Warlock meets Yorkshire Doom wizards Gandalf the Green.
I first saw Gandalf the Green play back in 2019 at Riffolution Festival, Manchester: an all-dayer for stoner-doom label APF. They’d just signed to the label prior to the show, and were snowballing momentum and confidence. They only squeezed two tracks into their set, one of which was the magnificent A Billion Faces, and they really appealed to my love of the psychedelic, daring to stray further down that path than many of their contemporaries. Being a Tolkien nerd, I loved the name too… I talked to the band via Zoom on March the 6th 2021 to reflect on their work to date, and talk about their much anticipated new album, Reflections. They’re a humble bunch of guys who are passionate about their project and deeply rooted in their West Yorkshire homeland. If you haven’t heard them before, check out the video for A Billion Faces and their EP King of the Ashes.
Andrew Flint: Lead guitar, vocals
Jack Walker: rhythm guitar, vocals, drums
Danny Wrigley: bass
On Tolkien and Gandalf
“we were on about writing one 30 + minute song that is the story of Gandalf the Green: he takes the one nug to rule them all to the bong of doom…he drops the nug in and gets the whole of Middle Earth high!” (AF)
W: So, first of all, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us – I know it’s a crazy time. I see you guys have got a show lined up.
DW: we do, yeah.
AF: Conan and Slomatics on back to back weekends!
W: I bet you can’t wait to get back to normality.
JW: no, we really cannot.
AF: It’s been over a year since we played any music together. We’ve bought so much new equipment and we want to hear how it sounds in a full context.
W: Yeah, and with you guys, I feel liked it’s stolen – or at least paused – your thunder, because you signed to APF and were gaining a lot of momentum on the doom scene, particularly in Manchester – there was a real buzz about Gandalf the Green, and I’m sure that’ll pick up where it left off. But first of all, I want to talk about your name and, more specifically, Tolkien. Tolkien was a huge influence on me as a child – when I was 8, my auntie forced me to sit down and listen as she read The Hobbit, and I was totally swept away. I wonder, when was it that Tolkien’s magic first entered your life, and what was it about his work that gripped you?
JW: well, for me, I grew up around parents who were gamers and my dad was into metal growing up and stuff, so I was always around fantasy things. They never read me the books, but as soon as the films came out they were on all the time and my dad was a big fan of them. And the kind of people I’ve associated with – metalheads and stuff – so many of them are into that kind of thing; it’s always been the cool thing to enjoy.
W: Sure, and Tolkien, I’d say, even more so than Lovecraft, has captivated the metal community. Why do you think this is?
AF: I was gonna say, Lovecraft seems to get a comparable amount of attention because he’s generally darker. I’ve not delved into Lovecraft at all, but I think Tolkien set the baseline that everything else got inspired from in the same way as Black Sabbath with metal music. Black Sabbath got a lot more recognition than Blue Cheer because there were so many bands influenced by Black Sabbath, and it all goes back to that root.
W: Plus, Lord of the Rings has got everything, right? The hero and the quest, plenty of darkness. It’s very English too – the Shire feels quintessentially English. The character Gandalf has obviously been a big inspiration for you guys. Who, or what, does Gandalf represent to you?
AF: For me, when you watch the movies, he’s the wandering wizard. You get to see the firework scenes and all the kids love him, but he becomes much more of a central figure. When we started the band, he became even more of a central figure for me. It’s hamstringed us in a sense because we’ve named the band after a fantasy character, and because of that people assume that the music is always going be about fantasy things, and people are always going to make the comparison, even if the songs are nothing to do with Lord of the Rings.
W: It’s such a cool name though – there must be so many bands wishing they’d thought of that.
AF: We’ve heard it a lot, yeah. It’s an interesting one though in that some people are like, ‘oh yeah, I didn’t take them seriously when I first heard the name,’ then they hear the music and they very much like it, and they’re like ‘I just wish they’d chosen a different name.’ But other people have listened to us purely because of the name.
DW: I think the name has allowed it to stick in peoples’ heads a lot more.
AF: What does Gandalf represent to you, Danny?
DW: For me, he’s the main driving force of the story. Whenever Gandalf appears in a scene, there’s going to be a drastic step forwards. When he first arrives in the Shire, it’s what kicks everything into action. Again, showing up at Helm’s Deep as Gandalf the White after disappearing…
W: I feel that too, like a catalyst. And you never know when he’s going to come knocking at your door. I feel a bit like Bilbo Baggins at the moment – I’m getting old, I’ve got a kid, I’m gardening all the time. But you never know when something’s going to throw it all in the air, and I think Gandalf’s a reminder of that. And different disguises too – there’s so many dimensions to his character.
