SONIC SHOCKS Issue 37 - June 2015

Isue 37 - June 2015

A Supergroup the world actually needed plus VOIVOD, JOHN LODGE, BTBAM, THE DIRTY YOUTH, FAILURE, CUT UP, ROCK GODDESS, RONNIE WOOD, LUCIFER, IBIZA OPENING PARTIES, DOWNLOAD FESTIVAL, BURLESQUE...

ON THIS ISSUE P 03: TAU CROSS P 44: RONNIE WOOD Interviews with Rob 'The Baron' Miller and How can it be - A Rock'n'Roll Diary Michel 'Away' Langevin by John Morgan Feature by Cristina Massei P 14: VOIVOD P 48: LUCIFER Interview with Denis 'Snake' Belanger by Interview with Johanna Sardonis by Matt John Morgan Dawson P 22: THE MOODY BLUES Interview with John Lodge by C. Massei

P 52: IBIZA AWAKENING 2015 Party Island is now open!

Feature by Nelly Loriaux including IMS, P 27: BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME HRH ROAD TRIP, CLUB OPENINGS Interview with Tommy Rogers by Matt Dawson P 60: THE GOLDEN AGE OF BURLESQUE Feature by Sophia Disgrace including P 30: THE DIRTY YOUTH THE SPARE RIB BURLESQUE & Interview with Matt Bond and Danni CABARET, LE DECO DESIRE and Monroe by Mark Fletcher CLUB PARADIS P 34: FAILURE P 62: DOWNLOAD 2015 PREVIEW Interview with Greg Edwards by C Massei Feature by Matt Dawson including interviews with P 38: ROCK GODDESS CHELSEA GRIN Interview with Tracey Lamb and Julie ALL THAT REMAINS Turner by John Morgan INSOMNIUM EOFE P 42: CUT UP YELLOWCARD Interview with Tobias Gustaffsson by Matt EVIL SCARECROW Dawson DRAGONFORCE

SONIC SHOCKS TEAM Editor in Chief & Creative Director CRISTINA MASSEI

Front page photo credit

Andy Lefton

Associate Editors MATT DAWSON & NELLY LORIAUX US Correspondent DENISE BRITT

Other contributors on this issue: Sophia Disgrace, John Morgan, Mark Fletcher,

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Supergroups: often a big clash of egos hoping to cash in on their collective fame with a mediocre piece of work; occasionally, an astounding fusion of creativity that is the wet dream of any music fan.

Relapse's latest signing Tau Cross see the talents of Amebix vocalist/bassist Rob "The Baron" Miller, Voivod drummer Michel "Away" Langevin, Misery guitarist Jon Misery and War//Plague guitarist Andy Lefton come together to create a brilliant record which is a must for any punk metal collection.

Sonic Shocks got all the insights from Rob Miller and Away, and we took the chance as well to ask what's happening in the Amebix family....

Interviews by John Morgan Photos by Cristina Massei (Away) and Cavan Bligh (Rob M & group shot)

Rob "The Baron" Miller We were lucky enough to catch Voivod the other night down in London at The Underworld…

How was that?

It was really good, a really amazing set.

It’s a stinky old hole down there isn’t it! [laughs] It is a bit of a hovel, I remember the last time I saw you guys down there was 2009.

That’s right, yeah! It’s kind of like mould on the walls but it’s brilliant when the place is full up, great vibe.

We were talking to Away about Tau Cross, he sends his regards and is looking forward to seeing you in Bristol.

Yeah, we’re going to fly down and see them at Temples that’ll be nice, the first time we’ve actually met up!

That’s what he was telling me, I couldn’t believe it was going to be the first time you guys have met, you must be really psyched about that!

Yeah, we had a chat first on Skype and when he got in touch with me again and said ‘Are you interested in doing something?’ I said let’s talk about this, and just chatted about the stuff we were both into; we made the connection straight away. The guy’s lovely and he’s also kind of eccentric in a really good

way, I like that.

He told us how you got in touch with him and sent him the ideas in a demo form. He was very complimentary about Roy (Mayorga) as well. Did you initially start writing with Roy or did you always have Away in mind for this record?

The original demos that I was writing was in collaboration with Roy, we sort bounced off the back of Sonic Mass thinking ‘OK, let’s do another album, put some material together.’ I had some ideas left over from that, a lot of things were coming into focus, I wrote very prolifically at the time but I had really primitive recording equipment so I had this Boss BRA (power supply), plugging a guitar into that, using some drum samples that were already in there and just sort of singing into the mic.

During that process whilst I was writing stuff the whole Amebix thing started to kind of implode, so it was a case of thinking ‘What are we going to do with this?’. I said to Roy ‘I’ve got a bit of time in August’.

I think this was 2012. ‘I’ll come across and we can start demoing this material and see where it goes.’

At that time it was already in question whether or not it was going to be Amebix, we did four tracks and one song of his which is in Roy’s stable at the moment – he wrote Midsummer as well – and we worked on these together.

At the end of that I came back and meanwhile everything’s still going on as it was and I was trying to keep in touch with Roy saying ‘OK, what do we do with these tracks?’. We’d actually approached another couple of people about playing guitars and they had kinda said ‘Yeah but no but’ so that didn’t work out, also Roy got taken straight out on the road with Stone Sour. The problem I guess he had was when Stone Sour aren’t playing Slipknot are, it’s that sort of thing, so whenever he’s in the seat it’s very intense – a year and a half/ two years Corey does Stone Sour so Roy has to be in place, in focus and getting on with that.

So I was kinda sat back thinking ‘Fuck, nothing’s going to happen with this!’ and I was trying to keep in touch with Roy and nothing was coming back from that, so again I was approaching different people saying who can do guitars, do this and all the rest and having no joy from it whatsoever.

I’d pretty much given up with the idea of trying to find anybody, I was thinking this was not working at all; I was having this conversation with Andy [Lefton] over Skype and he was sharing some of his music with me and I thought ‘I’ve known this guy for a while, I don’t want to go into his space at all and fuck around with his band.’ It’s a bit like poaching you know?

Of course.

I just put it to him : ‘Have you ever played with Jon [Misery]?’ and he said ‘Yeah I have and we get on really well.’ ‘Well fuck it, let’s try and do that!’ Again got in touch with Roy: ‘Roy, I’ve got these guys on board to do this.’ and nothing coming back. At the same time Away was in touch – we’d been in touch say three or four years at that point periodically – he’d said ‘Have you got anything on the boil?’

‘Yeah I’ve got this but we need to find out whether Roy’s going to be doing it or not.’ So Away comes back to me and says ‘I’ll break his arms and that’ll sort it out!’ [laughs] Just having a laugh about it and I said to Roy: ‘Listen mate, nothing’s going on here, I’m going to have to go on with this’.

I think he was busy, also he wasn’t in contact as much as he might have liked to be so he regrets having that go but we chatted about it four or five days ago and it’s fine and that’s good. We demoed the first stuff together with a view to initially try and make the Amebix thing work, but once that obviously was not going to happen trying to open up something else.

Do you feel that having two guitarists opened up the sound and song writing a lot more for you?

Hugely. Very much so. One of the things that was in mind after Sonic Mass is both Roy and myself were very much in agreement that it would be a good idea to get a second guitarist on board because we like the idea of being able to fill up the sound a lot more and get some more sort of subtle elements in there, I think that was one of the stumbling blocks that we had, so that caused some problems when I initially proposed it and I think a lot of the difficulties we came upon were precipitated after that really.

No offence to Stig whatsoever, I really thought we could make the most of this by having a very full sound and trying to get into expressing ourselves more musically.

With Tau Cross I came to those guys and said ‘I’m not going to tell you how to play and what to play, I really want you to find your own way with this and see how you interact with one another.’ Neither

With Tau Cross I came to those guys and said ‘I’m not going to tell you how to play and what to play, I really want you to find your own way with this and see how you interact with one another.’

of those guys would say ‘I’m predominantly a lead guitarist or rhythm guitarist.’ They’re just guys from punk bands that play guitar so it was a case of them finding who is going to take the lead and who’s going to keep the background and they’ve worked it out between themselves which has been brilliant!

In that sense everybody has let things flow in the direction it should flow into and we haven’t really had any difficulties with that al all, there’s no point where we stopped and said ‘You know what? Scrap that bit or do that bit better.’ or anything, it’s just everything has gone in line, we’ve been incredibly lucky with that.

I think part of that is the relationship Jon and Andy have which is close, they’re really good buddies and they can fuck around and jam together, they can party and they can hang out so they’re already set, the ideal sort of bond between guitarists is people that are really close and understand each other rather intuitively I suppose.

Away was saying there was a possibility of him receiving new material in the Summer to work on so all three of you must have been busy on the song writing front…

It’s fucking ridiculous to tell you the truth! We’ve been sitting around for ages waiting for this album to come out because I spent a bit of time first of all trying to pitch the idea to various different labels and sending them the demos we had made between us. My demo was absolute shite so I said to the guys ‘let’s re-do that, let’s actually work together on a demo to start with.’ So we got Away to track the drums up there in Montreal and bounced the files across, I was doing bass here, sending it back up to Dropbox and Jon and Andy are putting the guitars down; so we actually built the demo from scratch again and then we took the same approach to the album itself.

After having the demo in place it was a case of finding a label to go out with and that proved actually pretty difficult. I thought it was going to be fairly easy but I guess people weren’t hearing what we were hearing at all, so we were presenting these ideas to people and they were saying ‘Actually no, I’m really busy right now.’ or ‘Don’t ever bother me again!’ [laughs] There was this kind of double whammy of ‘oh shit’, first of all it’s really difficult to find anybody to come on board the project, and then it’s really difficult to find any way to be able to get this out there at all, so it was a bit demoralising.

Hooking up with these guys I knew the material was good, it’s just that you needed to imagine how it could be; unfortunately I was working with people that were used to that kind of style I guess and that level of incompetence in a person that’s put a demo together so they can forgive that and say I get it. Away was immediately into that and I once I shared the lyrics with him – because he’s like me, he’s a cerebral type - everything fitted into place and he was going ‘Yeah, man, fucking right into this!’ so he brought all that stuff straight away.

Coming back to what we’re doing now we’ve been sat around for a long time waiting for this to come out, in the meantime I’ve got another idea, I’ll just jot that down upstairs; we’ve got ten songs and we’re working all the time, at the moment I’ve got another three or four things on my left hand I’m thinking about and got planned now, it’s ridiculous what’s been going on.

There’s been a sense of twenty odd years of bottled up stuff and now the ideal palate to put that out to, because I suppose Amebix was brilliant, I really enjoyed that but we also had that onus on Amebix was Amebix and you keep it in that broad kind of ball park; with this particular thing you might not like this, there’s going to be stuff that’s not going to be easy for you because it’s not typical, it’s going to be more I guess what you would say is emotionally driven stuff, there’s a lot of depth to things, a lot more heartfelt. I really wanted to go into this territory, open it up and say I don’t give a fuck what

anybody thinks about this, it needs to go out there regardless and fortunately we did it!

I think a lot of people found that with Sonic Mass, they found it to be diverse: some of the heavier stuff they liked, but the acoustic stuff they found to be alien to them for Amebix, it wasn’t necessarily what they expected.

Amebix has always had this acoustic thing going on. We’ve always had this kind of tradition of opening up an album with a sombre mood building thing and having at least one or two more gentle pieces driven not with acoustic but an arpeggio guitar sound that Stig was very much into, and I think we broke a lot of ground back in the early eighties by doing that because all of a sudden it became acceptable to have a very hard punk band also have more melodic, thoughtful and emotional moments involved with stuff and people were very forgiving.

Yeah, I can understand that. Before we talk more about Tau Cross – quite a lot of our readers are big Amebix fans and obviously it was a big important part of your life and always will be, do you ever see a point where the band would ever get back together or are you focused on Tau Cross at the moment?

The short answer to that is no, it’s not going to happen. It’s not because I’m angry about what happened or anything like that; there was a period of a year and a half when I was really fucking bitter and resentful about it to be honest but that’s very much past now and I understand that things were exactly as they should be. The whole thing about getting back with Amebix was an absolute triumph, it was such an unexpected success, we went out and every gig we played we enjoyed, the album we enjoyed making immensely, I can’t think of anything that I didn’t think was great about that; the fact that we had problems at the end of that… it was going to happen, and the overall feeling I get from it is like, there were so many difficulties we had going along that path to actually make that happen. It’s almost like we used a lot of willpower to make these things and the consequences was there was a hell of a lot of damage. The manager at the time, his father died during the recording. Then Roy had a stroke whilst he was mixing the album and we had these weird fucking paranormal things that were going on when we were recording in Northern Ireland. It was just everything was very darkly set against us but we found the time, the momentum and this incredible amount of willpower - mainly through Roy being involved - to make this thing happen, but I guess we made something happen that shouldn’t have happened and I’m thankful, I have no regrets about that.

