Hey, how's preparations for Damnation 2010 going?
OK, we were still pretty well rehearsed from the short European tour we did a few weeks back. And if you can play through rivers of alcohol, a morass of violent, stage diving Czechs and a fortnight of venting pure hatred, I'd say you're prepared for Damnation.
The band have been involved with Damnation’s team substantially in the past either through Anaal Nathrakh or different bands like Mistress, is it fair to say you and the Damnation guys get on well?
Never had a problem with them yet in five years and four bands (Benediction and Fukpig are the others). Of all the gigs and festivals you could play, Damnation is the one that most embodies the 'by the fans, for the fans' ethos. Never a hint of bullshit or lack of commitment, no attempts to be dictatorial or paternalist, just genuine people trying their level best to make things work. We actually turned down a gig in Scandinavia that was worth considerably more money because it was the day before Damnation and we couldn't guarantee we'd get back for the time they'd asked us to be there - we didn't want to let them down. It's like working with professionally capable friends, and I'd stand any of them a drink any time.
As I said you’ve played the festival before, how did it go last time for you and what are hoping for this year?
Once or twice, yeah. It's always been an absolute pleasure. There's a very short list of requirements as far as I'm concerned - cider and a crowd of people willing to knock the shit out of each other. Every Damnation I've seen has had both in abundance so they've all been great. Last year was an unbelievable way to put a full stop to the raging, slurring invective that was Mistress. We couldn't have asked for a better plank to walk off the end of. This year? Explosives are much more potent when they're detonated in confined spaces. There's no such thing as just another gig, and I'm hoping for something truly cathartic.
Who's your must-see band for Damnation, other than Fukpig?
Discharge, never seen them before. And what anyone thinks of them is completely irrelevant - no one, ever, anywhere can fuck with their legacy so seeing them at least once in whatever incarnation is mandatory. Plus it'd be good to see a bit of Earthtone9, if only to bring back memories of being 19 and watching Tat Twam Asi in some shit hole. Duncan (when he was fresh faced, thin and angelic, if you can imagine it) was on their 'street team' for fuck's sake.
Having started out as an underground duo doing no live shows how has Anaal developed into a more official band with tour dates, a music video and a deal with Candlelight Records?
By never expecting anything, just concentrating on throwing ourselves into what we do and always striving to make something worth believing in. Everything else is bollocks. And then you just take what opportunities come along and see where they take you. We've been lucky enough to get some fascinating opportunities over time so we've ended up doing some great things in terms of the shows we've played, people we've played with, having the chance to make a video and so on, but that doesn't mean that at some point we made a decision to change how we did things. We still see everything in pretty much the same way that we did on day one - make the thing you're doing the most powerful thing you can manage, fuck everything else and hold on tight.
Where do you draw inspiration from to create such ungodly music?
From looking at everything without rose tinted spectacles on, trying to uncover the cracks in the makeup the world wears on its face. And then running it all through the gibbering mess of neuroses that take up the space where a personality should be. Let the demons talk for a while in the hope that the rest of the time they'll shut up.
What do you do in between musical endeavours?
Technically in Mick (guitar, bass, programming)'s case there isn't really a time between musical endeavours. No matter what he's doing his mind's still racing, and very often it's something to do with music, one way or another.
I suppose that's not unusual in a sense. If you think of people who achieve things, they tend not to be things that they fitted in when they'd got time. Rather, everything else was usually taking up time that they'd otherwise have used to work on whatever it was that was their fascination. Einstein didn't exist entirely as a patent office clerk, and then do physics on his days off - he spent his life mulling over precisely the things he became famous for in the end. And not that I'm saying Mick is Einstein (though obviously I think he's outrageously talented), but his creativity is similar in the way that it's virtually never 'off'. And me, I mostly think. Whether that's researching some untranslateable manuscript on the internet, watching documentaries about conspiracy politics or cosmology, reading books about some obscure German nihilist or genetic ethics - whatever. You can never know too much, understand too much.
If I told you how excited I was about the book I found earlier and what it was about you'd think I was a right fucking ridiculous prick, but such is life. When I grow up I'd rather be Slavoj Zizek than anyone else I can think of. I also drink a lot.
One of the first live performances you did was for Peel Sessions with the legendary DJ John Peel, how do you think back on that now and how was it working with him?
We weren't fortunate enough to get to meet him, the closest we got was talking to his producer on the phone and hearing him talk about the recordings when he played them on his show. But even that felt momentous. Hearing John Fucking Peel waxing lyrical over something you'd done because he personally requested it is quite a feeling. Looking back, the overwhelming feeling I remember was 'What the hell are we doing here? There's a fucking philharmonic orchestra in the room next door and this studio cost twice as much as my house!'. Great experience to step into that world and be made to feel welcome. It was also the first thing I remember doing with Anaal Nathrakh that went way beyond what we'd ever thought it was likely we'd achieve.
When you start out, you hope one day you might get a record deal and maybe be able to see one of your CDs in the racks in a shop. You don't even bother to think about standing on a stage with half of Napalm Death playing with you, or being on MTV in another country or any of the other things we've managed to end up doing. And you certainly, absolutely don't expect to one day have an unknown caller ring you up and for the voice at the other end to say 'Hi, I'm Kate, John Peel's producer'! It's the upside of never really expecting anything - everything that does happen can still blow you away.
I hear there may be a new album in the works, are you able to tell us more about upcoming Anaal Nathrakh work and what you‘re bringing to the table?
A fresh, full bag of evil and a desperate need to ejaculate it. There are a lot of ideas coursing around at the moment, the kinds of things it'll take a couple of albums to work through. We're straining at the edges of what we can do. But until it's done, we haven't done it, if that makes sense - the things we've been talking about with each other recently, some of them are potentially big developments, I think. But we don't know how we can possibly do them until we sit down and do them. For the new album, I think the thing that will stand out by the time we've finished it is a deeper sense of sheer horror.
In the future will Anaal Nathrakh ever be an outlet for anything other than the trademark apocalyptic blackened grind we all know and love?
It will only ever be a nightmare, but within that I don't see any reason why it couldn't be anything we want it to be. Why bother limiting yourself?
What have you been listening to recently?
There's been too much background noise to listen to much music lately. 'Stigmata' by Skitsystem and a bit of Aderlating, that's about it. If you're going through a period when you can hear the sound of static electricity and bombs going off inside your head most of the time there's not much point trying to concentrate on what's coming out of your stereo speakers. Slightly less recently I got into a load of more unorthodox stuff - the last movement of Bach's partita #2 for solo violin, and I'd really like to find a recording of the cello version of the Arvo Part piece Fratres, as used in There Will Be Blood.
Plus I started listening obsessively to the song Crabcraft (aka Heirloom, but it comes up as Crabcraft on my equipment) by Björk. That kind of weird phase is usually followed by something really quite awfully horrible.
It’s just after your set, what do you have hoped to have given the audience?
Sweat. Possibly blood. Hopefully no tears. The rest they'll give themselves.