AF: As well as the fact that it’s Gandalf the Green, not Gandalf the Grey or Gandalf the White; you can embellish the character in a sense. There has been an idea that once we’ve got this album done – which isn’t going to be Lord of the Rings focused at all – we were on about writing one 30 + minute song that is the story of Gandalf the Green: he takes the one nug to rule them all to the bong of doom…he drops the nug in and gets the whole of Middle Earth high! You can embellish the character and make him his own thing, so it’s not too limiting.
W: There’s plenty of bands who’ve done that too: they’ve got a name that references something, but they run with it in their own way.
AF: Conan being one.
W: Of course.
JW: I don’t know what I’d say Gandalf represents to me, but I’d always draw parallels to Norse mythology, since Tolkien had so much inspiration from that. I feel like he represents Odin’s human form, you know, when he wanders around as that old wise man, watching over people, that’s the kind of parallel I always see in it.
W: Yeah, I’m interested in Norse Mythology too, and the connection to Odin is clear. I also think it connects to the idea of purity in death – being re-born, that sort of thing. Cool.
On Yorkshire
“I think the reason it’s so appealing is because you can travel five minutes and be in a totally different environment. You can go from ridiculously hilly valleys to totally flat fern fields. And then you’ve got Malham Cove – some really interesting geography and rock formations there. I feel like it’s a microcosm – lots of different environments pushed together. ” (DW)
W: Where abouts in Yorkshire are you guys actually from?
DW: I’m from Bradford.
JW: I grew up in Bramley, then moved to Drighlington, and then moved to Huddersfield a couple of years ago, and I’ve just bought a house in Bradford.
AF: I grew up in Cleckheaton and moved to Huddersfield to go to university there, which is where the band started. We began rehearsing in my bedroom because I had this humongous room in an old Victorian house, so we could do full volume band rehearsals, but after I finished my degree I moved to Leeds. All our information says we’re from Huddersfield, but none of us are going to live there by the end of this year.
W: But it’s an interesting place to have as your epicentre, I guess. It’s got a real identity, and I’ve not heard of many bands coming out of Huddersfield.
AF: I think [Sound of] Origin’s the only one we know.
W: And I’ve never been to a show in Huddersfield. I always lived in Manchester and went to shows there, but I’ve recently moved out to Slaithwaite, do you guys know it?
JW: a little bit, only by name
W: It’s between Huddersfield and Manchester and I love it. Marsden’s the next village, and they have real folk-horror stuff there; they have the Imbolc Fire Festival every year, and people bring lanterns and the green man fights Jack Frost to mark the end of winter. I guess what I wanted to ask you is what makes this part of the world so enchanting for you guys? we can expand that to West Yorkshire as a whole, but particularly the Pennines area. What connections do you have with that landscape?
DW: I think the reason it’s so appealing is because you can travel five minutes and be in a totally different environment. You can go from ridiculously hilly valleys to totally flat fern fields. And then you’ve got Malham Cove – some really interesting geography and rock formations there. I feel like it’s a microcosm – lots of different environments pushed together.
W: Yeah, I guess England’s like that because it’s so small – you could be in a city centre then up on Kinder Scout an hour later. I lived in Manchester for years and never went to the Pennines, and when I did I thought, woah, this has been here the whole time…
AF: I love going over on the train.
W: Yeah, it’s like you’re in the Alps when there’s mist or snow – quite dramatic. So, you feel rooted to the Pennines. You mentioned Malham Cove Danny, where is that?
DW: It’s North Yorkshire – a really good place to go and visit.
W: How is it a cove? It can’t be by the sea…
DW: No, it’s a massive cliff, but it’s obviously land locked. It’s really interesting.
JW: That’s the inspiration for Helm’s Deep, isn’t it? It’s just huge rock formations with a gap in the middle. I went there with Winslade, our original drummer. [Jack is correct – it was the inspiration for Helm’s Deep. It’s a massive limestone cliff that used to be a waterfall, and temporarily became one again in 2015 thanks to Storm Desmond…]
DW: It’s amazing.