I think a fantastic thing to go out with Amebix is to say we never actually did anything bad, we stuck to our guns, we were very true to what we believed in and I firmly believed everything that we did was righteous. I would really hate to go on and do a shit album that was half assed after that, so Tau Cross I’m very happy to have fallen into because it’s the first fucking band I’ve been in except for Amebix in fifty one years! [laughs] So a change of pace for you!

Yeah, a change of pace but it frees me up a little bit as well, I don’t think I was feeling necessarily restricted by Amebix but I had responsibilities, particularly because myself and Stig were brothers, we’d grown up together, you have this very sort of tight bond and we had this relationship which was the defining factor of Amebix. Once that began to fall back into the way that it was before 1987, when we started to melt down the first time around it’s like, you know what, we’ve done this before and for the health and wellbeing of both of us let’s actually say now that’ll do. I’m really hoping he’s going to be making good music himself in the future and that we’re going to find different ways because it’s the same vibe, it’s just that, look at an amoeba – we split into two!

I think when it’s family as well there are other ties there and it’s refreshing to hear what you said about no hard feelings, let’s just move on and take it from there.

We have to be like that, Stig will be the same, both of us had a big period of anger and resentment about that but that’s not healthy and when I look back on it now I think all of that stuff was set up for a purpose, and the purpose is it’s brought us where we are today. It’s allowed us both some of that breathing space: he can get his annoying younger brother out of his hair and his face and I can stop being a twat, he can do what he wants to do and we can both have our own space to do stuff, so I’m fine with that. The best thing you can possibly do with these sort of circumstances is find the positive in it and say ‘this is for a reason’ and I know what the reason is now.

I’m glad to hear that. I didn’t know how to approach the subject as I’d been a fan of the band

...both of us had a big period of anger and resentment about that but that’s not healthy and when I look back on it now I think all of that stuff was set up for a purpose, and the purpose is it’s brought us where we are today.

for quite a while and a lot of friends were asking, but it’s refreshing to hear you’ve moved on and everyone seems content with the situation.

Yeah, I think also with these sort of things if you start shit talking a band within a band it doesn’t do anybody any favours. You need to create a little bit of distance first of all, take a big breath in and hold in whatever you’ve got to say at the time; wait until it finds its place, finds expression and you know that things have changed. I think time is a great healer. I love my brother, he’s a great fella, pain in the ass but he’d say that about me! It’s one of them sibling things you know.

Let’s talk about Castle Keep. Do you find that having the outlet for the swords helps inspire the music?

Yes it does. When I first came into making swords it kind of seemed to be a logical way to manifest the same energy as I had been doing through the music, but I actually physically and every other way turned my back on my past life at that point, and that’s when Skye was this remote place – it didn’t even have a bridge – as a result in the early nineties: no internet, no connection with the old world so I was very much in a different environment. I think the creative urge never actually left, it just found expression in different work and there’s actually a particular kind of current which it seemed to completely fit into like a hand in a glove with the whole sword making thing, the lyrical and musical approach - the sort of poetic if you like impressionism of Amebix. The feeling behind that was exactly the same as I was getting from this alchemical process of how to forge and how to work with all the elements in that kind of context and to take the work itself into a physical environment, but it’s also very much a metaphysical thing too.

It sounds a little bit pretentious, but I understood a lot of my own creative energies through transferring that into making swords and the other part of that which is getting into very fine detailing, the jewellery, into the symbolism, the mythology and the group unconscious – the ideas of how these symbols are represented and the sword being a particularly relevant and very potent symbol that we all hold within ourselves. So it’s kind of a logical extension I suppose and these days I’ve moved away more from my relationship with making swords which was on a very visceral, spiritual level when I first got involved with it because I didn’t have to make money from it, I just needed to find outlet for this energy. These days it’s what I do for a business so there’s less of that absolute concentration on that sort of energy, but the different way it manifests is that the actual creative side of it, I’m really pushing that.

For instance I did this piece recently I’d been working on for a year and a half that was really stunning and that really pushed me to delve into doing the very best possible work that I could on this particular sword.

I have a limited vocabulary musically speaking, I’m not a professional musician, I don’t understand music but I have a very intuitive approach and that seems to have served me very well, not only in music but also in swords. I understand how something should look and how it should work, I understand how something should sound too and how it should push your buttons in both the physical manifest world of the swords myth and that of the wordsmith or the songwriter.

Obviously you’re a perfectionist by trade with what you do with the swords but swinging it back to music – actually recording an album, sending files out and getting them back to listen to, how difficult is it for you to say ‘We’ve nailed it’?

I guess it was difficult, we weren’t completely sure, I would have done things differently if we could have done. We realised that we didn’t have any money, we didn’t have much time and we didn’t have many resources so we decided on this idea: we’ll just do the best we possibly can here with what we have and we’ll see how that goes. I’m really pleased with it and we couldn’t have done better, we could have got together in a studio; but with the end of Amebix I didn’t just lose the band, I lost everything that goes with that, so I had to start off with really limited resources and these guys didn’t have much to say we can do this or we can do that. With Away I was saying you’ve got a friend round the corner and he charges $160 a day, let’s try and get the drums tracked in two or three days’ and I’ll find that somehow and put the money up, we did that then Jon really worked hard in his basement, set up the amps and stuff down there and got a really good sound together for the guitars, I sent them the actual disk for ProTools and got them setup. We were really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this, trying to get as much impotence out of the limited stuff we did have, so I’m very proud of it from that point of view.

We could have certainly done a more polished, perhaps more professional album if we were given more time but it’s exactly what it is and one of the great redeeming factors about this is I can listen to this; with some of the Amebix stuff I couldn’t listen time and time again, if I can go back to this and go you know what? The thing that makes it stand out actually to be completely honest there’s no icing on the cake here, you’re seeing exactly the process we went through and really trying to bring everything that we had to bear on that. You can tell the guys have given their very best for the guitars, the drums are fucking great – I’m really pleased with what Away brought into that – and I was really trying myself in my little room next door to experiment vocally and say ‘Push yourself, try and create something unique, something more than you usually do and really bring stuff to the fore!’ It is what it is.

Away was very open to one day in the future doing some live dates, is that something you’d be hoping to do at some point?

Absolutely! There’s no question about that, I don’t play music so I can sit up here on my own in a fucking bedroom in the Isle Of Skye, it’s not about that at all, it’s absolutely about playing live, that’s really at the center of all this. We’ve got three countries and three guys working full time so we’re going to have to juggle a few things to make it happen. For me personally I really want to do it and I feel confident about the way this is going to translate live, most of that album is going to be fucking kicking, if we can get that sorted out and put together the same way we did the Amebix stuff, I’m going to thoroughly enjoy it.

It just seems such a departure, I mean Away’s drumming is so straight when you compare it to Voivod – there’s all the multiple changes, but he’s let the Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor out which I think sounds great.

Yeah! I’d be interested to hear from his angle as well and how he approached that, I guess we’re going to have a bit of time to think about that chatting over these things next week. I’m really aware that in a sense he’s downplayed a lot for this because he’s a very technically proficient guy and he’s used to working with very complex rhythm structures and ideas and get his head around really big challenges, whereas what I was presenting was fairly simple slabs of stuff and saying what would you do with this? He’s sat right into it, he hasn’t overplayed things at all, he’s just really created something very solid and he’s driven the whole thing from underneath. I don’t think anybody’s had that kind of idea like the spotlight is on me kind of stuff, everybody has just said I’m going to make this work and somehow it has!

Can you tell us where the name Tau Cross came from?

I always had that name in the background from Sonic Mass because the album cover for Sonic Mass came about when we were recording up in Derbyshire and I had this clear idea of a monolithic structure, the kind that followed through from Monolith but would also make a powerful image itself which both incorporates early archetypal imagery but also something we can definitely say is our own stamp; so we created this structure which was the front of Sonic Mass and that in itself incorporated the Tau Cross which I became very aware of. It’s actually something which has always been throughout my life – when I was growing up in the eighties and I started riding bikes again after being a kid and getting out of Bristol I always used to go round with this sort of ankh hanging of the back and always believed superstitiously that was going to save me from having any accidents but that came to manifest once again in the symbol of the Hammer and that’s where the Tau is relevant too.

Looking back into mythological angles it’s a pre-Christian thing and it does occur throughout different mythologies, cultures and stuff. I guess it was something that was always present in the background, almost like making a name for something that’s already there but you need to meditate on it a little bit further, so I wanted to be able to understand that and take it outside of the realm of the purely religious and say what does that mean? I’ve no fucking idea what it means but I could say it represents the hammer of Thor in Norse mythology or you could say it does this or that, it could be Hebrew or Egyptian, it could be anything but the fact is it’s there so what is it? Is it a key?

I love the album, I’ve been listening to it pretty constantly in the car and one of my favourite tracks is We Control The Fear – I wanted you to explain how that came together because it’s very acoustic and you hinted along those lines on Sonic Mass.

I was really pleased with that when it was done. I was watching a film and that line came up and I thought what a beautiful lyric, I’ll steal that! [laughs] I then thought ‘let’s think about this as being this otherworldly entity or a conglomeration of the ideas of power itself’, which is impersonal but it is also a dialogue between one person and this overlord type entity, something which is dictating the terms and which is making us understand very clearly: you can do what you like but we understand exactly how you think, we understand how to manipulate you on a completely emotional level as human beings and we do control the fear. So everything we do – the way we control you like puppets – is completely conceived and contrived, we understand the goal, we understand the aims and you don’t, you haven’t got it yet.

It’s this idea which is fairly claustrophobic, it’s not a happy outlook but it can also be applied in the present day political climate. You can see that in the media, particularly since the 9/11 fiasco and all the rest of it, there’s a very keen awareness on how to manipulate the people through neuro-linguistic programmes or through imagery and propaganda; these days we seem particularly prone to very variant forms of propaganda, and with the advent and progress of the internet funnily enough that’s become more so, we’ve become more susceptible because people don’t question so much anymore, they’ll take a meme and literally believe whatever it says without digging behind that.

Couldn’t agree with you more.

When I first wrote it, it was like a hippie 60’s protest song and I could hear it with tambourine in the background, the guy playing an acoustic guitar – almost like Bob Dylan meets Bruce Springsteen – so I really wasn’t sure whether that was going to work. I gave it to Andy and Jon and said I was very keen to have this as part of the canon that was going on for the album and I thought they were going to say they aren’t doing it, but Andy played it to his girlfriend – his wife now – and she was really taken by it: ‘You know what, that really works!’ and it’s like I know it works because it goes in somewhere, it’s a very personal space, it hits a nerve with people and I think that’s why it doesn’t seem incongruous on an album like that to have something which is in essence a protest song from the sixties.

I was giving a mate a lift and that track happened to be on – the first thing he said was ‘New Model Army are sounding different these days!’

Ah right! That’s not the first time I’ve heard that, somebody else made references to Fields Of The Nephilim on ‘Sons Of The Soil’ and that too was a whole load of stuff that people are picking up on because quite consciously I’ve been looking into the music I liked when I was growing up and the feeling that gave me; people like Pink Floyd, Joy Division and to an extent people like Springsteen for that simple guitar driven ballad stuff. Obviously Killing Joke and obviously Sabbath, it was a really good chance to wonder what it would sound like if I would go in here and give this a shot, so it was very liberating I suppose in that sense too.

One last thing – what do you hope people get out of this album?

Give it a couple of listens; what I’m personally getting out of this is that it kind of reinvigorates my love of music again because things have been very bland in some senses. It’s not the most clever or complex album in the world or anything like that but I really feel there’s a connection there, an honesty which carries through and I think people will recognise that before anything else. Either you like this or you don’t, this is what’s going on from now, that’s how we roll. We’re going to keep on doing stuff and really try to keep the doors open rather than saying we need to be like this or that. This has been a great experiment in saying ‘You know what? Play the fuck what you want to play, if it comes from the heart and the soul then it’s real and will make its own way out into the world’.

That’s a perfect way to end! We hope the meeting with Away goes well and you have a good time down at Temples.

