Firstly, thank you for doing the interview! How are you doing today?

Not a problem!  Thanks for getting in touch.  I’m very well thanks, but I could do with a touch more sleep in general, currently - I have a lot to concentrate on at the moment and windows in which to work on it all come at odd times.  Throughout all this recording and leading up to the shows at the end of the year I’m stocked up with practice, rehearsals and vocals & guitar lessons.

I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times already but, why did Interlock split up?

Funnily enough, in an official capacity (for instance, a printed interview) I haven’t been asked much at all.  In still managing the interlock myspace account, and my own, it’s surprising how often I get asked by past fans about the whole situation but I’ve mostly been keeping some sense of quiet over it, but since you asked…

There were many factors surrounding the split and I think it’s fair to say that a large part of it was a steady decline.  The first album through Anticulture Records (‘crisis//reinvention’) was pretty well received, there was a lot of interest in hearing what might follow it.  At the same time, as with any band, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes and pressures that don’t immediately seem apparent.  Having released on a relatively new label, a fair portion of the album’s earlier promotion had to be done by us (sort of what you’d expect nowadays as standard, but this was nearly 5 years ago), so it was made pretty clear to us that we needed to spend a lot of time touring. 

interlock were never an easy band to book tours for - who do you put on the same bill?  It’s not like putting on a night of industrial acts as we were too heavy, and not a death metal night as we had electronics in our sound.  Nevertheless, we spent a lot of time on the road, so much so that in 2007 we toured the US, UK & Europe for nearly 2 and a half months, solid. 

Somewhat inevitably, attention on interlock grew and there were a few interested parties in the room concerning the release of the second album.  Business is business, and relations with our then label broke down with strong arguments lying on both sides.  I’m still good friends with Steev Power (the head of Anticulture) but it was a difficult time for everyone involved, especially around the time of playing Hellfest ’07 which saw some pretty tense ‘discussions’ in the VIP campsite.  After the Trans-Atlantic Tour 2007, we took some time out to concentrate on the new album and optioned it off as a prospect to the labels that were interested.  Unfortunately, what then began was the gradual decline of relations within the band.

The writing process was extensive, expensive and in some parts unnecessarily extraneous.  Many of us were at our wits end but for different reasons for each person.  There are perhaps some details which, out of fairness for all involved, are best kept to those around at the time.  Needless to say, what had operated as a well-oiled gigging machine and cohesive family unit became very much divided.  The pressure on those of us who were in employment to keep the band ticking over financially and the album process funded was huge, additionally for me was the pressure of keeping the band’s media identity buoyant whilst we effectively took over a year seemingly doing very little insofar as public-facing output was concerned.  In many respects, a hiatus the size of the one we seemed to be taking was career suicide.

It all came to a head just before we played Offset Festival 2008.  The week before, we had a meeting to discuss everyone’s concerns about the amount of time the album was taking to finish and the writing process (amongst a number of other matters) and at one point John [guitars / programming] announced he was leaving.  That was effectively the catalyst that got everyone walking their own way from the meeting.  Each of us always had a strong commitment to business arrangements so we pulled together to do the show we’d agreed to but, as you might imagine, the performance we did a week later (our last) was wrought with a number of emotions.  Eight and a half years of my life essentially had just flashed before my eyes, and I spent the following 6 months in some of the worst health I’ve ever had, including going from 15½ stone to 12 in a matter of weeks, plus having to nurse a totally debilitating stomach ulcer.  Not pleasant.

Are you still in contact with the other band members?

Those that I care to have contact with, yes. 

Joe [drums] & I obviously talk pretty much every day due to being in talanas together, we’ve always been on extremely good terms ever since he joined interlock in 2006, we became very close during the American tour in ‘07. 

I actually live with Christina [vocals] in a flat in Camden, she’s been a great friend ever since she completely turned interlock around when she replaced the last female singer in 2005/6, and because she’s only one floor away from me I hear what she’s now working on musically and I can tell you - it’s stunning. 

Mart is a very close friend of mine and Beth Ryan’s, I knew him from before he joined interlock so I’ve always had that rapport with him.  We work on a number of things together; he plays guitar for Beth Ryan alongside me, he’s also a fantastic video editor and has done a lot of work for Eulogy Media, including the most recent talanas video blog.

