed) has its thirtieth anniversary. We have a good balance of well-known songs and up songs and songs the punters love, so this upcoming tour experience should be fulfilling for both parties.

LIR: Thank you.