I hope to do stuff live as well, I’m dying to get out there before I get too old and fucking decrepit! [laughs]

Michel "Away" Langevin How did the collaboration come together?

We first got in touch with Rob from Amebix because we curated Roadburn 2012, we wanted them to play and they couldn’t make it -- I think it was right before they split up -- Rob and I kept in touch and someday by chance I asked if there was a project he needed drum tracks for, he said he had a full album ready and he was going to do it with Roy (Mayorga) but he was really busy with Stone Sour and also producing and he really couldn’t get involved, so Rob was left with a full album worth of songs; he sent it to me and I really liked it.

I immediately went into a studio in Montreal to rework some drum patterns and we rearranged everything based on these demos. Andy (War/Plague) and Jon (Misery) then recorded on top of my demos so it built up this way, everybody recorded their own parts in their own respective cities sharing a dropbox folder.

How was that experience?

I didn’t really have to restrain my playing except that the music is a little bit more straight forward than Voivod so it’s a different approach but I was raised on punk rock and Motorhead.

That’s what I thought – when I heard the album I heard a lot of Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor like the opening hi-hat…

Oh yeah, exactly! Phil’s my all time favourite drummer , his freestyle I think is amazing, it really brought the punk metal out of me. The guys are excited – they’ve sent me ten more songs that I need to demo this summer.

The album with Rob singing sounds like a natural progression from Sonic Mass so I can imagine with being in a progressive band do you find having that outlet to play straight punk rock gives you more freedom as an artist?

Definitely but I will try to put a little more backwards beats on the next album so it might be a little less straight forward, a little more Voivodish. It’s definitely a liberating experience. I’ve always loved Rob’s music, I’ve been a big fan of Amebix from way back.

While we’re on the subject of artwork – you’ve had one book of artwork released.

Worlds Away is still available on Hi Fidelity Entertainment’s site: hifi247.com/worlds-awayvoivod-the-art-of-michel-langevin.html Any plans for another release?

Yeah, I have two other books in the works with Spiderpress but I still have a 1000 copies left of Worlds Away. It’s a long process for me as I’m very busy playing music, just to do the art and layout is long work but two more are planned.

Do you prefer to be really busy or do you prefer to having a set amount of time?

I really like being busy, I’m lucky because whenever I’m not recording or touring with Voivod I do art for other bands as well – tons of CD covers, t-shirts so I spend a lot of time between tours doing art.

What are the plans live with Tau Cross? I know you’re hoping to meet with Rob at Temples We’re thinking of touring early next year, Rob is very busy forging swords! His lyrics are very special although we’ve never met so it’s going to be great to see him at Temples.

I was raised on punk rock and Motorhead... Phil ('Philty Animal' Taylor) is my all time favourite drummer

n orga M ohn J i y sse wb a e i M v r a Inte istin r C tos Pho

Legendary Canadian metallers Voivod once again grace the UK stages with their sweaty, roaring live show. Sonic Shocks takes the opportunity for a chat with frontman Denis Belanger, aka Snake, as he gets ready to face our crowds...

First of all, let’s talk about your recent US tour with Napalm Death, can you tell us how good it was to get on the road with those guys?

It was wonderful, it’s one of the best tours we’ve had, everything was there – people showed up every night, almost sold out and the vibe was great between us and Napalm, it was a wonderful tour – even though it was wintertime and it was a really cold winter [laughs] we managed to get across the US and it was wonderful.

Excellent! It seemed like a good hardcore tour with lots of bands that have good crossover.

Oh yeah, now it’s fun because it’s bands that we’ve seen them but have never had a chance to tour with them and so when you bring these two bands all together people show up and it gets crazy!

As I’ve said we’re really excited about you coming over to Europe – you’ve always had a good relationship with your European fans, how exciting is it to come back over here and do some dates on this side of the pond?

Right now there’s a good vibe and we’re in a good stretch so I hope people are going to show up like they did in the US, it’s going to be a fun night that’s for sure.

I was talking to some friends of mine about the first time we saw you guys at the Electric Ballroom with Possessed back in 1986 which is almost 30 years ago! Can you tell us any memories you might have of that gig?

With Possessed back in the day I remember it was crazy – I don’t remember EVERY night though! [laughs] The fun part was the tour manager of Possessed who was 55/60 driving the van taking care of the kids y’know?

Sounds like a blast, it must have been a good time!

She put a smile on our face every day, the boys were real excited but the show was crazy!

I Remember it being a pretty wild show, it was one of the thrash shows that people still talk about to this day in London. I’ve also read you’ve had a health scare that’s limited

I remember all what happened with Piggy... I’m happy to be still alive, in good shape.

your touring so now that you’re back on tour does it make them more special after that period?

Yes of course, I’ve had health issues, I remember all what happened with Piggy and I was freaking out saying to myself ‘it’s my turn now’ and there’s this ghost above you but [I] managed to get through it so I’m happy to be still alive, in good shape.

It’s good to have you back!

The ultimate test was the tour with Napalm Death, I realised that my shape got really better and it was a test for me but I managed to get through it – we had no days off which is pretty intense!

Yeah, I can imagine!

I did good, I just wish it’s going to stay like that! [laughs] I was going to say you’ve been a vocalist for a long time now, people underestimate how difficult it is for a vocalist to keep his voice in check especially for songs you wrote when you were a teenager. Do you have any extra special things you have to do to take care of your voice these days?

Not really, I try to eat better, hydrate myself better. I was pretty rough on my body over the years so I had to do some changes but it goes with the age – when you get old it sucks! [laughs] You have to stop doing things fast!

Indeed – start behaving!

I managed to get through it pretty easy, it’s just a routine of changing the way you do things overall. It’s for the better after all.

That’s good, man! Since the release of Target Earth you’ve been through a line up change – can you tell us a little bit about the new bass player?

Ah Rocky! He’s great, man, we vibed the whole thing when he got into the band, he’s a funny dude, really optimistic, he’s really happy to be there. Right now this band kicks ass! He’s so tight with the band.

I was going to say Dan had a really hard job coming in after the tragedy with Dennis before, do you feel that over the years he’s stamped more of his own personality to the songs you guys are writing now?

Well of course it’s hard to say but Dan is not Piggy but I think he managed to recreate the spirit of Piggy’s playing and so that’s the most important thing – I don’t want him to BE Piggy, I want him to be him. The way that he sees music ; he grew up hearing Piggy’s stuff and so it’s all inside of him – he grew up with Voivod – and he’s able to really recreate the spirit in the songs. That’s quite something by itself.

It is, you guys have got such a unique sound and in the beginning people were questioning whether you’d be able to continue but I think one thing you have proven to people over the years is that the band is like a real family. You had Jason [Newsted] for a while and are still on good terms with him so it seems there’s a real vibe with the band.

Rocky grew up with Voivod as well so him being there is like a dream or something so he understands what Dan’s tried to do. We’ve ended up creating new songs right now, it’s going to be pretty fun to do, it represents what Voivod is right now.

We’ve just heard the new track from the 7 inch split with label mates At The Gates – I understand it’s something you plan to do more of in the future. Can you tell us the thinking behind that?

Well we want to release songs here and there so we did We Are Connected with At The Gates, we want to release a little bit of the new stuff as it goes.

I guess it’s also difficult with the amount of touring you guys are doing as well to get back

in and do a full album.

Yeah that’s going to be part of it – We Are Connected’s going to be on the next record – but we want to release songs here and there to keep the momentum right now. With Target Earth we released it, I got sick and everything that was planned after that was kind of thrown away so it was an idea from Century Media, we agree with the idea and I think it’s a good way to keep the fans knowing what’s happening with the band.

When you write new material do you listen back to previous work to ensure there’s some sort of continuity or is each record a representation of where the band is at that current moment in time?

It depends, sometimes I have to go back, have some flashes of the past [laughs]! Killing Technology or something like that. We Are Connected – the song is related to something that happened so it’s not Sci-Fi or anything like that. From one song to another I try to get some stuff that’s more personal : what happened with the band, how we live in the band.

Do you find that becomes easier with age?

I think it’s possible that it has something to do with it, you live and learn and what you learn drives you.

That’s a good philosophy.

Sometimes I want to go out and do something out in space, I try to vary the subject as much as I can.

Yeah, you had a period when you were away from the band and recorded an album separate from Voivod – is that something you see yourself doing in the future?

Yeah, it’s possible, I always have offers to do stuff with other people but sometimes it’s hard to combine, right now it’s VV all the time, doing another project takes a lot of time and if you’re with different guys it’s hard but I’m always open for creativity.

When you write stuff do you write separately and then bring the ideas together or is it a rehearsal type scenario?

It’s all that, sometimes we set up with a little computer to try to create ideas, it’s a long process – we’ll start from one point but nobody knows how it’s going to end up. It’s also the best for the song, we all have an input.

Your albums have always shown a musical diversity from hardcore to psychedelic rock – if you had to pick the album that displays that the best which one would it be?

I would say Dimension Hatröss, but Outer Limits was something else – it’s really hard to pick one!

Interview by Cristina Massei John Lodge is a busy man. While touring the world with the legendary Moody Blues (please take a bow), he’s promoting his second solo album ’10,000 Light Years Ago’ - released in May on Cherry Red’s offspring Esoterica Antenna. Surely he could afford to sit back and revel in his glorious past, but that past made him the musician he is today: one of a dying breed, one of those prompted by that fervid need to share an emotion.

Just what we’ve been missing.

So you’re just coming back from the USA – how did that tour go?

It was wonderful, thank you. We had a great tour, nine weeks on the road; we started on the north east up in Niagara then the west coast and we finished in Denver, Colorado.

Does being on the road still have the same charm?

It’s a long time on the road you know, particularly in America the distances are long – it’s a big country – so there’s a lot of travelling, but it’s wonderful because people want to see us perform our music.

Let’s talk about the album – why now 22 years after your last solo album?

I’ve been thinking about recording; the last Moody Blues album was ten years ago, a Christmas album called December, and we haven’t been in the studio since then and I was really wanting to get back into the studio. I had this phrase going in my head for a while, ‘the future is always in reach, but the past is gone forever’ and I thought that would make a really good theme for an album; so I wrote a song called ’10,000 Light Years Ago’ and I knew that was going to be the title track, but I didn’t know whether it was going to be a Moody Blues or a John Lodge album.

Recording it became really different, I wanted to get back to how we recorded those very first albums with a group of 4/5 people creating an album together and I found a way of doing that.

I think getting the Moody Blues to do that in a studio was pretty impossible but I realised I could do that by myself so I decided I wasn’t going to wait any longer, it was just a case of finding the right musicians to form this band with me.

The drummer I got from the Moody Blues – Gordon Marshall, Alan Hughes on keyboards who produced the album with me and guitarist Chris Spedding who I like really much.

You worked with him on ‘Natural Avenue’ as well.

Yes. Chris has also got his own band and plays with people like Roxy Music; I love his guitar playing and I thought if I could have a core band together of these four people then I could make the album. I managed to get the four people together and they all wanted to make the album so we set off on our journey!

On ‘Simply Magic’ you worked with Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder – was that written with them in mind or did you involve them at a later time?

I involved them at a later time – I’d written the song on a six string acoustic guitar, when I was playing it I thought ‘this sounds like Moody Blues from way back. It’s exactly a beautiful part for Ray to play on flute.’ I rang Ray up and he said yes so we went into the studio and recorded all the flute parts. While we in the studio Ray said ‘Why don’t we ask Mike as well?’ So I rang him up – Mike lives in California – and said ‘Mike I’ve written this song, we’d really love you to play Mellotron on it for me?’ I sent all the parts to California and Mike went into his studio and recorded his parts. It was really nice, it sort of completed the circle for me because ’10,000

Light Years Ago’ is about who I am today and Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder were part of my musical growing up, it was really nice that they should partake and be involved in the song.

We just did some concerts in California, one was in San Jose and Mike came along and it was really nice to see him again because it’s been a long time. We had a great reunion and lots of photographs!

How’s Ray’s health?

Ray is Ray, I’ve known him since I was fourteen and he’s great, a wonderful sense of humour and a great smile so it was fun to be with him again, to share those moments together is really nice and also our lives. Ray didn’t want to tour – he stopped ten years ago, he felt it was far too energetic and stressful, he still thinks the same today!

Another song I imagine is very autobiographical is ‘Those Days In Birmingham’ – would you like to tell us more about that one?