JW: Do you know what the top of it’s called? It’s these sinking rocks and they filmed some scenes from Harry Potter up there. He’s having a fight with Voldemort at one point, and the floor behind looks like it’s all sinking, but it’s the rocks at the top, it’s all waterlogged and the rocks have sunk in an interesting way. It’s a really nice view from the top as well. [The sinking rocks are known as the ‘limestone pavement.’ It was indeed used as a location in the 7th Harry Potter Movie]
W: Rocks are cool though, aren’t they, because they move and they live and they change very slowly.
AF: thousands of years.
W: There’s something doomy about rocks.
AF: I’ve seen a bunch of doom bands named after geological things, and it makes a lot of sense.
W: Yeah, it does when you think about it, I guess – heavy and slow. Where did you take the shot for the cover of King of the Ashes?
DW: That’s down in Cornwall. It’s a little seaside town called Hayle where my family go all the time. We were on the beach having a drink and some kids had put sticks in the sand and they were all just sticking up, and with the shadow and the lighting it looked really dark and ominous, the sticks look like burnt out trees.
W: Yeah, they do, that’s what I thought they were. I assumed it must be in the Pennines somewhere. It’s a really striking image – otherworldly.
AF: the reason that came about, it was just supposed to be a demo EP, King of the Ashes, really. We were looking for something to use as a cover, and I remember Danny said that and I was just like, that could work as King of the Ashes, because it looks there’s ash and burnt trees…if you put enough filtering on that, make the sand look black, add a green tinge to it that’ll work fine. But we’ve diverged from the landscape question, and I remember we had some good answers to it!
W: Sure, well let’s go back to it. We were talking about place, weren’t we, place and how you connect to it.
AF: I was thinking, what does this area link to? And all three of us agreed, countryside is the main one you think of; Yorkshire’s one of those places that consistently wins awards and tops the lists of the most beautiful places in the world because we’ve got this rolling, lovely countryside. As Danny said, you can drive five minutes and you’re in some form of it. But there’s also this weird culture that comes with being from Yorkshire; it’s the only place I can think of in England that has more than a few people actually wanting it to be its own independent state. There’s this very proud thing about people from Yorkshire and how we don’t like people from anywhere else, but not in a hateful way – which I’m aware contradicts, but…there’s also tons of history. You go to York for example, and there’s all this Viking history, and everywhere you go there’s old ruins, or what look like enchanted forests. There’s a place in Huddersfield called Beaumont Park. [See Adventures…] It’s this tiny little park, but when you walk in, it’s like an enchanted forest, just completely untouched. And it’s got these old stone walls and things – it looks like something from Lord of the Rings, Mirkwood Forest or something.
JW: I think where we live there’s a lot of epic scenery just a short drive away, and between you get little clusters of towns and then this beautiful countryside. Like Danny said, it can be so vastly different depending on where you are. And I think, whether consciously or subconsciously, it’s hard not to be inspired by that, and I think when you live in such a beautiful place and have such epic scenery, I suppose that’s why I’m drawn to epic, beautiful soundscapes.
W: Absolutely. The landscape here is rich with history and surprises. Some great cities as well.
AF: Yeah, well I’m in Leeds city centre; like, I’m fully in a concrete jungle right now, but I don’t mind. I can walk twenty minutes down the road, and I’m in the centre of Leeds, and that has impacted the way I’m writing music – the next album details that transition to living in the middle of a city.
On psychedelia, Mongolian throat singing and Sleep
“For me, it was Blue Cheer, The Beatles, Gong, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, a little bit of 13th Floor Elevators, and then the modern bands like Connan Mockasin, Acid Mother’s Temple, Foxygen; plus I listen to loads of things like Wardruna, Heilung, all those kind of bands. And then, like, we all listen to…well, occasionally, the Tibetan throat singing stuff. ” (JW)
W: So, the psychedelic was the next thing I wanted to talk about. It’s obviously an important part of your concept, and it really comes through in the sound. It can take you by surprise as a listener sometimes, because thinking of A Billion Faces, it’s heavy, but then you get this really nice introspection. What bands from the psychedelic era played a part in shaping your sound?