Syan is very much still around and is working on a number of projects, we speak fairly regularly to update eachother on what we’re doing, I’m extremely pleased to hear that she’s now a permanent member of Tribazik who suit her kind of outlook wonderfully.  She’s also doing a lot of work Club Antichrist and working as a DJ.

What happen to Parasite? Will any of it ever be released?

I’m not sure I can answer that fairly or give a full enough answer explaining why it will never be released (which would mean I’d somehow have to defend the decision) without losing my temper over the issue.  I'm told that it will never be heard by anyone in the way interlock wrote & recorded it (it was effectively finished and fully tracked).  You’d need to ask John Tyrell about any future plans with that, he still has all the recordings.  Other than him, nobody in the final line-up has actually heard the album or their performances on it, nor apparently will they ever in the format of complete songs.  If I could release it now for free, on a CD, on a tape cassette or even a bloody wax cylinder I’d move heaven & earth to get it heard, as I feel the people who supported the band (fans, endorsing companies, families of band members) deserve a lot more than to have the issue just ignored, let alone what the people who performed on it feel about the loss of the best performances of their careers to date.

Interlock created what was called “cyber-metal”, was it always your intension to create this type of sound? What attracted you to this kind of sound?

John (the band’s founder) & I only really tabbed ourselves as ‘cyber metal’ around 2005-ish, we’d heard similar terms used to classify bands like Fear Factory & Strapping Young Lad so it seemed the most fitting.  At the time it was this huge mission statement to us to incorporate all possible facets of sound & influence into metal, and what that we wound up as was something that sounded closer to industrial that much else, after a while the specific subgenre tag thing became a bit of an albatross around our necks - it shut as many doors as it opened. 

The pursuit of that kind of sound was down to those of us who contributed material refusing to listen exclusively to metal.  The difficulty that then comes with creating music like that is it’s like turning up to a house party with a bottle of really weird (but strong) liqueur when all most people want is beer.  I’ve since discovered that the majority of metalheads these days have extremely diverse, non-metal tastes, it’s just that the metal they like needs to sound good as metal, not as an eighth of a sound.

Are you aware of any other bands performing this style?

Of course, but I think it’s a mistake to be, unless you’re as big Fear Factory and have as much history of successful release under your belt.  Now is so very much not the time to be releasing electronic metal and dressing like it’s still 1999.  It’s my opinion that people are wanting more genuine performances and identities now, a lot of current metal is stripped to the point where you’re forced to concentrate on the musicianship, it’s no longer passable to hide behind just a chugging rhythm line.

Interlock also had a very distinctive look onstage, was this a conscious decision?

Yes it was.  I can say that now, this far away from it, but I have to put my hands up and say that it was mostly me who enforced that.  I’ve always believed in a strong sense of theatre being necessary for any performance, and I still do, but at that point the look we had seemed to suit the music pretty well.   I hated the idea of hitting a stage wearing just a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, it also seemed extremely strange to be up there giving the performances we did if we were just wearing totally nondescript outfits.

I can’t say it was always plain sailing though, and of all the things we used I’m least sorry to see my black contact lenses being packed away in the wardrobe.  They were enormously painful 2/3mm thick blocks of solid plastic and the shit I put myself through on tour in having to use them (like having to get dental cement casts of both eyeballs) was out of this world, but they looked cool.

I had the privilege of seeing Interlock live twice; I thought it was a pretty intense performance. Do you enjoy playing live?

This far from the split, it’s what I miss the most.  One thing you could always say about any of the members of interlock is that we will always give a performance worth watching, no matter what band we’re now in.  For me, a live performance is a hell of a commitment on the audience’s side - now that everything’s basically available for free (albums, DVDs, images of the band etc.), the choice to part with nearly £10 to go see someone potentially fuck up their favourite songs for them has to be considered by every musician that will ever perform.  It’s a contract and a responsibility for a musician as soon as the audience walk through the venue door, my role is to entertain and make that ticket a worthwhile purchase, I’m not going to do that standing near the edge of a stage acting like I’d rather be at home having a wank.  Consequently, when you get it right, the feeling of unspoken, mutual communication defies explanation.  It also means that the cost of that ticket is justified in going towards the petrol to get us to the next set of people who have parted with their hard earned money.  Audience members who go to gigs and see band members not bother to sing their own parts, walk off early or make excuses for being shit need to demand refunds. 