I was on stage one night and I was looking at the equipment and I realised there was loads of it on the stage: lighting rigs, sound rigs, trucks, buses and aeroplanes. I went straight back to my schooldays, when every lunchtime I went to this café that had a jukebox in there playing 45 records - at that time there was no such thing as a 45 record you bought in England, they were all 78’s – I’d drop a coin in and listen to the music: Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and Buddy Holly.

I suddenly realised that’s what I’d really like to be a part of and so I bought a guitar and learned to play a few chords, formed a band, got a van, put equipment in the van and started to play gigs around Birmingham and started to play at places like Tyburn House and Mothers. I just wanted to put that in a quick synopsis or précis of my life as it brought me back to being on the side of the stage with the Moody Blues.

Do you still follow the local scene in Birmingham?

I think Birmingham has got a rich scene, there’s a lot of great bands and musicians and singers. The live scene is still vibrant and that’s the way it is nowadays: the record industry has almost disappeared, you hear about artists selling millions of albums but that’s very rare these days because there’s no way you can go to record stores and discuss with people, so it goes back to live music and bands playing live in clubs.

Does that have anything to do with The Moody Blues preferring to tour these days rather than record?

I think it’s one of the things. We’re asked to perform concerts every day of the year which is absolutely wonderful so when we tour our promoters and agent mention we have another tour next year – would you like to do this? I like performing live. I like recording as well, but when you record something you really need an outlet, other people than you:

record company, publishers, people that will take what you’ve recorded and actually make sure it is available to everyone.

There’s very few music men and people in the record business that understand that and can do it, so it’s really frustrating when you write a new song at three o’clock in the morning and wonder if anyone’s going to listen to this… You really want people to buy or listen to the record so you can get on stage and perform it. There’s a lot of factors why we haven’t made a new album.

Back to your album – which song would you pick to represent it as a whole?

I think all of them really but ’10,000 Light Years Ago’ is probably the one that sums everything up because it is talking about the future. The opening line ‘There we were standing closer than the universe’… in other words the whole universe was in front of us and what you do about it? You have to think about who you are before you can answer that question, and when I thought to myself ‘who am I?’ I realised who I was – all of these musical influences over my life: songs like ‘I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock’n’Roll Band)’, the ballads, all those different songs made me who I am.

When did you decide that you were going to be a musician full time? I know you did a degree in engineering…

It actually took over, it crept on me. I finished college and Ray Thomas asked if I wanted to join the Moody Blues because Ray and I had wrote together and so I went down and never really thought about the future, I just thought ‘I’ve got to see Ray and make some music’. It was only months/years later I realised I was a full time musician!

About the songs on this album will we get a chance to hear them live?

I’d like to. We’re obviously on the Moody Blues tour at the moment, I’ll wait for things to happen naturally – I waited this long to make the album because it had to come at a natural place in my life, and doing live shows will be exactly the same.

Talking about the Moody Blues tour coming up what can we expect from the set list? It must be difficult to pick the songs…

Obviously there are songs we have to do – ‘Nights in White Satin’, ‘Tuesday Afternoon’, ‘I’m just a singer (in a Rock And Roll Band)’, but what we like to do is take the audience on a sort of musical journey; each song has a real place in the set list, taking them on a wave and trying to keep the emotion flowing throughout the concert. At the end hopefully the crowd have gone away with an emotion that brings them back wanting to see the Moody Blues again. Just like an album in the old days, you’d play it all the way through and it’s what made you want to play

it again – you’ve got to get the right songs, the right emotions across musically.

Personally I think that’s what missing in a lot of music nowadays – more of it is disposable and less gets through to people…

I think over the last decade most recordings take place in the control room and you’re not in the studio. You’re trying to create and you’ve got a producer there and an engineer and everyone’s putting their vibe on what you’re trying to create, you can’t get the emotion in there. If you’re in a studio on your own you are exploring creativity and creativity is emotional. I find that really important and that’s why I like releasing an album on vinyl: you can share the music more with your friends, analyse, discuss it and feel real emotion.

That’s what I look for in music all the while – emotion. Not the generic disposable music with a couple of catchphrases. I think it’s missing from life in general – sharing is about emotion, and we don’t seem to do much of that with anything in life.

Musically speaking is there anything you haven’t tried yet that you want to do?

What’s wonderful about being a musician and loving music is that things happen for you out of the blue, things you’d never ever think about doing. A couple of years ago we were approached to do a bluegrass album, well I’ve never thought about bluegrass with the Moody Blues but we made an album and ended up on stage in the Grand Old Opry playing bluegrass with all these wonderful players, was such a great experience.

If you love music and you love playing all these things turn up for you to do. It’s much better not to try and chase a dream that might not be the right dream for you – I wrote a song called ‘House of Four Doors’ and that was what it was about: go and explore, go and see what’s on different avenues, you might suddenly have a Damascus moment!

Interview by Matt Dawson - Photos Justin Reich With Coma Ecliptic on the horizon and a striking video for The Coma Machine just being released we catch up with vocalist/keyboardist Tommy Rogers about the album concept, how the video links together, touring as a father plus the plans regarding Thomas Giles material.

Recently you released the video for The Coma Machine and I’d like to ask how has the reception for that been so far?

It’s been good man, I think overall that song and Memory Palace – I’ve been feeling good about it, everyone seems to really enjoy where the direction is going, there are some that dislike it but that’s the nature of the world. With this kind of record we’ve been done with it for so long, we’ve been anxiously waiting for people to hear it with fingers crossed hoping people will like it so it’s a relief to hear positive feedback from what we’ve released so far.

Wasn’t it last September that recording started?

I believe so, it’s a great experience and I’m happy as we get closer for people to hear it.

I was watching the Coma Machine video quite intently to see if I could see anything to analyse the night it was released [laughs]!

Honestly it was a tough video, we had decided on the song but in the story it’s the very beginning and not a lot happens as far as the story goes – it’s basically him preparing himself to go into the coma so when I was talking with Wes I was asking how can we create footage?

Basically he came up with this guy’s life and why he’s leaving, I wanted to create a very unstable character who wanted to get out of his current life, the neat thing is the story never

discusses what that entails so we had to write as we went along, it adds to the story I think it almost creates dialogue to the record which is pretty cool.

Yes because there’s a letter that he notices, someone he’s fighting with – which I presume is himself as he gets the events together…

Yeah and he’s not all there, he’s very confused and he’s basically fighting himself trying to get out of his current state and finds something better.

There’s been talk of the album’s story being like the Twilight Zone but I feel it also reminds me of Night Gallery as well. What’s also interesting is the different moods there are throughout the album…

Yeah, when I was coming up with the story I wanted something I had a bit more freedom with, in the past there’s been times when writing a concept record where you get stuck, with me there’s hours where you can go off the wall, you always want to create lyrics that go well with the music and sometimes I can be really tough. With this scenario I was opening myself up to I can create anything – these past lives can be as bizarre or as calm as I want them to be – I knew it would be a better way to create unique storylines yet "With this scenario I was opening myself up to I can create everything fits to past lives can be as bizarre or as calm as I want them to be music really well.

Overall I think from a better way to create unique storylines yet everything fits t day one when we started writing it had a very dark song quality to it and I wanted to write something that fit that mood, I approached it as if I wrote a miniseries what would it be?

It’s a very different approach from the Parallax story which was the last two albums along with hints on some of the others.

There’s actually a small connection in this story – it’s only in one song. I originally was going to create a story that was previous to Parallax but it didn’t really work well so I incorporated one of the characters, his early life is this guy’s past life on one of the songs, it’s very subtle. I like to tie everything together in some way or another!

So far with the teasers of Coma Machine and Memory Palace have you had any weird theories going around?

Not really from what I’ve seen. We’ve done a song right near the end of the album and one at the beginning, the beginning one’s pretty obvious and Memory Palace is more a transitional period for him.

You experimented with keyboards on Dim Ignition – how was it to have a track that mostly focuses on that?

It was something I written and we all liked it, I don’t think there’s any guitars in that song so that might be the only song in our discography like that, it has a cool vibe to it and fits that moment in the record really well, it gets you ready because that song is just him travelling.

Later this year you’ll be touring with Haken in September so I have to ask how it is to be touring with them as they’re one of the new wave of prog/tech crossover bands coming along?

They’re great, we discovered them a year or two and were instant fans, they’re a great match and I know Dan [Briggs] has become friends with a few of the guys, I’m glad it’s happening.

Last time you mentioned about time being full for you these days with you becoming a father so I have to ask – how is fatherhood treating you at the moment?

It’s great! I’m actually watching my son play with his truck toy right now. We have a busy year so it’ll be tough being away from him a lot but we’ll find moments for him to get on the road, he’s growing up and starting to listen to music a little more which is cool. I’ll also be writing because we’ll be on the road so much, trying to get some stuff for the future done. anything – these Aside from his father’s work what bands does he get excited – I knew it would be for?

We’ve been listening to the new Faith No More a lot, it’s a really to music really well." good record – comeback records are tough but they did a great job.

What other albums have you been listening to?

Weirdly I’ve been listening to a lot of Billy Joel, Dodheimsgard and the new Mew I’m loving.

Recently you guys did Bohemian Rhapsody – you’ve done it partly in the past…

Yeah we did the end rock section when we toured overseas and we were planning to do something special for New England Metal Fest and it was fun, we put our take on it but who knows if we’ll play it more.

Would you ever consider doing another cover record?

It has been talked about, probably not but it was a fun experience when we did it and super beneficial for our writing, I think that record really opened us up to trying new things and we learned a lot from that record, we learned so much for recording, writing and what we can do as musicians.

Will there be another live record similar to the one for Parallax?

I wouldn’t want to do the same idea but I’m sure there’ll be some live material.

Now I read there’s about 80% clean vocals on this album – do you feel with this direction there’ll still be a balance between harsh and clean or going towards more clean?

It all depends on the music really, with this record screaming just didn’t work for most of it – I spent a lot of time with variations of songs, every vocalist is finding a balance for what works; I’m never like should I scream more or sing more? It’s just like what I need to do for this part to work, for the record to flow well. That’s the thing – people are like ‘why aren’t you screaming?’ Well if they knew how silly screaming was for a lot of this. Maybe I’ll just record a harsh version! [laughs] When it comes to the new material you’re thinking about writing on the road does that include Thomas Giles work?

Yeah, I’m probably going to start diving into that, we’ll see, I really enjoy writing that stuff.

Interview and photos

by Mark Fletcher

The Dirty Youth hit Reading’s Bowery District supporting InMe, just before their sophomore effort ‘Gold Dust’ is due to hit real and virtual stores around the world. Mark Fletcher catches up with Matt and Danni to talk about the album, the past, the future and a canine stage invasion…

Why is a band with nearly 7 million Youtube hits and nearly 50k Facebook followers supporting a band with less than 0.5 million youtube hits and only 28k facebook followers?

Matt: I think InMe have been doing this a long time perhaps pre-facebook. I remember watching them in 2000 at Reading Festival main stage and I think it’s very easy to forget what these guys have achieved.

Danni: They were around before the whole social media thing which is why you have the numbers you have, but their following is represented by what you see at their live shows.

So tell us about The Dirty Youth: who are you, where are you from, and where did you get the name?

Danni: We’re from all parts of Wales, we’re a five piece and our newest member Freddie has been with us just a year and he’s from Swindon so he’s the only English man.

Matt: Technically he’s Australian.

Danni: We’ve been around nearly eight years in August.

Matt: The name comes from a T-Shirt brand we wanted to launch and we thought ‘The Dirty Youth’ would look cool as a T-shirt brand and we decided to call the band that!

Danni: It’s a rubbish story really but

when we wanted to start the clothing brand I thought the name would look cool on thongs and boxers… then we ended up using it for the band.

Where do your influences come from when it comes to song writing?

Matt: I don’t listen to that much really but I can listen to metal, when we’re in the van we listen to hip hop, and I like the occasional blast of boogie boogie on vinyl.

Danni: Individually we all listen to different music. I don’t listen to what Fred listens to and vice versa and we fight every day about what goes on the radio; but when we come together in a room to write, it works. Personally I’m a pop diva and I thrive on having a band behind me but we do all like Queen and Freddie Mercury which is where the showmanship comes from.

With your online popularity, do you feel you are under selling yourselves at all?

Matt: We can only play what we’re given. We’ve played things like Bloodstock to Download so we’ve been incredibly lucky and one of the great things, and drawbacks really, is that our fan base is so vast. We have fans in places like Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and Kazakhstan all thanks to YouTube and it’s not through specific marketing campaigns, it’s all DIY and people seeing us and wanting to show their mates.