AF: The psychedelic era from the late 60s, early 70s didn’t directly play much of a part in the way we’ve approached the sound, but we’ve taken influence from bands that were inspired by those bands. I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of influence from Pink Floyd, and some from Jimi Hendrix as well, but other than that, I was struggling to think of bands that for me, at least, have directly inspired my approach to psychedelic stuff. Whereas stoner bands that incorporate the psychedelic into their sound have influenced us, and a lot of shoegaze bands lately– I’ve been massively into shoegaze and that really is coming through in the material I’m writing now, where it’s just effects: drenched in reverb, drenched in delay. It’s stuff like Weedpecker, King Buffalo, and shoegaze bands like Deafheaven and Nothing that have really come through in that.
DW: I’m the same. There’s not much from original psychedelia that I listen to, but then Earthless, Electric Wizard: bands which incorporate psychedelia but maybe don’t make it the whole focal point of the music.
W: It’s very twee a lot of the 60s stuff. 13th Floor Elevators are probably my favourite because there’s a darkness to them. I listened to Mark Riley’s A-Z of Psychedelia on 6 Music which is pretty interesting.
JW: I think I’ve listened to more of the older bands, but still not a whole load. For me, it was Blue Cheer, The Beatles, Gong, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, a little bit of 13th Floor Elevators, and then the modern bands like Connan Mockasin, Acid Mother’s Temple, Foxygen; plus I listen to loads of things like Wardruna, Heilung, all those kind of bands. And then, like, we all listen to…well, occasionally, the Tibetan throat singing stuff. And there’s some sense of, not really psychedelic, but that same kind of meditative mindset and calm, and both are good kinds of music to reflect upon and I think elements of that are definitely prominent in what we’re writing for the album.
W: Yeah, it’s interesting what you say about the folkier stuff there like Wardruna and stuff, and I think it all lends itself to doom because there’s something primal about it. Speaking of throat singing, have you ever heard the Inuit throat singing?
JW: I think so.
AF: I’ve heard different kinds.
W: It’s cool, very guttural.
AF: I don’t think I have heard that one. I’ve listened to a few different kinds of throat singing. Mongolian throat singing is the one we particularly like, like Huur-Hurrn-Tu and Batzurig Vaanchig. Funnily enough, there’s one of the riffs [on the new album]. I was bored one day trying to practise throat singing, because I’ve got this air fryer that hums in the key of F, and I was trying to throat sing and harmonise with the air fryer and I ended up writing a riff with my voice, and that’s actually how the riff for Reflection came about: I was harmomising with a cooker in my kitchen!
W: That’s hilarious! So, the shoegaze thing. How has that come into your music so far?
AF: The shoegaze sound isn’t too present on King of the Ashes, that wasn’t what I was listening to when most of that was written. A Billion Faces more so, but for the newer stuff I’ve been able to buy a load more effects and things. When we were playing King of the Ashes I owned, I think, three guitar pedals…whereas now I’ve got a Line 6 Helix – it’s a computer, basically. It’s just a toybox of effects, so I have gone absolutely mental writing in all this kind of stuff.
W: I’m not a musician, so I don’t know much about the technicalities at all – I wish I did. Sleeping Shaman have done that ‘Search for Tone’ series which is quite interesting.
AF: I could sit there and chat shit for hours about that; I’m proper obsessive over it.
W: I think it’s fascinating. Did you see Sleep when they played in Manchester?
AF: Yeah
JW: Yeah
AF: Did you Danny? I remember me and Jack did…
DW: I didn’t. I slept on it – I’m an idiot.
[Laughter from Andy and Jack]
DW: I was like, ah, it won’t be the last they come over, and then they announced they were breaking up the day before, so…
AF: Hiatus! They haven’t broken up, it’s a hiatus. So they say…
On King of the Ashes and A Billion Faces
“I remember being sat there in Harrogate thinking ‘I feel like shit.’ And I was like ‘what if I’d have gone to a different university – I wouldn’t be here…where would I be?’ And then I got thinking, if a parallel universe exists, somewhere there’s a version of me that did go to that other university, sat thinking, right now, where would I have been if I went to the university I did go to… And then the idea is there’s a billion different versions of yourself across every parallel universe ever, but there’s one version of you that’s looking through the ether at you right now. ” (AF)
W: It’s interesting to hear how your sound is developing. What are your thoughts about King of the Ashes (2016) when you look back on it now?
DW: Looking back at it, we weren’t taking anything that seriously when we came out with that. Like Andy said earlier, we were getting together in his bedroom at University and just jamming. I don’t think any of us expected to get to the point where we are now. So instead of it being entirely focused on what we want to be in the future, it’s more just taking influences and then changing them a little bit. It was just a fun project…we didn’t feel like it was going to go as far as its gone.