Lyrics?

I have to confess to being a lyrics fascist.  I’ve been put off bands before for having bad lyrics, it’s really that important to me.  Words are the first thing a human will identify with, people sing along to lyrics more than they do guitar lines or keyboards so if you screw that up and alienate people by churning out “the way I feel, it’s so real” crap then you’ve immediately lost a portion of the people you should be trying to reach.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying every singer needs to be Wordsworth, but for heaven’s sake find something worth writing about and take some time considering how you’re saying it.

Interlock released an EP called the Skinless remixes. I don’t really understand how the remix culture in Industrial music works. Do bands remix your songs and send them to you? Or does the label send your songs out to bands that enjoy remixing and then compile them into an album?

I think it’s more of a case of how it worked, rather than works.  ‘Back in the day’, bands like Pitchshifter would release some seriously exciting stuff and have some amazing artists treat their own tunes.  Releasing the ‘skinless remixes’ EP was in my opinion a bit of a mistake - amazingly, the press just couldn’t recognise it for what it was, you wouldn’t believe the amount of journalists & publications who reviewed it as a second album.  Amazing. 

The process back then was initially to approach artists that we knew would make something of interesting of the material, then we set up the competition where anyone could take the sound files and make what they will of it.  That part was really interesting and choosing a winner was extremely difficult.  These days, I think remixes are really best left to the dance circuit, I don’t think people can adjust themselves to metal remixes anymore and things sound outdates so much quicker in that field now.

Have you done any remixing?

Me personally?  Heavens no, I’m more about doing proper, organic and intriguingly altered covers of existent songs.

I am still a big fan of Interlock yet I don’t own one of your t-shirts. Can we still buy merch from anywhere?

Interestingly enough, Joe & I have a box of shirts & assorted interlock merch.  We took over our section of the studio we used to operate in when in interlock, so we’re currently just waiting for a time when we’re both less busy to deal with it all.  From early on in my career in interlock, to its zenith, even to beyond the split I find myself still managing & administrating a considerable amount - it’s me still handling the myspace page etc.  I’ll be setting up a promotion shortly where you’ll be able to buy an interlock shirt or hoodie in a deal with copies of the ‘Vampire Diary’ soundtrack we appeared on.

You had, or still have a sponsorship from Mantronic Clothing, how did this come about?

I still do.  I talk to Nirjaro (who runs the company) fairly often, he’s an astonishing designer.  The great pity is that he’d actually designed and already in some cases made the outfits that were intended for the ‘parasite’ era of interlock, most specifically for the album shoot, and they were really amazing. 

I first came across Mantronic when I was searching for a new stage outfit around where I live in Camden Town, I found this great top that seemed tailor made to someone who has slightly more broad shoulders than most, after that I decided to contact the company directly and discovered that it was a one-man company and that he was a wonderful person, very eager to work within quite the specific look we had.

I’ll continue to work with Nirjaro and have, since the split, done some modelling that have showcased his designs.  We’re hopefully work towards getting designs sold in more places in the UK.

Even a brief look at your myspace page shows that you have been involved in a number of notable bands including Interlock, Worms of Sabnock, Leech Woman and Dam among many others. How did you end up in so many projects? How do you find the time?

I’m not sure I do find the time, that’s just the problem!  I’ve always busied myself in musical projects probably as a mixture of wanting to keep my horizons and experiences as broad and contemporary as possible combined with simply having a very, very short attention span.

The thing is, I love a huge amount of different styles of music and rarely feel that I can express myself completely using just one medium.  Very early on in my musical career I consciously set out to involve myself in as many different types of music as I could, but soon enough I found that I was being asked to join bands as a result of what I’d done before.  Certainly recent acts I’ve been part of have been from them being friends or peers and being drafted in as performing guest, that’s the case with bands like Dam, Worms of Sabnock, Leech Woman etc. and I’m very fond of that sense of community that exists between musicians. 