With a fan base like that, do you have plans to play abroad?

Danni: We’ve played a lot around Europe and would love to play beyond that maybe in the States but that is all down to funds that we don’t have.

Matt: We’ve played plenty of festivals in random places where a silly amount of people have turned up and we’ve got back to the hotel and we’ve been on TV it’s weird! We also have a tribute band in Japan called ‘The Dirty Youth’.

‘Red Light Fix’ started recording in 2007 and was released in 2011 on Universal. ‘Gold Dust’ started in 2013 and it’s self-released this week. Why so long to put an album together?

Danni: We recorded it and someone broke it! We had put everything on a hard drive and it

got dropped and we lost everything so we had to do it all again.

Matt: (about Red Light Fix) Basically Danni and I recorded an EP of ‘Requiem of the Drunk’ and ‘Fight’ and released that in 2008 and we had lots of people coming back to us saying we should put a band together. So we did. We had this TV thing where we were asked to go on ITV and the new guys hadn’t heard the song, so we got them practicing in front of the mirror two hours before we shot the video.

Lets talk about ‘Gold Dust’. How does it differ from your first album?

Danni: It’s more us. We wanted to do something that was us, so we did.

‘Alive’ and ‘The One’ are big tracks.

Matt: With ‘The One’ we did a crazy video with robots and stuff which managed to get into the Daily Mirror!

How do expect sales to go?

Matt: We’ve done alright so far to be honest. We’ve already sold a thousand at shows, we were on the front page of iTunes the other day and you don’t get to be there if your rubbish!

What’s your favourite tracks on the album?

Danni: ‘Invincible’ and ‘Bedroom Karate’, the two we don’t play live!

Matt: I think ‘Alive’ is the best written song and ‘I’m Not Listening to You’ because I put the ‘Back to the Future’ lead break in it.

You have an impressive CV of festivals and support to big name acts, what’s in the bag for this year and when are you looking to headline yourselves?

Danni: We did last October. We booked a fifteen day tour and we thought no one would turn up but then the pre-sales started coming through and when we went out we were getting crowds of 150 per show.

Why such a big gap between your two albums?

Matt: We had a few member problems with drummers; one was a close friend who had a massive drug problem and it got quite scary really, we wanted to give him time to sort things out and eventually we had the get rid of him and it was quite sad.

But it was the best thing for him. He is alright now and we have started speaking again.

Do you find being a female front to the band, you get all of the attention?

Danni: Not really, I think Leon gets more attention than me because he looks like he should be in a boy band! But I didn’t realise how strong my image was until I changed my hair colour and started to get death threats from angry fans. So it’s not all about the music…

Tell me about the worst gig you have ever played.

Matt: How long have you got? Hhmmm….. Got it! We got attacked by a dog on stage. We had a song called ‘Kill’ and there was this dog and he was growling and shit and he got on stage and the lyrics went ‘Kill Kill Kill’ and this dog just launched at us and attacked the guitarist. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was when we played in Mansfield at this wrestling ring. There were these two midgets fighting this guy and wrestling and we had to play in between wrestling matches. It was awful.

Tell me about the biggest star stricken moment.

Danni: Jericho for me.

Matt: Dolly Parton for me. We had the same publicity people and I got a call from them asking if I wanted to meet Dolly. I said ‘Fuck Yes’ and got in a car and went over to this arena, passed security and into her dressing room and she said ‘ Oh so you’re the Dirty Youth?’. I was calling my Granddad saying listen up guess who I’m with? And we got some good photos, she was amazing!

Interview and live photos by Cristina Massei Their last album ‘Fantastic Planet’ was released in 1996 and is considered one of the era’s most influential rock records. Tool’s Maynard James Keenan famously once said “Failure has been a huge inspiration to me. They say amateurs borrow and professionals steal. Well over the years this pro has robbed those poor saps blind.”

Despite inspiring many now established artists on their path to fame, Failure never got for themselves the success they deserved. Fans of the band are however a pretty loyal lot with a good memory, and they’re out in force when the LA alt-rockers pay a visit at The Garage in London’ Islington.

The following day, we catch up with guitarist Greg Edwards to talk about Failure’s brand new album ‘The Heart is A Monster’ and the future of the band.

Next year will be the 20th anniversary of ‘Fantastic Planet’ – why did you wait so long and why did you decide to do this now?

The way the band ended after ‘Fantastic Planet’ was not on the best terms; it was a chaotic situation, I had a drug problem and it just couldn’t continue on at that point, it had to end.

In the intervening years we all went on to do other things and at some point Ken and I reconnected. We both had children, enough time had passed and we were both healthy.

Older and wiser.

Well yeah theoretically at least! We started talking about the idea of it, Ken’s wife would sarcastically slip in remarks all the time about us working together again, it just happened slowly

and naturally and it got to the point when we were writing again. We wrote a few things and we thought they were of value and that we should think about making another record.

I’ve been reading your diary where you talk about discussions on the order of the songs on the album; the outcome seems to show you being grown up, finding a compromise that maybe you couldn’t have found back then…

The same situation during ‘Fantastic Planet’ would not have been resolved so peacefully. Part of me has a concern whether or not the end result was actually better just because there was more peaceful adult compromise involved; the childish part of me wants to go back to acting like that but it’s certainly a more peaceful environment. As I wrote in that piece I believe all in all that made for a better sequence.

The childish part of us just wants to have the last word sometimes.

For sure.

Last night was your first UK show in over 20 years – the fans were really enthusiastic, did you expect such a reception after all this time?

We’ve had that kind of response when we’ve played shows in the US which was at first really surprising to us - not that you get used to it or take that for granted. I think we were still surprised of this being London and the UK where we really didn’t have much of a presence at all even when we were first together, so we had no idea of what to expect but that audience last night was as enthusiastic and emotional as any we’ve had in the US, so it really felt good.

You played three songs from the new album last night – how did you think the reaction was from the crowd?

I think it was good, I was happy with it, one of the songs ‘Hot Traveler’ a lot of people have heard and then the other two I was happy with the reaction, I heard feedback after the show

and people seemed very positive. I know personally when I go to see a band play and they play songs I’ve never heard before it can be difficult in a live setting, and there’s certain song that you might love in the recorded version that you might not understand at all just hearing live for the first time and vice-versa, but I think they came across. We were concentrating on not fucking it up, I was relieved to get through it without making a catastrophic mistake!

Did the new songs come naturally or did it take a while to get that vibe back?

I would say it came out very naturally, there were different phases of where the songs came from, some of the first songs came from ideas that I had for a while that became songs and then there was a bunch of time where we just all played as a band and just recorded - we did that before ‘Fantastic Planet’ too - so we had hours and hours of jamming and playing spontaneous things, then we’d go back through and pick out moments that could be expanded into songs, so there were a bunch that came out of that. Then when we were in the final finishing phase of recording in the studio there were songs written over two/three days in the studio out of necessity because we didn’t have a full record yet. It was those methods that gave us the body of songs.

Are you pleased with the final result?

If I did have any reaction whether or not to change something it’s too soon for me to even know, but I am happy with it. I think that, given the time that’s passed, to me we’ve made emotionally and thematically the follow up to ‘Fantastic Planet’.

You used Pledge with the album…

We used Pledge like a pre-order method.

There’s a vinyl of Fantastic Planet you put out as well – that’s Pledge exclusive?

The vinyl is only on Pledge yes.

If you had to pick one song to represent the album which one would it be?

That’s what I was talking about on the sequencing thing – you’d want the first song on the record to have a kind of totality somehow that almost never happens, it would be really difficult – I would have the same problem with ‘Fantastic Planet’, you have to listen to the entire thing and it’s the feeling you get from the whole record. That’s what I would pick.

It’s like a movie: you can’t just open with the best scene. It creates anxiety in that, no matter what, the first thing they hear is going to be the first notes of that song; but in the end you have to create the sequence that flows the best, the one that allows the record to build and grieve, tension and release. You can’t get so caught up in putting the ‘strong’ songs first or a single in a certain position, we didn’t give thought to any of that stuff.

Failure influenced a lot of bands but were never ‘mainstream’ – is that something you miss or don’t care?

I certainly have no investment in the idea of being famous, but the idea of a lot of people being affected by the music is very appealing to me.

So Maynard James Keenan saying he robbed you blind… (both laughing) That’s him being funny, and I appreciate that because we’re good friends with him and he’s a great artist. I don’t hear him obviously ripping us off but he likes the general sensibility about us – that’s his way of saying ‘I like them a lot’, he could never just simply say it like that.

What was your biggest influence?

The Beatles and then there’s a lot of The Cure – earlier Cure – the mood of it, especially a bittersweet sensibility that was in there and also Robert Smith’s voice sounds insane but very beautiful at the same time. A lot of Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, but also I’m a big fan of ‘Meddle’ and ‘Animals’, not so much ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, more ‘The Wall’ and things off ‘The Final Cut’… but I’ve always appreciated them in their different incarnations – Roger Waters’ lyrics and the way thematically he deals with the theme.

A very rich set of influences. What is the future from here?

Right now we’re just focusing on what’s right in front of us, but we certainly want to tour as long as people want to hear our music, and based on how the making of this record went it’d be easy for us to imagine doing another one.

Any plans for more UK shows?

Definitely, we were just talking about it after the show last night, it’s a shame we just came for the one show. Last night was a really positive experience for us.

Where does this leave Autolux?

We pretty much finished the next record and we’re really happy with it.

Interview by John Morgan Photos Cristina Massei

As far as comebacks go, that of Rock Goddess is one not many expected but everyone welcomed with open arms - and raised horns. The girls are backstage at Camden’s Underworld, getting ready to meet their UK fanbase again after 32 years. While Jody preserves her vocal chords for tonight, Tracey and Julie find the time for a chat with John Morgan…

So 32 years since your last UK show – how does it feel to be back?

Tracey: It’s surreal isn’t it?

Julie: It’s weird but wonderful Tracey: Very exciting.

You used to be regulars on the London scene back in the day so how is it to come back and do a London show? I know you did a couple of warm up shows over in Barcelona and Madrid…

Tracey: I wasn’t nervous in Spain at all but I am today to be honest but I think that’s all part of the adrenaline buzz and the performance, you got to have a little bit of nerves.

What was the idea of doing a couple of club shows in Spain first, was it just to fine tune everything?

Tracey: Yeah, just to take care of any technical problems that we may have had with anything.

Julie: See how the set works…

Tracey: We’ve changed it around a little bit because we’ve thought that song may be better later or earlier in the set so it was good we did those shows really so we can get it right for

London.

I’ve read a lot of recent press and this phrase ‘unfinished business’ keeps coming up, is that where you feel Rock Goddess is at the moment, you feel you have something to say with the band?

Tracey: Yeah, we’re not going to call the album unfinished business anymore but we still have a song of the same name but we just want to carry on what we did before because that’s what we do best.

Julie: It’s unbelievable it’s been thirty two years! We’ve come back and it feels like a few years ago.

Tracey: It doesn’t feel like thirty two years!

How have your friendships evolved over the years? You’ve obviously moved to Spain and Jody and Julie are obviously sisters, have you kept in touch much over the years?

Tracey: Me and Jody kept in touch all along really, obviously I lost touch with Julie because she got wed and had a family and all that but me and Jody nearly formed a band with a couple of mates from Girlschool back in 2006 before I moved to Spain but we’ve always kept in touch.

You’re going to be playing some classics but you also mentioned new material – has that been in the works for a while?

Tracey: Jody’s the writer in the band and she sent us Mp3s of the songs that she wanted us to learn to record on the new album, we rehearsed remotely because I was in Spain, I put my bass parts to it and Julie put her drum parts to it but Jody is the songwriter.

Any new material tonight?

Julie: Five or six songs.

I’ve got one of the old albums here. [Shows both a copy of the self titled debut album] Do you remember much about that time such as that photoshoot for instance?

Julie: I remember having that photo taken!

Tracey: Me and Jody were eighteen/nineteen and Julie’s four years younger than us. I went to school with Jody – we met in our first year of secondary school in Mayfield comprehensive, we were eleven when we met and thirteen when we started the band, Julie was nine! I used to go round Jody and Julie’s for tea ; ‘no peas for me!’ I used to say to your mum, I love them now! [laughs] Now when you decided to do these gigs was there any song you both were looking forward to doing in particular?

Tracey: Satisfied then Crucified. We start the set with that and always have done even after I wasn’t in the band.