JW: I’m very much the same. I was initially going to play drums but didn’t have the gear for it. So they got Winslade as original drummer, and then I joined as an afterthought because I bought some guitar gear of Andy. Winslade was just learning drums, and I was just starting to learn guitar a bit better; Andy was still learning guitar a little bit. We were all learning together, so we’d just get in Andy’s room and usually get shitfaced or pretty stoned and we’d just play songs. Sometimes I feel bands want to sound a certain way to appeal to people, but we didn’t have any of that, we just wanted to play what we wanted, and I suppose that’s why [King of the Ashes] has got quite a generic sound. We did it all in Andy’s bedroom ourselves and it was just a nice experience. I was 18 when it started and we were kind of growing up as we were doing it and it was a weird time in our life, so it was just fun, that’s how I look back on it.
W: Yeah, there’s a rawness to it, but I really like it. It does feel like there’s cohesion too, even though you were having fun and trying things out.
AF: That’s so strange for me to hear actually. The writing process generally for us has always been I’ll just be sat in front of my computer, and I’ll be like ‘that sounds like a good riff’, I’ll play it into my computer, put some midi drums on it and I’ll take it to these guys, and we’ll tweak it about… That EP genuinely was just me throwing bits together. I was like, ‘yeah I wanna write a song that sounds like High on Fire,’ or ‘let’s play a stoner rock song…’ which is what the song King of the Ashes was, which was why that is so different from everything else. I couldn’t play with the same guitar pedal as I was playing with for the others songs, because it was all like ‘widdly woo’ fast notes and stuff. And it was genuinely just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. We’ll write a fast song, The Right, we’ll write a much slower song with long passages and psychedelic bits, which was The One Ring, we’ll write King of the Ashes, which is a fast stoner song. We’ll do an interlude with synths and stuff like that – see how it goes…And just showcasing all kind of elements and seeing what people liked, seeing what we liked to play. And whatever people liked, that’s what we’ll play. Now interestingly, it seemed like The One Ring, at least from my perspective, got the best response.
W: That’s my favorite.
AF: Yeah, that’s by a long way my favourite. It’s the only one, other than Old Toby, we still regularly play. You can tell that The One Ring sits in the same ballpark as A Billion Faces.
W: Yeah, I think that’s why I like it. It goes off on a nice tangent, and, structurally it’s quite interesting. So, you were saying you start with a riff, and do you just experiment on a motif, or do you have a structure worked out?
AF: Funnily enough, the way that writing is approached seems to be what’s spawned a lot of our criticism – I’ve heard a few people describe it as jumping between sections quite abruptly at points. And I think that’s because a lot of it is [me] sat in front of my computer like, ‘that sounds like a great riff,’ and then I’ll write another one and I’m like, ‘that sounds like a great riff’; I’m like, how do I get from Point A to Point B? And it’s usually just open note, have it all ring out with effects, and then go into the next section. And I’ll throw in middle sections to connect it all together, which is why it ends up being quite progressive and weird.
W: So onto A Billion Faces. I think that was a massive record. I had it on one of the APF compilations that I got free at a Tuskar show. As soon as I heard it, it blew me away. I used to put it on in my car driving over the Pennines. I was going to ask about landscape in relation to it…
AF: There’s a lot to say about landscape with A Billion Faces…that was another one [I wrote] whilst I was on my degree. I moved to Harrogate for a year, so I was way way away from everyone else and we barely got to play together as a band. I was writing things on my own with no real outside input. I could only see people on a weekend. I had to balance my time between my girlfriend, my friend and the band on two days out of seven a week – I couldn’t do anything through the weekdays. It did play a big part I guess, but I don’t know – that song wasn’t really fleshed out at all, it was just an idea. Then when we took it to the rehearsal room, every time we played it, it got a bit longer. The original demo of A Billion Faces was about 8 minutes – the final song is 13 and a half minutes! It started off as a song speaking about ‘what ifs.’ So, I remember being sat there in Harrogate thinking ‘I feel like shit.’ And I was like ‘what if I’d have gone to a different university – I wouldn’t be here…where would I be?’ And then I got thinking, if a parallel universe exists, somewhere there’s a version of me that did go to that other university, sat thinking, right now, where would I have been if I went to the university I did go to… And then the idea is there’s a billion different versions of yourself across every parallel universe ever, but there’s one version of you that’s looking through the ether at you right now. And that’s where that song came about. And as I say it just morphed and became something much more when we jammed it out together.