The practicalities are of course a different matter altogether, having to time it all together with committing to a day job to make ends meet can take its toll, and certainly since taking up guitar a lot more seriously my practice time has doubled.

Do you have a favourite band/ moment/ memory from your time performing music?

It’s difficult to say as there are just so many fond memories from the time I’ve spent, I’d easily say that it’s been the most prominent factor in my life.  I couldn’t single something out, but it’d have to be a mixture of a few:

Around 2005 and the release of ‘crisis//reinvention’ we reached a point where I actually didn’t have the time to commit to a full-time job, my days were filled with interviews, photoshoots, rehearsals and the rest of my time I’d spend in the gym.  As egotistical as it may sound, it was actually more the sense of affirmation that I was spending the time doing what I was supposed to.  A rare opportunity, and one that was truly appreciated.  Steev from Anticulture Records did a great job in keeping us busy around that time.

In a similar sense, we played to some mad audiences.  Seeing the footage from Christina’s camcorder she’d just shot of the queue of people who were waiting outside a venue in North Wales to see us headline on the last tour before we were about to hit the stage was jaw-dropping, then walking onstage to see a huge, packed room just added to it.  We were so grateful.

There was also a great moment on the US tour playing to a packed out sports hall in Richmond, Virginia that had been out on by Rick Ferdinande of Juan John Promotions.  He’d done an amazing job of it and had rented us all rooms in a nearby (very good) hotel, provided drink & food and promoted the living hell out of the show for a while, it meant we had a rabid crowd of local kids who went utterly mental.  About a week or so later we had an unintended gap in the tour schedule whilst we were in Jacksonville (Florida), we managed to turn up to a huge metal venue we’d found almost by mistake and negotiate a slot on that night’s bill after the headliners, I don’t mind saying we tore the place up and it was by far one of the highlights of the entire southern leg of the tour.  Other memorable moments came from that tour such as impromptu and completely bonkers house parties held in our honour by local audience members that would seem fantastical if described.

Similar feelings came from headline shows in London (The Marquee etc. ) but largest of all was playing to the crowd at Hellfest 2007, which was our biggest ever.  It was realising that, not only did we have an expectant fanbase out there, but that they were singing my lyrics back to us in our own language that was so totally humbling.

What advice would you give to young bands/artist starting out in the UK scene?

The most sincere advice I can give anyone starting off in this industry, let alone the UK scene, is to work as hard as you can to develop a reputation for being a pleasant, fair & accommodating person to be around and do business with.  The harsh reality is, as I’ve discovered, there are people out there in this trade who will be set to talk shit about you seemingly just for the sake of doing so, if people know you for being a decent chap then the report of you being otherwise will be met either with disbelief or an understanding that the situation absolutely warranted it.

The saddest fact is that it should all be about just playing great music.  It’s not.  That’s about 50%, maybe even less.  If karma existed, there would be a lot of dead businessmen & politicians, instead people trade with horrible bastards as much as they do with virtuosos, and invariably the bastards still find their way to the spotlight.  Always thank people and never assume that you’re being given something for free.  With that said, if you’ve been turned down for something you think you were worthy of, always examine the reasons given and why you’ll have been given them, as often there’ll be more reasons than simply ‘feedback’.

You are the director of Eulogy Media, why was this set up? What services do you offer?

I had found myself in a position of being able to talk the language of those interlock needed to business with, which came as some surprise.  I discovered that on one side people were wanting to speak to a formalised company and on the other side there were musicians & artists who had seen what we could arrange for ourselves as a band and wanted in.  It made sense to incorporate as a company and we offered some similar representation for management, promotion & booking to some trusted friends. 

Eulogy Media Ltd. is about to have something of a re-structure, Stewart & I are about to bring Nathanael Underwood from Dam into the company and very soon we hope to have out first few releases available.  It’s in place to help promote and release artists that we see as having something unique, as such it’s meant that we have mixed roster (acoustic, electronic, metal etc.).  The best statement we can provide as something of an outlook for the company is ‘for musicians, by musicians’.

Did you always want to go into the music industry?