Julie: We recently added Make My Night which really rocks.

Tracey: We’ve only rehearsed it twice and we’re playing it tonight because we love it, it’s like the old Goddess!

You obviously used to play festivals such as Reading back in the day and with Iron Maiden, I believe you have some coming up?

Julie: Sweden Rock.

Tracey: Headbangers in Germany then headlining a festival in France on Halloween then Hard Rock Hell.

You used to tour quite extensively - the big Def Leppard and Iron Maiden tours – in regards to a full scale tour would you want to do that or rather a few gigs here and there?

Tracey: I think it’s necessary to tour especially if you’ve got an album out, we won’t be touring until we’ve got the album out but there will be festivals and gigs like this.

A lot of your lyrics were about relationships…

Tracey: Yeah that’s Jody! [laughs] They come from a very female perspective and back in the day it was mostly you and Girlschool leading that charge…

Tracey: A lot of people can identify with Jody’s lyrics.

You’ve got 10,000 likes and a new generation of ladies coming to this show, is that something you could envision back then?

Tracey: You’d have to ask Jody but I don’t think she could have envisioned that when she was writing them but I think she does now.

Julie: It’s amazing when you get younger people like In Spain – one was nineteen.

Tracey: One had a tattoo of the Medusa from Hell Hath No Fury but there was one lady who brought her son and he was a fan as well but it was fantastic having our generation and the younger generation coming up.

Does that make the band more special?

Tracey: They want to hear the new but they want to hear the classic Goddess as well.

Julie: It’s great that the younger generation want to listen to the older songs.

One foot in the past but also looking forward to the new stuff.

Interview by Matt Dawson - Photo Soile Siirtola When you’ve been working together for twenty four years crafting death metal, the end of one band in Vomitory didn’t mean the end of the creativity for Tobias Gustaffsson (drummer) and Erik Rundqvist (bassist/vocalist), leading instead to the creation of Cut Up. With ‘Forensic Nightmares’ on its way, Tobias chuckled with us about working at Big Balls studio, reminisced about Karlstad where he grew up and explained why Entombed’s ‘Left Hand Path’ is a strong essential record that any death metal fan should have in their collection…

After disbanding Vomitory what made you decide you wanted to form Cut Up? Erik and I wanted to continue writing and playing together, so just a couple of months after disbanding Vomitory, we began forming Cut Up. We both felt we have a lot more to give musically and we simply enjoy each other’s company, so the decision came very naturally.

What would you say is the mission statement behind the band?

To create quality death metal, record and release albums, play live a lot and have a good time.

What led to picking Andreas and Anders for the guitarist and vocalist roles?

Anders Bertilsson had been filling in several times at Vomitory shows the last couple of active years, both for Urban and Peter at different occasions, so with him it was a no-brainer.

He's a great guy to hang around and an excellent guitar player. We wanted to have two lead vocalists (Erik being one of them) in Cut Up, and the first and only name that came to mind as the other vocalist was Andreas Björnson, a local who also plays guitar and sings in Fetus Stench. We knew he had what we were looking for, so after just one rehearsal together we felt it was right. Björnson is one hell of a riff machine and has actually written the majority of the music on the debut album.

How was it to record in the excellently named Big Balls studio?

Yeah, isn't it a pretty name for a studio?! I've known the guys who owns Big Balls Studio for years, and I've also recorded there a lot before for Torture Division, The Project Hate MCMXCIX and Create A Kill. It's located in Karlstad, which is our home area and where we also have our rehearsal place, so it was very convenient to record there. The people there are very easy going, so the whole recording process went really smooth. We were also very well rehearsed as a band when we began recording, so that played a big role too of course.

We knew pretty much exactly what we wanted when we entered the studio and left with something even better.

When it comes to the town of Karlstad was there a particularly big rock/metal scene

as you were growing up?

No, not really in Karlstad, but in the smaller communities located around it. Karlstad was a lot more upnosed and was more about pop/indie than metal, although there were a few metal bands from there too. But I guess Forshaga, my home town, is more associated with metal than any other small town in our part of Sweden.

What are the plans (if any are confirmed) when it comes to touring the UK? Unfortunately there are no tour dates confirmed yet. But we are working on it, and I really hope we can announce some new live dates soon. There has already been some interest in bringing Cut Up on tour as support to bigger bands. The only show confirmed at this moment though, is our release show in Karlstad on June 26th, with Nifelheim and Puteraeon as special guests.

What would you say was the biggest inspiration for you and what would you say is the strongest death metal record you’ve ever heard?

It's difficult or even impossible to point out the biggest inspiration. There are a lot of different ones combined that have made me who I am as a musician, drummer and song writer. But the strongest death metal record ever for me is Left Hand Path by Entombed. That's the album that ultimately got me hooked on death metal and that sort of set the standard. It has everything - the songs, the riffs, the drumming, the artwork, the production, even the band photo is totally epic. To me, Left Hand Path is the blueprint of death metal.

What have you been listening to at the moment?

I've been listening to At War With Reality by At The Gates, Delusions of Grandeur by Sahg - both are favourite albums at the moment - and the metal/rock classics that I always listen to, like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, MotĂśrhead, Deep Purple, Whitesnake, WASP etc.

Ronnie Wood How can it be? - A Rock'n'Roll Diary

By Cristina Massei For most of us, finding in a back drawer a diary we kept at 17 is an unsettling experience; we would hide it better or even burn it, dreading anyone else might one day come across it. But if you’re Ronnie Wood that’s quite a find, and one that deserves to be shared with the world. So here we are tonight, at the Ambassador’s Theatre in London’s West End, waiting for the man himself to give us a preview of ‘How Can It Be? - A Rock’n’Roll Diary’, his 1965 journal published by Genesis.

Bob Harris is the exceptional host for the evening, sitting with the legendary Stone, going through the pages and prompting the rockstar to tell the stories in his own words.

Wood, a natural born entertainer, happily obliges. The audience is taken back to 1965 when, oblivious to what fate has in store for him, a 17 years old Ronnie is playing bass with the Birds. I can make a case for 1965 being one of the greatest years for music ever, so much of it is generated from London and you were right in the middle of all of it - starts Harris.

‘I was on the verge watching, looking in as a 17 year old in a group that nearly smashed

their way into the top 50’ Wood replies, searching for a face in the audience: he finally spots the Birds’ frontman Ali McKenzie a couple of seats away from me and involves him in the conversation! ‘Every now and again we were close up to the big boys as you can see by some entries in the diary…’ - A picture of the volume appears on screen - ‘this is a replica of the actual size, leather bound with gold…’

The detail in it is unbelievable – did you get home at night and fit it in reflective on that day?

‘I’ve no idea when I did it really! Much boozing took place! It probably would have been in the afternoon, some of the things like ‘the audience were a bunch of cretins’ I probably wrote after the gig to get rid of some of the frustration. At the time we didn’t think about the money much, fifty quid here and we went to Truro once for a fiver – you could get four quid petrol split between the group but that was on a bad night. We did go out for 75 quid at the weekends, at one point I think we got to £115 and we used to gauge everything by how much we saved. We put all our energy and focus on the songs and our setlists…’

A couple of entries from the diary suggest you were talking to people about their record collections and that was one of the sources – you were listening to a lot of music you couldn’t hear on the radio back then.

‘A lot of the radio was swamped with like The Shadows or the Walker Brothers, every now and then you’d get an outrageous record that stands out like The Stones but I remember Keith Moon used to be a big supporter, The Who had a big hit with ‘I Can’t Explain’ and came down to the Ealing club and going ‘We’re Number One!’. We had a friendly rivalry with them and at the time there was the circuit – bands like The Pretty Things – Viv Prince their drummer was one of the greatest debauched people about – worse than Keith Moon! [room erupts into laughter] They’d be playing music and you’d hear the drums crumble and Viv crumble off the back with legs sticking up!’

Harris keeps going through the scribbles, photos and drawings, which are shown on screen as the crowd eagerly follows him down Memory Lane: ‘I remember going Harrow blues Club with my brother, a marvellous collection on influences on such a young lad and I’m going ‘Wow, I want to be like this, I love this music!’ Country, blues… my first guitar influence being Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin’ Wolf in there’ - then a flashback of Jimmy Page at a train station - ‘I remember being on a train with Jeff when he lived

in Surrey and we were going past the station and he said ‘There’s Jimmy with his guitar case!’ He was very much hands on in those days, it was a small world’.

Harris stops on a funny drawing where Ronnie is hugging a big amplifiers stack and Pete Townsend gives him a frustrated ‘You bastard!’ as he walks past with his guitar: it tells the story of the first 12 inch Beta Cabinet Jim Marshall made, which Townshend promptly ordered but Wood got first. Questioned about the drawings on the book, he goes on to explain that some are actually originals from the diary or back in the day, while others are done by memory to illustrate some of the entries. A good memory if you ask me… And more precious memories follow, the next about one night at the glorious 100 Club where the Birds had a residency.

‘I remember one gig where Bo Diddley turned up but his bands didn’t so he asked us to be his band, in the dressing room I said to him ‘hey Mr Diddley we’re with Decca and they’re not promoting our record, any advice? He said ‘Tell them to shit or get off the pot.’ A strange bit of advice! My brother also backed Howlin’ Wolf up when he came to London’ Next in the Ronnie Wood’s mental museum, Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits - I met him in Manchester - ‘we played Twisted Wheel when they were number one, we were unloading our equipment and he gave us a hand. There were only a few bands, the only aggro we got really was getting paid, our gig wagon was a Transit van, we used to push our equipment in a glorified wheelbarrow!’

And then comes the obligatory chat on the music industry yesterday and today…

The business in those

days I get the feeling it wasn’t as controlling as it is now - wonders Harris, waiting for an insight from his guest. ‘A record company would take a band with an element of risk, I remember the managers around this time – Brian Epstein, Kit Lambert who managed The Who and would leave all these boys up to no good! Record companies parties were once a year at Christmas time, The Beatles would be in one, Stones in the other.

It was a happy family around Christmas time like Phil Spector’s albums come to life!’

Before a final pick and mix of entries and illustrations, Ronnie Wood remembers his first bass: ’I couldn’t afford to have much, Telecasters at the time were not as adaptable as a Fender Strat and even though I like the Gibson Les Paul they’re very heavy, when I joined the Jeff Beck Group I needed a bass so I went to Sound City on Shaftesbury Avenue and I have this standard jazz bass which I still have to this day!’

A very special evening is coming to its end. Even Ronnie’s dog comes on stage to say hello, before the audience is treated to a remake of ‘How Can It Be’ (‘the second or third song I’ve ever written’). Sure tonight’s guest and host were exceptional, but what really took centre stage it’s a story that rock’n’roll seems no longer able to write. In the background, the London we’re losing brick by brick, the London of guitar shops and seedy venues harbouring the legends of tomorrow.

To secure your own little piece of history, head to www.RonnieWoodBook.com.

Interview by Matt Dawson - Photos Ester Segarra It all starts with church bells ringing in the background – something that Johanna Sardonis points out with amusement about ‘the devil’ living next door to one- and while there’s been a lot of talk about her former band The Oath this is the time to focus on Lucifer – a band that bring a love for the 70’s hard rock mixed with spirituality to the fore.

The timing as well for our chat is great – the day of our talk is the one that Lucifer’s debut album is released to the UK and Europe so naturally the first question is thus: What are your thoughts today as the album is out there for people to hear/buy?

Exciting! If you know the story about Lucifer and what happened before it was very devastating when The Oath ended because I had a lot of plans for the band so I thought the best thing to do in a situation like this is to take all this energy and make something positive and create something new.

I did and it turned out to be – as much as I love The Oath – even more so my thing, I’m very passionate about the band. This album that we’ve made means so much to me, so far the reception we’ve had from journalists is really good, I’m really excited to see what folk will say who’ll buy the record. For me it’s the best thing I’ve done so far, I’m very proud of it.

You’ve got Gaz Jennings on guitar joining the group – how is it working with him?

Well with my bands – The Oath and Lucifer – being on Lee Dorrian’s label (Rise Above) and Gaz having being in Cathedral and also working at Rise Above it all ties up, I did have the bassist and the drummer already [Dino Gollnick and Andy Prestridge] at the start of Lucifer and when the question was up of who am I going to get to play guitar Lee said to me ‘Why don’t you speak to Gaz? He’s writing and playing all the time, he’s eager to play and he liked The Oath so maybe he wouldn’t say no?’