W: Sure, that’s really cool. That really struck me, that lyric: ‘one is staring back at me.’ It’s like a reflection almost…
AF: Ah! You just stepped into something there! Reflections is going to be the title of the album.
W: Oh wow! Well I wanna talk about the new album in a bit, for sure. Anything else to say about A Billion Faces? It seems to have been a definitive moment for your guys, not a new beginning, but…
AF: It was actually; it was a new beginning. Because with the first ep, as I say, it was just us throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. We were a four piece, our guitars were tuned up way high. We swapped our drummer out – we’re still friends with him – but we got Jack in on drums – he was playing second guitar…It was us basically saying, ‘we’ve got a new sound, we’ve tuned our guitars down over half an octave…’ We went from the tuning that Sleep are in to the tuning that Conan are in, and Bongripper…that super deep tuning. [We] bought a load more equipment, started playing way louder, way trippier. And I think A Billion Faces was just us saying ‘this is the sound we wanted to achieve in the end; here’s every facet of the sound that we want to go for in one song.’
JW: Yeah, I feel like the different elements and sections in there sum up everything we were trying to do at once. Like, looking back at it now, it’s done really well, but I feel like how it’s done on the album is way better, and it’s taken to the extremes a bit more: there’s a certain element, like this really heavy chaotic bit – there might be more of that in this song, or the softer jammy bit there might be more of that in this song, and we’ve taken those little parts that summed up the sound and explored it a bit more.
W: That sounds great. Is A Billion Faces on the new album?
AF: no.
DW: It’s its own thing.
JW: We don’t have room on the vinyl!
AF: the next album’s looking to clock in at over sixty, maybe seventy minutes. I think there’s about three or four songs that clock in over ten minutes long.
W: Well it’s nice to have A Billion Faces as a single that stands in the middle, I suppose, like a milestone.
On APF and playing with Eye Hate God
“Fieldy is the best hype man you could ever have behind you…he genuinely is the most passionate person I’ve ever met, I think, about this kind of thing. He’s just truly there for the love of everything, and if he likes what you’re doing he’ll let you know…” (DW)
W: The first time I saw you was at Riffolution when you’d just signed to APF. How has the label helped you to develop as a band?
JW: I think it’s helped us a lot with confidence. I think before we knew we had some kind of potential, but Fieldy helped us see that a bit more and see where we could go if we had the right contacts and played it smart. He helped us get a lot of decent gigs because obviously he knows a lot of people. We’d not been in the doom scene for a very long time, and there’s a lot of people who’ve been into it for ten, twenty years, and we’re still quite young…It’s helped us massively to feel like a proper band rather than just three dudes playing songs we like.
W: And he seems really clued up on the business side – I guess you’d have to be – and someone you could trust.
AF: So for me, as Jack said, confidence… But one thing that was absolutely massive was the fact that, all of a sudden, we weren’t just being the opening band anymore. For ages we were like, ‘we’d love to crack Manchester; Manchester’s the big place in the area for the stoner and doom scene…’ Everywhere we looked it was the big gigs at Manchester. And we just had no idea how to get into it. It seemed like a very insular scene where you saw all the same bands on the line-ups. And suddenly, we had A Billion Faces ready to go – again, we’d recorded it for free, mixed it all ourselves…And Corky from Bong Cauldron said ‘just speak to Andrew Field; just say you’re interested in working with him’, not asking to get signed, but to see if he knows where to go, or if he’s willing to work with us. Then we sent it to him and he instantly, instantly was mental for it – he went absolutely crazy. I remember Jack – I think I was at uni or something – and Jack goes ‘he’s just replied…he’s put ‘holy fucking shit!’’ And we’re like, ‘what’s this mean?!’ And I’m like, ‘he’s not gonna sign us though, is he?’ And no one had been that enthusiastic about us before, and for it to be someone like Andrew Field, who, in the area, he’s like this arbiter of taste; he’s got this cult of personality around him where he is a stamp of approval to say ‘this is a good band…’ which is why we approached him first, we were like ‘if we can get APF on side, that’d be amazing’ and, yeah, he put it out a week before Riffolution. We were like no way, this is our first Manchester show and suddenly we’ve got the big Manchester label behind us, and it’s all looking up, it was huge for us…
W: I suppose that’s one thing that’s endearing about you guys. You feel a bit like the underdogs because you’re quite new on the scene and obviously a little bit younger, but with what you just described there, that’s what the dream of being in a band used to be like, where you’d send off demos and someone would be bowled over by it. It doesn’t happen like that nowadays.