It was more of a pleasant surprise, really.  I think it was fairly obvious I’d be in some form of a performing art, my family has been in theatre & film for 3 generations and I studied at the same drama school as my Grandfather.  It’s odd though – not a huge amount of people in my family are musical; my Grandfather is basically tone deaf but my father had released a single (as an actor) with Ray Davies of The Kinks.  I’d been in bands since I was 13 (singing, guitar, drums) but when I left drama school I spent a few years as an actor until things kicked off with interlock.  I had to make the choice of continuing cutting my hair and going from Shakespeare to Shakespeare, or go back to piercings & headbanging and potentially lose my agent.  The music won.  I’ll eventually go back to acting though, returning to the odd piece here & there and co-writing & directing a piece for Fiona Hardingham that went to Edinburgh the other year was great.

What is your first memory of music?

As with most people, my parents – they had been good enough to introduce music as a crucially important element of life from very early on and had drawn no distinct line between The Beatles, Led Zeppelin or J S Bach.  I think my first live performance memory was possibly seeing people like A-ha, Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney perform at Wembley and feeling how the entire crowd were so swept up in the anticipation & electricity.  I'd say that stuff like that was pretty pivotal in me wanting to become at least a performer, if not a musician.

And now on to pastures new! How is Talanas going? Could you tell us a bit about it; how it came about? What kind of music you play etc? Where the name came from?

talanas is progressing in leaps & bounds.  It's the new project that was formed by me and Joe, interlock's drummer, and as it turns out it would be appear to be the first complete recording project to have emerged officially from the 6 of us as a result of the big split last year.

During the recording process for 'parasite' I think we'd all registered how exasperated we'd become, both personally and artistically and in respect of wanting to keep some sense of vitality in myself as a musician I was certainly very open at the time to new offers.  Nathanael Underwood, the frontman & founder of Dam, had asked me to guest on guitar for a London show he was booked to headline for last summer.  I saw this as something of a test, I did the gig and was surprised to find that I was singing along to a lot more of the material than I thought I knew whilst playing the set.  I returned from that guest slot with a new itch to scratch and immediately went to speak to Joe about it, he & I always had a sense of communication since he joined interlock in 2006, and in all honesty he's pretty much my favourite drummer I've ever worked with.

As the weekly slots interlock had at Berry Street Studio were overnight sessions, we decided we'd use any of the spare practice time that we might have ahead once recording had finished to try out how things might feel if i were to take up guitar & vocals at the same time with the express intention of writing some face value, no-nonsense metal that might challenge us in some way.  I think we were both slightly scared of having lost sight of metal for metal's sake and the enjoyment of playing 'organic' material, meaning we wanted to move away from the restrictions of playing to strictly programmed electronic backing & arrangements.  As it turns out, interlock were using the studio to practice overnight up until the split so we never had the chance to try it out beforehand, but I think in some ways knowing that there was something else on the horizon made the last show a little less tragic than it could've been for both of us.

The two of us were so set on working on something new that Joe & I were in the studio, jamming out material the week after the Offset Festival final interlock show, we got in there as soon as we could, ensuring we'd have something of a seamless change in the amount of effort we were putting into our careers.  Everyone around us at the time (the guy who runs the studio, our endorsees etc.) were amazingly supportive with helping us to get things going, and that hasn't stopped.   Even before we'd locked down any definite material, the interest and support we received from interlock fans and others close to us was overwhelming.

Getting a new band off the ground hasn't been entirely absent of its issues though, but we appear to have had significantly less that I've been used to in the past, it's just extremely odd for me to be starting at a relatively low step on the ladder again.  Since starting it all up though, things have evolved in the most bizarre way, and I don't think we could've imagined it would end up sounding like it does currently.

Various people joining have inevitably brought their tuppence worth to the table, and Ewan Parry (our guitarist) has certainly cemented his role as a major writer, he's come in and totally re-awakened my love of Akercocke and more prog-based acts, he's also a stunningly good guitarist so I'm playing catch-up with a lot of this.  As such, I think it's fair to say that we're closest to progressive death metal as a sound or genre.

The name is pretty open for interpretation, to be honest.  I came up with it by mistake after a brainstorming session that ended up in us realising that almost every name under the sun appears to have been taken up, however since naming ourselves talanas we discovered that it's actually the name of a type of insect, hence the logo.