So I contacted him and he said yes right away, we started working and it’s really fantastic to work with him because he’s so experienced, I had a concept in my head for Lucifer so I gave him a direction and references of how I wanted Lucifer to sound, he then sent me tons and tons of riffs and songs which was really amazing in a short amount of time. I got to sit down in Berlin with us all over the Internet, he recorded his stuff at home and I had my mini studio, I sat down with all that stuff and got to pick riffs and make whole songs together.

He’s a wizard, one of the best of his genre and having been a Cathedral fan for a long time it was amazing to work with him and also on a personal basis he’s a great guy, very humble, very talented and we have so much more to talk about regarding music, it’s been really good.

You mentioned a concept – can you give us more about that?

Lucifer is a different band with a different concept however there’s a core that’s similar in

"You find good music in every genre - it's the musicianship, the sincerity and the originality"

influences, The Oath was also based on stuff like Black Sabbath but it was leaning more towards a new wave of British heavy metal influence while with Lucifer I took that out while I was writing with Gaz so there would be times when parts would be overlade in heavy metal solos and very speedy – I would say how about we replace this part and do something more moody here? Lucifer for me is more of a heavy rock band but like I said there’s a similar core of influences.

There’s definitely a love for the 70’s there I noticed, what is it about that decade that defines itself to you?

Being a metalhead for over 20 years I went through different phases of different styles, it started off with classic stuff: old Metallica and Danzig, that’s when I was 13, when I was 15/16 I went really deep into black metal/death metal/doom and so on for some years but then the older I got I started to dig more into the past, I started to realise that these classic bands from the 70’s are the bands that everything is built on and there’s a reason why they are so classic and why they are such icons – they’re just so good!

Going through all these different phases by now I have the taste of a 60 year old man but there’s a reason for it – I’d rather be influenced by the originals, I think it’s cool that there’s a revival for kids to know where it lies.

I get what you mean – I was discovering rock and metal through the ‘nu’ era so Limp Bizkit and all those, I realised over the past few years I’ve found myself going more towards the past.

Exactly – if you’re a fan you keep developing and looking from where it’s coming from.

Not just rock and metal either.

Same here – you find good music in every genre, it’s the musicianship , the sincerity and the originality.

There have been a lot of descriptions for Lucifer as occult rock but you personally have described it as magic rock…

Yeah, that’s because it has become sort of an insult of ‘they’re an occult rock band’, we had that problem with The Oath – we never considered ourselves an occult rock band, we just play heavy metal. Whatever people need to name it; occult rock is not a new word but it’s been used and abused lately [laughs]. I’m aware people do that because of spiritual content but my argument is the devil is not new in rock and roll, that’s always been a topic in rock and heavy metal music.

So do you feel that labels aren’t exactly necessary these days?

The thing is when I sat down and plotted out Lucifer I didn’t think I needed to have another occult rock band, I’m at a certain point in my life musically where what we play is exactly what we want to play and that’s not so much what other people want or expect because we’re all kind of mature as musicians , whatever labels are put on it in the end it doesn’t really matter it’s just a name.

That’s refreshing – I was thinking about a writer I saw do

spoken word recently who described one of his pieces as a magick ritual kind of thing which I had in mind regarding a couple of songs on the Lucifer album.

Spirituality is something important in the lyrical content but that is more of a personal journey, it’s not a fashion thing, it’s the universe inside my head and how I see the world – life, death and everything beyond. Music is some sort of ritual, going on stage is a ritual but it’s not for show, it’s genuine and sincere.

What are the plans for Lucifer touring wise in the UK and Europe?

We just got our first US tour confirmed (with Pallbearer and High On Fire) and we definitely would love to play Europe (dates announced as we go to press, check our website) Finally what has been your current listening tastes?

I listen to a lot of different stuff, I also run an old school metal night in Berlin – a monthly night for the past six years, there’s a lot of proto metal, new wave of British heavy metal, 70’s hard rock and stuff.

I do listen to a lot of 70’s Heart, Fleetwood Mac and Blue Oyster Cult then still a lot of Sabbath, Uriah Heep , Deep Purple, Aphrodite’s Child, Lucifer’s Friend, The Shocking Blue. I like 60’s French stuff like Serge Gainsbourg. I’m a huge Danzig fan!

IBIZA AWAKEN

Party Island is now

NING

open!

Article and photos by Nelly Loriaux Another year has passed and gone and Ibiza is once again coming alive with its customary offering of countless opening parties, IMS conferences, electronic music under the stars and even metal. People may think this is the life of Riley but trust me, without planning or even better a friend pointing out an alternative choice, you may end up missing out on the unexpected gem; and my first night out demonstrated that the proof of the pudding is definitely in the eating.

HRH Ibiza Road Trip @ V club, San Antonio With every intention of getting away from the London metal overload, I inadvertently fell back into it on my first outing. And I honestly have to say that I am glad I did.

The HRH Ibiza road trip was back at the V club in San Antonio for its 6 ‘Rock’n’Roll holiday’. The annual denim & leather invasion of the white isle has garnered a strong following throughout the years with familiar faces gathering round for the Metal Hammer night. th

BLACK STATE HIGHWAY opened to an already decently packed venue. The five piece rock outfit fronted by petite Lisa Steinberger may seem young at first glance but their raw brand of heavy riff, melodic hooks and powerful solos managed to conquer the tough crowd.

DRUGANAUT swiftly followed, a rather mischievous bunch of Geordies’ bad asses fronted by tongue in cheek and part time exhibitionist Craig Relf; This has to be one of the most entertaining band I have seen in a long time. Wearing only a pair of rather skimpy short and dark sunglasses, the energetic frontman got the heat rising belting out his high energy stoner rock including ‘Sex Face’, ‘Bums Rubs’ and ‘Shipwrecked’ whilst sauntering around the stage dizzying us all with his rather awesome collection of tattoos.

Having already entertained the HRH crowd to a short cover set a couple of night before, Attica Rage needed no introduction. A raucous reception greeted their powerful hard and heavy biker rock set from ‘Contradiction’, ‘Crazy Horse’ to ‘Old School’ Due to previous engagement, I unfortunately miss out on the last band, SKINDRED, who, from what I heard, brought the roof down with their raggametal ferocious performance.

http://www.hrhroadtrip.com/

More photos http://tmblr.co/ZIt1Ew1lwvYUd

TROPICANA Ibiza coast suites and SANTOS Ibiza coast club openings Day two brought me back to familiar territory with the opening of the TROPICANA Ibiza coast suites hotel. The new kid in town on Playa d’en Bossa started in style with a presentation cocktail overflowing with Cordoniu cava lavishly served within the Miami inspired décor of ferns, flamingos with splashes of funky pink throughout, waylaid by the tunes of island residents DJs Bones, Colin Peters and Silvia Superstar. For a second, I half expected an impromptu visit

by Crockett and Tubbs, but only the jolly sailors made an appearance. The evening ended a few doors down at one of the finest pool party venue on the island, sister hotel SANTOS opening, an exhilarating experience enhanced by the extensive display of psychedelic images projected on the hotel wall, mesmerising the crowd frenetically dancing late into the night under the skilful musical marathon of Sebastian Gamboa (Vintage), Rae (Defected), DJ Pippi (Pacha’s Funky room), Oriol Calvo (Ten By Nine), Alex Kentucky (Adult Rec) and Chris 44 (Lolitas).

IMS, Hard Rock Hotel Heading for its eight year, IMS once again took over the Hard Rock Hotel for 3 days of intensive debates, keynotes and interviews with topics highlighting t the issues directly impacting on people working in the industry.

Keeping up with the tradition, the first day started with the IMS business report presented by Kevin Watson.

Although not as high as last year, the industry still managed to grow year on year by 12% to reach an annual value of 6.9 billion US dollars. Streaming has become one of the most growing formats of the music industry and EDM is faring very well by being the 4 most popular, ahead of Country. In US and Canada alone, there were 12 billion streams of dance music in 2014. Dance’s share of single sale track in the UK reached an 8 year high with 27 out of 100 most sold tracks being electronic tracks. th

The Forbes list recognises Calvin Harris as the top earner with 66 million dollars with other DJ’s like David Guetta or Avicii still managing to earn a sizeable 30 and 28 million respectively.

Social media reach and its influence on popularity and earning put Soundcloud in the forefront with the platform undoubtedly becoming more important for DJs and live acts to reach their audience, Skrillex and Calvin Harris having 5 million followers; but if we take into consideration the fact that Hardwell, voted number 1 DJ of the world, only manages to be number 9 on a social

media perspective, it brings to attention that you may not necessarily need to have a huge social media following to become popular and be successful. The Asia Pacific scene also records a high popularity in term of social media following for female DJs with NERVO topping the list in Australia.

Looking at large music festivals and clubs, 12 of the largest ones in the US generated half a billion dollars in revenue in 2014 with a quarter of all nightlife tickets sold for electronic music events.

Full details of the report can be found there: http://www.internationalmusicsummit.com/img/stand_alone_files/file/original/imsbusiness-report-2015-18.pdf http://www.danceonomics.com/ All the keynotes can be found on http://www.internationalmusicsummit.com/talks https://www.youtube.com/user/TheIMSIbiza?feature=watch Following on the Back2live panel highlighting the goal of introducing live element to electronic music, a new Gibson Back2live concert was introduced with the event seeing the cohesion between heavyweight dance music brands and Gibson Guitars being featured during the live sets.

6 eclectic bands and DJs graced the Hard Rock hotel stage supported by Pacha resident Andy Baxter.

This Is A Recording started the proceedings with their Balearadelic and Space-Rock-Disco extravaganza.

April Towers gave us their electronic pop music, reminiscent of LCD Soundsystem and New Order whilst Harley Maxwell brought his chilled rap fusing modern music genre with poetic and harmonious rhymes with ‘2sweet4me’ and his rendition of Duke Ellington ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’ clear favourites amongst the crowd.

Flanked by 2 dancers and sporting a huge black hat and matching black dress, Power Dress and Ben Macklin introduced us to single ‘A Matter Of Time’ followed by a rather unusual performance which came in the guise of The Wolf, bestowing upon us tech house grooves, tribal drums and powerful MC rasp interspaced with some serious moves from his wolf

pack AKA a rather dexterous dancer with mesmerising agility.

Uner live band wrapped up the evening with a rock heavy set punctuated by his soft touches on the piano and screeching solos, a great musical experience enhanced by an array of captivating holographic display in the background.

The legendary Dalt Vila Gran Finale returned enabling all revellers the unique experience of partying under the stars in the surroundings of this amazing UNESCO heritage site: 2 nights of exhilarating performances from Luciano, Pete Tong, Damian Lazarus And The Ancient Moon, Solomun and IMS legends award recipient Techno veteran Sven Vath on day one to MK, ZHU, Thalab, Kidnap kid culminating with my all-time favourite RUDIMENTAL on day 2.

The 4 actual members seemed to have multiplied by the time they all entered the stage with

their army of sessions musicians and female vocalists and wasted no time in wowing the crowd with all-time classics like ‘Love Ain’t Just The Word’,

‘Waiting All night’ and ‘Feel The Love’. Now that was an evening that will stay in my heart for a long time to come.

More opening parties are yet to come so it’s time for you all revellers around the world to pack your suitcases and head on to the island that never seems to sleep.

Welcome to your one stop drop, for all the news on the best burlesque nights, in the capital and beyond! I’m Sophia Disgrace, I’ve performed at numerous events in the UK and abroad, from festivals to the most exclusive clubs. I perform in a neo burlesque style and often incorporate other elements such as angle grinding into my routines. I like to shake the audience up a bit!

By Sophia Disgrace

Burlesque, or 'the art of tease' as its also known, first rose to prominence in the 1950s; in recent years it has enjoyed something of a revival, with stars such as Dita Von Teese helping to popularise the scene once again.

London as ever is at the fore front of this movement, which is both alluring and inspiring for men and Photo Susan Grace Hinman women alike....

THE SPARE RIB BURLESQUE AND CABARET @ The Magnet, Liverpool Thursday 18th June - 6.00pm to Midnight This burly event has its heart in all the right places! Not only does it open with a pre show 'Twerk-shop' (I'm assuming this will be a lesson in Miley Cyrus-esque butt jiggling!?), but all proceeds raised on the night will go to the Claire House Children's Hospice. There’s a stellar line up of acts, including Roxie Royale and Tilly Mint - expect music, dancing and titters a plenty… In the words of Del Boy 'Lovely Jubbly!'