DW: I just think Fieldy is the best hype man you could ever have behind you. He’s got that whole meme of the ‘I love your fucking band’ thing. And it really does ring true with him – he genuinely is the most passionate person I’ve ever met, I think, about this kind of thing. He’s just truly there for the love of everything, and if he likes what you’re doing he’ll let you know…
JW: We’ve had a few nights with Fieldy where we’ve just been sat up after a gig or whatever, and it’s just us, and he’ll be drinking and drinking and (obviously he doesn’t anymore) and he’ll be just going ‘I fucking love your band…I fucking love your band.’
AF: He proper gushes about his bands.
JW: But it’s a great thing because it makes you feel really confident and worthwhile to get that kind of appreciation from someone.
AF: Someone who knows their shit appreciating it.
W: Yeah, he probably feels really stoked that he’s got his hands on you.
JW: Well, I remember, I sent it to him – and I was saying to these guys for months before Riffolution, I was saying ‘Fieldy’s gonna be there.’ We didn’t really know many other local big labels that we’d have a chance at, so I was saying ‘Fieldy’s our guy; he’s gonna be there – we’ve got to play it right.’ But then we ended up having the track ready before, so we were just like, ‘fuck it, we’ll send it to him.’ So we just sent it and were like ‘look, do you want to work with us? If not that’s fine, but could you help us out with where to send it, or whatever.’ And I was driving home and he replied, coz he said ‘I’ll listen to it later,’ and I saw the message ping, and he was going like ‘holy fucking shit, message me back as soon as you can, I want to talk to you now’ And I was just driving going like, fuck, I can’t…He was sending us videos of him listening to it going apeshit in his office at work and stuff, and a few hours later it that was it, it was a done deal.
W: That’s fantastic.
JW: Yeah, it was really good. It made us all feel really nice and warm inside.
W: That’s awesome, I’m so glad it went like that for you – and I’m sure there’s more to come from that partnership, which brings us onto the last question. What can we expect after the Covid nightmare – you say you’ve not played together, but you’ve obviously kept in touch and been busy on your next project, so what can we expect and has this period been useful in anyway?
AF: It has been useful in the sense, as I say, the writing process is usually just me sat in front of my computer, but it’s also been a lot of time to go through all the demo tracks that we have, because we’ve got the whole album written on demo tracks with a drum machine, and I’ve put my guitar into the thing and then pitched it down so it sounds like a bass, and there’s loads of bits that I’ve been able to say ‘I’m not keen on that.’ There was one track that I was like ‘that’s not going to work.’ We were gonna go with it, but whenever we played it it turned into mush.
JW: It was too fast.
AF: It was too fast! And because we’re playing with a sludgy as shit guitar tone these days, it just turned into mush. So then I was like, ‘I’ll re-write it as something completely different.’ It’s a song about when I first moved to university and I lived next door to this massive wooded area and we’d just get high as fuck and walk around the woods and have campfires and stuff. Genuinely one of the best times of my life ever – I’d just moved out and we were doing all this stuff. But it’s been nice to be able to re-visit all of the demos and perfect the bits that we weren’t keen on. Whereas before, there were parts where we were like ‘not so sure on that part, but I don’t know what to write instead.’ There’s been plenty of time to re-write. Have you guys got anything to add in?
JW: We’re playing with Conan on the 25th of July at New Continental in Preston with Swamp Coffin. That’ll be really fun. We’ve been wanting to play with Swamp Coffin for a while.
AF: Yeah, it’s good for us – it’s not a weekday so people won’t miss the opening band. We had that with Eye Hate God on a Monday…
W: Yeah, I missed you. I was so pissed off. I travelled in from Slaithwaite and got there late. Was it a good show?
AF: It sounded great, but we played to about 40 people. It filled up to about 500 for Eye Hate God, but there was just fuck all people there for us.