You are recording your debut EP “Reason and Abstract” very soon at the Berry Street studio with James Dunkley. What made you choose to work with him in that studio?

James had always been in the picture with interlock, he had definitely registered a serious interest in wanting 'in' on recording us.  He'd also worked with us on live sound on a number of occasions such as our headline show at the Marquee so we were certainly very familiar with him.  He'd since really impressed me with his production work on albums for The Rotted etc, and out of a pretty strong list of people who had expressed interest in producing what talanas were doing, he came out on tops as a band-wide opinion.

Berry Street Studio is something of a second home for me & Joe.  For myself, I've been practising and recording there once a week, every week, since 2001.  It may sound a little odd, but one of the pivotal factors of retaining our position at Berry Street was that Joe's kit would need to be housed somewhere (he lives in Winchester) and even just mobilising to another London studio would take money & time - we hope to showcase his kit at some point soon; it's the single largest kit that Mapex have ever made for one of their endorsees, it has 4 kick drums and ton of other stuff, we've since dubbed it 'The Mothership'.  Aside from that, Berry Street has some great gear and is a top notch facility for any band to record in, let alone rehearse, and it's in the heart of London.  All the main interlock recordings were done there. 

When can we expect the EP to be released?

I think that, safely speaking, we're looking at maybe August although obviously I'll be hoping for earlier.  I'll put my hands up and admit that one of the major factors in the time it will take is doing vocals - we're going to be recording one night a week and I honestly have no idea how my vocals will turn out this time around.  I've been so used to what I've been doing for this many years, it's a hell of a challenge to identify a new voice that correctly suits the feel of the music which is something that’s really important to me.

You also play guitar and programming with Beth Ryan. How did this come about?

I first started speaking to Beth when she was being considered to appear in an interlock video a few years ago, she’d been quite the fan of the band and I stumbled across her music page by mistake one day.  She has a stunning, unique voice which she has a hell of a lot of technical control over, however she was also one of these people who in some ways needed backing both musically & personally. 

I started working with her on guitar fairly soon after I met her, but it’s taken us a while to gather together material simply because of practicalities and fairly demanding pursuits on either side.  However, we’ve since recruited some amazing people, namely Mart from interlock on guitar and Tom Whiston (signed to Anticulture, Noise:Tek & Bad Sekta Records) on programming.  The music has moved upwards from its original acoustic singer/songwriter roots and is now far more in the area of contemporary electronica, it also has a strong leaning towards a lot of Siobhan Donaghy’s early work.  We’re likely to have something available towards the end of this Summer, and the gigs we’ve done so far have been great, they’ve generated a lot of interest.  There’s a lot of room for her to move into more commercial climes, I think.

There is also the Kharnum project, which sounds very interest to me! What can we expect from this?

When things finally pull together with Kharnum, it’s going to be horrific (in a brutally good way).  Kharnum was intended as the absolute polar opposite of what I was doing at the time in interlock, and was very awkward brainchild between me & Tom Whiston.  He’d worked with interlock as a live sound engineer at first and then as a remixing artsist, we’ve had quite a history of working with eachother and had always said we should combine musical forces to make the most horrible thing we could.  We’ll be fusing technical death metal with breakcore & gabba, and preliminary attempts at the mixture have so far been brutal as all hell.  I can’t guarantee a timeframe for it, but I do know that when it hits; it’ll be hard.

What do you think of the UK scene at the moment?

I find it’s extremely easy to feel out of touch or not quite up to date with things in the UK.  There appears to be a new band for every minute of the hour and each one is declaring others before them to be outdated in some way.  Whatever happens, the general metal populus will always have a main ‘scene’ or fad to complain about, I remember when it was nu metal, then it was emo, now it seems to be that people are wising up to the fact that grindcore has been taken to its absolute limit of exploration and exploitation.  I really don’t feel like I’m one to denounce things too far though, as frankly I’m more interested in sitting back and concentrating on what I really want to generate rather than keeping up with the metal Joneses.