Please call The Magnet for further details on 01513 290 830

LE DECO DESIRE @ Proud Cabaret, London Friday 26th June - 6.30pm until late Proud Cabaret do two things very well: 1) They know glamour and glitz 2) They serve rather lovely food and drink! So put 'em together and what have you got? A sumptuous evening of decadence, top notch performances and sultry pizazz, that’s what!

The latest hot ticket a la Proud is 'Le Deco Desire’, a 1920s themed event, which evokes all the hazy sleaze of a latter day Speakeasy.

With an ever impressive roster of performers and a reputation second to none, miss this at your burly peril!

For booking details please call Proud on - 0207 283 1940 CLUB PARADIS @ The Chapel Arts Centre, Bath Saturday 27th June - 7.30pm ’til late This event is held at Bath's premier alternative performance space, Chapel Arts. The exotically named 'Club Paradis' has an impressive cast of multi faceted artists, sure to arouse and amuse in equal measure. Starlets include Loretta von Dini - who incorporates a touch of magic into her burly acts, the infamous modern day showgirl, Lady Lolly Rouge, all overseen by legendary compere Jacques Bruxelless. Music is provided courtesy of Josie and The Outlaw - a family collective that fuse rockabilly, rock n roll and blues - to titilating effect!

For further information please call 01225 461 700 Sophia Disgrace Really F**king Rates....

Now, like most girls, I love a good pair of shoes! I must confess I own far too many, bought solely on the basis of how visually appealing they are!Yes, issues of practicality are often rendered meaningless in the face of sky scraper heels and quirky innovation…

A recent purchase of mine is the perfect case en pointe: behold the one and only 'Bondgirl gun heel platform shoes’! They are the ultimate in foot wear for voluptuous vixens and delectable vamps.

And they are totally impossible to walk in. But don't let that small matter bother you!

Pick up your pair here: www.alternative-footwear.co.uk

PREVIEW

by Matt Dawson

The summer festival season is in full swing and once more Donington is home to the diverse mixture of rock and metal we have enjoyed over the years – from the likes of Slipknot and Kiss to the church of party that is Andrew W.K and new rising stars that include God Damn and Aaron Keylock.

With all that in mind we decided to ask a few bands their thoughts – and as always the answers are entertaining!

1 - When/where can we check you out at Download and WHY should we?

2 - How are you planning to impress all those potential new fans?

3 - What has been your most memorable experience at a festival so far?

4 - If you could get one band back together to join you at Download who would it be?

5 - What world record would you like to break while at Download?

6 - Create either a drink or food item that represents your band – what would it contain?

7 - What are you promoting at the moment? Links please!

(A.K.) 1. We play June 14, and if you like to exert a lot of energy, and watch a good performance, I'd say we're up to the task.

2.We’re gonna rock the fuck out of course haha 3. Just playing in front of thousands of people. Fans, and newcomers alike.

4. I’d say The Beatles, just for bragging rights haha 5. The record for most people jumping, at the same time. Like, ground shaking shit.

6. An anti gravity drink, that makes you float haha.

(Mike Martin) 1. We're gonna be opening main stage at download at 1pm so get there early!

2. I think the coolest thing about all the potential new fans there is that we get a chance to start the day off getting our songs stuck in their heads. We've always took pride in having memorable songs so I think whether the person at the festival likes the band or doesn't the songs are gonna be stuck in their head no matter what and we love that.

3. I think our most memorable moment at a festival so far would be the first time we played metal town in Sweden. 20,000 people were going crazy and singing every word it was just completely mind blowing for us to see especially in a place we so rarely play.

4. If I could get one band back together for download for me personally it would be the original guns n roses line up. I think download is one of the only festivals epic enough to be able to pull a reunion that big off.

5. I would like to break the world record for the most fish and chips ever eaten at download ever. 6.

If I could pick a food item to represent our band it would be Shepards pie since it's a bunch of random crap mixed together that creates surprisingly tasty goodness!

7. We are currently promoting our new album "The Order of Things." You can get it anywhere and anyway for the most part all over the world. If u wanna follow the band on Twitter it's "@ATRHQ." Our Facebook is easy to find its just Facebook.com/allthatremains and our official site is allthatremainsonline.com.

(Ville Friman) 1. You can check us out on Saturday evening around 7-8pm on 4th stage. You should check us out because we’ll guarantee that you’ll get one of the best performances of whole Download. We’re also bit different from the other bands and will stick out in a positive way.

Even though our music is complete opposite of positive.

2. We always play and perform from our hearts and give our 100%.

We play honest music and we never hold back. We absolutely love playing live, will show it and get also the crowd excited.

3. There are so many great festivals we’ve had opportunity to play at.

One of my personal favourites is Summerbreeze festival (DE). We always have had great shows there and it’s always filled with great metal acts.

4. I would pick our good friends Ghost Brigade. Everyone should check them out (http:// www.nihilindustry.com). The main man, Wille Naukkarinen, is also behind the artwork of past three Insomnium albums.

5. As we’re Finns it would have to deal with drinking. Maybe something with the lines “Most shots poured during 45 min gig both on stage and crowd”.

6. I would definitely go for Insomnium beer. As a result of living in UK for the past 5 years, I absolutely love your selection of ales and pub and microbrewery culture in general. I think I would go for Black IPA/APA. Something bit different but smooth and easily enjoyable. Naturally, it has to be dark as our music.

7. We’re currently still touring to support our one-year old album Shadows of The Dying Sun. I’ve been writing new material as well and hopefully we will come up with a new release next year. You can check us out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBZ5SLJmfdw

1. You can catch us on Friday at 1pm on the 4th stage. It will the first time we are playing some songs from the new album and our first time at Download. we have been building up to this for a long time, we love festivals so we know the score, and its our job to get it all started, and we will. Gonna be an amazing three days, so kick it of with us, enjoy the set, then catch us after watching all the other superb bands.

2. Put on a live, raw show, have fun and hopefully get everybody involved with our new songs, we'll try get everyone pumped up for the rest of the weekend. Energy, energy and more energy and some pretty awesome tunes, if we do say so ourselves.

3. Reece jumped into a bin at 2000 trees with 10 other people whilst a circle pit started around him. He says that was memorable but I question his sobriety levels at that stage.

4.Only one answer really its has to Led Zeppelin with John Bonham if we're allowed to resurrect the dead. That would be a show worth seeing.

5. We’d like to start the Biggest gentleman's wall of death ever. That would be pretty interesting and a jolly good show with minimal ruckus. :-) 6. We would create an organic British chicken marinated in a dark rum sauce with a fresh modern salad infused with an unexpected spice and chips 7. Our new single of course, Wake Up , in terms of gigs we are playing a show with Heaven's Basement on the 29th of may in Sheffield at the corporation, then we're playing camden rocks on the 30th of may at 2pm at the stillery, then on to Download Festival at 11am on the 4th stage on Friday the 14th. Sunday the 28th of June we are headlining Lichfield rocks festival. Lastly we have just finished recording our debut album at Red City Studios which will be released in august so keep your eyes peeled over at any of our social media's under eofeofficial or over at eofe.com where you can also check out our merch. Here’s the links you desired :-) Thanks for talking to us

https://www.facebook.com/EofEOfficialBand https://www.youtube.com/user/EofEOfficial

https://www.eofe.com/

(Ryan Key) 1. We will be closing the 3rd Stage on Sunday June 14. You SHOULD come check us out because we have never been on a UK festival this big and we are super excited to play!

2. The festival definitely leans to the heavier side as far as the rest of the line up. I think fans of heavier music will be pleasantly surprised to see what we do, especially some of the songs from our newest record, Lift a Sail. We just hope that putting on the high energy show that we do will get people stoked on our music.

3. In 2006 we co headlined a festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil with Fall Out Boy. There were almost 50,000 people there in a soccer stadium and the energy was just unreal. 4.Anberlin.

5. We would like to break the world record for most people watching a band at the 3rd Stage in the history of Download.

6. Can you make a drink that has whiskey and tequila in it? We are split between the two.

7. We put out a record in October of last year called Lift a Sail. It's a bit of a departure from the sound fans have known over the years. But we are so stoked on the songs, and the reaction to the record has been overwhelmingly positive.

(Dick Platt) 1. We’re going to be on the 3rd stage on Sunday around lunchtime. Why should you check us out?

Only because it will be the greatest gig you will ever witness! People are going to be talking about it for years afterwards. "We're you at Evil Scarecrow's debut Download show?" people will say. Imagine if you had to reply "Nah, I was sleeping in my tent and had a mammoth hangover." You don't want to be that fool do you?

2. By not giving away all our secrets in this interview that's how! We've got some things lined up that involve a [REDACTED] that we bought cheap from a [REDACTED] and you can fit at least 12 in its [REDACTED] without too much trouble.

They're going to look great [REDACTED] across the whole crowd!

3. As a band or as an individual? As a band our most memorable experience at a festival could possibly be either Bloodstock last year (11,000 crabs/fans scuttling left and right at 11am) or our first ever festival, Skegstock 2002 (11 people stood in a park).

4. PANTERA! I saw Phil do some Pantera songs with Rex at Download last year and did a little cry as I had never saw Pantera. Obviously I'll never see Dimebag now, but if I had the power I'd bring him back to play!

5. Most pies balanced on a pigs back? Fastest washing of a giraffes neck under competition conditions? Most gold bars on rained upon a crowd at festival? Least amount of natural disasters at a festival? A few years ago we attempted to break the world record for most synchronised robot dancers at a festival, but Guiness wouldn't accept our camcorder footage of 3000 people in a tent.

Bastards. 6. Everyone likes cake don't they!? So it would be a lovely Evil Scarecrow cake containing an element of each band member. From Dr Hell it would be a rusty nail from his head and a moist dribbling of costume sweat, Kraven would have added a lovely crisp trouser nugget, Monty could provide some sweaty blood as some sort of jam, Princess Luxury could add a dash of swan batter (I don't know?) and I'd mix in a pint of sorrow. It would taste disgusting and no one would want to eat it.

7. Currently we are promoting our fourth studio album, which has neither been written nor recorded.

I'm getting ahead of the interviewers this time. They always like to ask when the next album is coming out. We've got a tour coming up at the end of May and we also have MacMillan fest in September.

We're also after a new tour bus so they're going to be a crowd funded begathon coming up in the near future.

Thank you for interviewing me, you have been lovely, I have been Brother Pain! High five! http://www.evilscarecrow.co.uk/ https://www.facebook.com/Evil.Scarecrow http://www.amazon.co.uk/Galactic-Hunt-Evil-Scarecrow/dp/B00NFSCCZK https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/galactic-hunt/id930126422 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/evilscarecrow4

(Frederic Leclercq) 1.We play the first day of the festival, at 18:55 on the 3rd stage. You should because otherwise I’ll come find you and hit you with a lethal French Baguette.

2. We will continue to do what we do best, play and have fun! We have a very energetic show, and while we are very serious when it comes to playing our instruments, we don’t take ourselves too seriously! There’s always a lot of smiles, both on stage and in the crowd.

3. The first time (or was it the second, I'm not sure now) we played Download, we played a ballad and managed to get the audience to do a slow motion circle pit! It was great fun! Speaking of circle pits, another memorable festival experience at Loud Park in Tokyo: we had 3 circle pits going on at the same time, quite impressive to watch from the stage!

4. Let’s see...Pantera. Or Queen!

5. I never owned a Guinness Book of Records so I’m not sure what sort of records there are to be broken. Couple of months ago I would have said something like "the number of whiskey shots consumed after a metal show before bus call", but because I’ve slowed down on alcohol...how about "the amount of smiles in the crowd at a metal show"? That would be cool!

6. A friend of mine did a "DragonJuice" once and it was spicy yet refreshing, so I’d go for that.

For food I would mix an ingredient from each country represented in the DF line-up. Something with Kiwi (for Sam Totman from NZ), Vodka (for Vadim Pruzhanov from Ukraine), Spaghetti (for Gee Anzalone from Italy), Rice (for Herman Li from Hong Kong), Mushy Peas (for Marc Hudson from England) and Cheese (for me, from France)....mmm, sounds YUM!!!!

7. We are releasing our debut DVD called "In The Line Of Fire" in July, it shows what it’s like on a DF World Tour, both onstage and offstage!

And we are still on the World Tour to promote our latest album "Maximum Overload" which started in 2014 and won’t end until 2016. Below are a couple of links to 2 videos, ENJOY! http://youtu.be/Fb7F3SU5BRw http://youtu.be/OIv3cmvZRTI