JW: I think what was slightly frustrating was when we played Riffolution, we had a really really really good crowd, especially for the time of day, and then we played that and we were playing on the main stage and we were expecting a similar turnout, especially for Eye Hate God. I’ve never even seen a band in doom of that size, so I was expecting loads. It was still a really good gig though…
On Reflections, the new album
“The one that I wrote is called Abyss, and my mental health hasn’t been great over the past few years, and it’s gone to some really dark places, and it’s kind of about that – at points in my life getting really fucked up to avoid dealing with the problems in my head, and you fall into that Abyss if you do that. ” (JW)
W: So going forwards…When can we expect this album?
AF: Whenever we get it rehearsed. We don’t know. As I say, the vast majority of it is written, it’s just a case now of getting it all rehearsed properly, tightened up, then making plans to head in the studio. The plan was, just before the pandemic hit, this is the time, we’re gonna hammer down, we’re gonna rehearse it like mental and hopefully get it out by the end of the year. Now we don’t have a rehearsal space, we don’t know where to rehearse. It really is just how long is a piece of string…
JW: It would be nice to put an end date on it, but we want to do it right. You can only do your debut album once, so I don’t want to say it’s so many months away, or even half a year… I want to know it’s done right.
W: Well, yeah, absolutely. It’s called Reflections?
AF: Yes. That’s never been announced!
W: Well, I’m honoured you’ve revealed that here! Anything to say about that – what inspired the title? Is it linking back to A Billion Faces?
AF: No, but it’s gonna be one big concept piece written in chronological order detailing the transition from being a teenager to a young adult, I guess, told through the lens of getting fucked up! So, the first track, for example, is about when I was 16 and I remember a bunch of my friends had just bought a bong, and it was when, if you remember, legal highs like Spice and stuff…
W: Oh God…
AF: that what when that boom was. Now we went to a shop to buy a bong to go to a festival, and then the guy goes ‘have some of this’ and just puts this stuff called ‘Annihilation on the table.’ And yeah, I was 16, I didn’t know what that was – I’d never done any drugs before, and I was…fucking…
W: They work those legal highs!
AF: They were ridiculously strong…I’ve still never experienced anything like that. I tried it twice. The first time was great, the second time was terrible, and that’s what the first two songs are about. The first 20 minutes or so of the album is about that, and it kind of goes on from there.
JW: The one that I wrote is called Abyss, and my mental health hasn’t been great over the past few years, and it’s gone to some really dark places, and it’s kind of about that – at points in my life getting really fucked up to avoid dealing with the problems in my head, and you fall into that Abyss if you do that. The idea of the album is that each song is a reflection of us looking back at that event or time in our life.
W: That’s interesting.
AF: And from there, it moves onto a more upbeat one, which is going to be all pretty-sounding, about when I first moved away to university when I was 18, and all of a sudden, I was like ‘this is amazing.’ It’s another new beginning…And from there it goes to one song that’s not fully written yet, but there’s an idea there about my placement year: I hated the job I was working, you know, kind of getting stuck in a job that you hate – there’s no way up, you just keep on going, and that being kind of a plateau, a bit of a purgatory situation. And the next one’s going to be ‘what next?’ Which was after I finished my degree and I was kind of like ‘shit, what happens next’ I’m gonna just end up working a job, being another nameless person in a city walking to and from work everyday and never doing anything; kind of getting high, but it’s not the same anymore…
W: Yeah, it sounds like a coming-of-age album, but with elements of maturity and reality coming through, particularly what you talked about Jack with the mental health, but also the drug experiences and things changing…and finishing uni’s horrible. God, I went on a real downer after it, because you think you’re gonna head out into the world and things’ll be laid out for you and it isn’t like that.
AF: It’s so empty
W You’ve got to make your own opportunities, and you go from knowing loads of people… It’s a weird time.
AF: It ends exactly as uni did, with me kind of saying ‘what’s next?’ I remember there was a time when I was sat at Jack’s, and I was anxious as fuck. I’d just finished uni and I was like ‘I don’t have a job yet, what the fuck am I doing?’ I remember he had to give me some CBD because I was shivering! I don’t know what it was, I’ve never had anything like it…
W: Jesus, well it sounds intriguing, and that’s an appropriately ominous point for us to end on, I think. Thank you so much guys – it’s been great talking to you. Is there anything else you want to say?
AF: I guess, I’m thinking of a better way to word ‘watch this space…’ Big things coming! As the local band stereotype goes.
JW: Trust us, it’s good bro!
AF: There are going to be things coming. Just keep an eye out for us. That’s it from me…