Insofar as live work is concerned though, it’s interesting.  With the closure of places like the Red Eye, then years later the Astoria, sometimes it’s hard to feel the same ‘scene’ solidarity we had back in, say, 1999 / 2000 or so but then I’m sure people were saying the same back then about 10 years before. 

Do you have any favourite bands?

I can provide a snapshot of where I am currently, as I think people go in phases mostly.  I’ve been listening to an obscene amount of David Sylvian at the moment, he’s a huge influence on me vocally.  I will always have an unquestioning love of Fields of the Nephilim as they were ‘my band’ in my adolescence.  Akercocke feature highly on my playlist, as do Stam1na, Tom Waits, Black / Colin Vearncombe, Tori Amos & Siobhan Donaghy who I feel is possibly one of the most underrated pop singers to have ever come from the UK.

Being involved in so many diverse sounding projects you must have quite a wide taste in music?

I’ve never seen any point in limiting your exposure to art of any form.  The idea of needing a musical scene to belong to is something that quite worries me, it’s possibly why I’m so at odds with deliberately exclusive and ‘them & us’ stuff like Manowar even despite their apparent tongue-in-cheek intentions; there are still plenty of metalheads who will sing along to it whilst drunk and slightly mean it. 

Could you pick out a few favourite artists?

There was once an artist whose work I was lucky enough to view whilst on a school trip to Paris for a week.  I believe that knowing you’ve found an artist who you adore is when you look at their material and don’t realise time passing.  Sadly I never caught the name of the artist in question, but their work was displayed in the Pompidou Centre and was effectively tightly, but roughly bound bundles of distressed rags that were suspended by near-invisible wire from the ceiling, to me they looked like rotting babies and were accompanied by a soundtrack that were a mixture of noise and obscure ambient soundscapes, I hadn’t realised that I had been standing there watching these things turn slightly in breezes from passers by for about 2 hours, I was totally captivated.

Other favourite artists include without a doubt Dave McKean who worked on albums that were my path into extreme metal and who, as luck would have it, is a neighbour of mine down where I come from in Kent.  I’ve had the extreme fortune of knowing him now for a number of years now and having worked briefly with him as an actor on one of his projects, he’s an absolutely amazing person and the personal contact I’ve had with him has broadened my appreciation of his output.  I’m also a huge fan of Rodin and find would rate ‘The Gates of Hell’ as one of my favourite pieces of sculpture I’ve seen, there’s a visceral and incredibly sexual aspect to his work that at times renders it hard to believe the work he’s done is actually made from stone.

What is the first album you bought?

The first album I remember making a concerted effort to afford myself was ‘Oblivion’ by D-Rok, they were signed Warhammer Records (who also had Bolt Thrower on their roster at the time) and had the singer from March Violets as their frontman.  It was on cassette of course, and I wore the tape down to a barely listenable strip, having crumpled it several times in substandard tape decks.  It was hugely important to me.  They never released anything beyond that album.  A few years after buying it I quizzed Brian May over his guest appearance solo on the single they released and he could hardly remember doing it.

What is your favourite album of all time?

Such a tricky question to answer, as one changes mood you find you need different things from different artists.  If I were to boil it down to being what I regard as essentially flawless though, I’d have to say it’s ‘Into the Labyrinth’ by Dead Can Dance, mostly on the basis that it contains the song ‘The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove’ which in my opinion is the best written song that I know.  The sentiments expressed in that album have managed to apply themselves to almost every profound situation I’ve been in since I first bought it in 1995, which to me shows true talent in songwriting.  Brendan Perry’s voice to me remains one of the most sublime in modern music and one that I find makes me capable of completely disassociating myself from my surroundings whilst listening to, both he & Lisa Gerrard manage to establish and maintain emotion for the length of each performance.  Close runners are possibly ‘As the Flower Withers’ by My Dying Bride, ‘Secrets of the Beehive’ by David Sylvian & ‘October Rust’ by Type O Negative.

Who is the best artist you have seen live?

The absolute best I’ve ever seen as a performing artist is Steven Berkoff when he was going his ‘Shakespeare’s Villains’ one man show in the West End.  In the most humble way possible, I had a religious moment watching it and had to see it a further 3 times to work out just what the hell it was that I was experiencing.  The mark of a true artist, in that sense, for me is not showing the cogs turning and for the suspension of disbelief to be automatic in their audience rather than than a conscious decision, in that an audience member shouldn’t need to volunteer their attention and indulgence in the fantasy of roleplay but instead be irresistibly compelled to believe what they’re seeing.

In that same respect, musically I’d say that Akercocke are possibly one of the best live acts I’ve ever experienced, and I’d say that after having worked or associated with them for ten years.  I’m not personally into going in the pit at metal gigs, yet each time I see them I’m drawn to, they succeed in making me forget that I know them as people and communicate a level of undiluted ferocity to those watching, it’s a level of performance that I find myself getting totally taken aback by, in the kind of “Oh shit” way.

How did it feel to be voted “most shaggable male” in Terrorizer a few years ago?

The overall feeling I had about the whole subject was hilarity.  That whole side of the poll (and some would say the polls themselves) is very much tongue-in-cheek.  Given that it must’ve taken at least some people to vote in order to have me appear in the category for 6 years, I’m obviously very honoured and it’s caused my modelling career no great harm.

It is something that gets raised a lot.  There was one interview I did, in person, where the interviewer seemed intent on repeatedly mentioning it as if it were some sort of insult or that I’d somehow instigated it, which was a little odd, it’s a bit of fun at most.

I notice the Queen is present on a lot of your pages; I take it you are a fan of our dear Monarch?

I am, yes.  I don’t tend to discuss it too much as it’s sadly something of an unpopular subject amongst many people of this generation, but I do think that many people have one belief that they’re prepared to be blinkered over and accept beyond all reason, mine is that Queen Elizabeth II is my monarch and were she (in the extremely unlikely, near impossible event) to command that I lay down my life for her, I would.

You said that you went from being Christian to Pagan to Satanist before giving up on spirituality. Why was this?

I was raised as Church of England, I was baptised and very nearly went through with my confirmation.  As I grew older, each year there seemed to be more of a niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite right with what I was supposed to believe in, I was also increasingly more and more attracted to darker fiction, fantastical stuff.  I knew very little about Paganism and stumbled across it whilst researching English folklore, I had a few conversations with some extremely amiable Pagans when I was around the age of 12 and had a lot of personal questions and concerns answered by their system of faith, it was so much more personal than the blanket system & regulations offered by Christianity.  A few years later, I learnt of a loss in the family which had prompted a Christian priest to offer some unwelcome views on the subject that I found not only to be extremely rude but essentially evil, it was at that point that it all switched and I embarked on an adolescent mission to oppose Christianity in any which way possible, which of course tied-in wonderfully with being an uptight & hormonal arsehole.

I went through the paces, bought all the skulls, wore all the pentagrams etc and I’d say it was an operative factor in me joining the band that was to become Worms Of Sabnock (then called Nature’s Whore), but then as the whole teenage thing wore off I realised I had been using the exact same veracity to oppose a system that it was so closely linked to my own, or in some respects was reliant on it.  I was being a hypocrite.  I also steadily realised that the stories and mythology were equally as banal, pointless and ultimately just as difficult to accept as anything other than version of the tooth fairy mythos.  However, in adopting an atheist mindset, I think I still retained a lot of the personal and political values that come with modern Satanism.  Every now and again I have my lack of faith challenged which I think is vital and something that I hope will continue throughout my life, but as yet I’ve had no argument strong to inspire me to return to any religious belief.

Thank you very much for the interview! Do you have anything you would like to say to our readers?

Thank you for the questions & interest!  Yes I do have something to say - anyone should do what they can to remember that many of the opinions on artists no longer needing labels and the whole DIY pro musician thing is only an ideal.  It’s a crusade at best, not yet a revolution and as with any or either of those movements there are bound to be some casualties.  The larger the band, the less they have a say in where they’re booked to play, similarly a band doesn’t get coverage in magazines just for being good, there’s a lot of exchanges of money & favour that would make politics look like a field day.  Being a composing, recording and gigging musician costs money, lots of money and nothing’s getting cheaper, so if you’re listening to something and it effects you, consider taking a moment to contemplate what the performers went through for it to reach you.

Photo credit:
group shots: ross wildish

solo shot: robert marchosias