Subba-Cultcha speaks to Steve Beatty, bass player with one of the UK’s most unique bands, October File, to discuss their latest album ‘Our Souls To You’ and the joys of serenading zombie hordes.
October File are something of a rarity in the UK’s music scene; a band with much to say, and who know just how they want to say it. Despite delivering some gloriously nasty noise in their time, the four-piece have had more than their fair share of setbacks, but with a newly solidified line-up and a great new album under their belts, things are definitely looking up. That’s before we even get onto the upcoming Cayman Island trip...
Cheers for your time today. So, how are you doing, what have you been up to?
We’re good, we’ve just confirmed that we’re going to be in a film, so we’re running around trying to get everything together for that, our work permits and all that guff. We’re off in about three weeks. We are just about to announce that we’re special guests on the City Of Fire tour, which is Burton and Byron from Fear Factory, and we’ve got some festival announcements coming up but we can’t say anything about those for the time being.
Cool, there’s some good stuff going on then.
Yeah, finally (laughs).
(laughs.) Your latest album ‘Our Souls To You’ was released a little earlier this month, could you tell us a bit about the recording process this time around? You’ve mentioned that it’s been a slightly smoother ride than previous records...
Well, the process itself was much the same as the others really, we’ve actually recorded all of the albums in the same place with pretty much the same production team, apart from Justin (Broadrick). The difference has been that on ‘Holy Armour...’ John (Watt, drums) was pretty much the new boy, and he hadn’t really even settled into the band when we were doing that, we’d just gotten rid of the prick that was there before him. We almost regard this as our debut record really as it’s the first that we’ve been really happy about doing, and we’re really happy with it. It’s a really focused record, quite unique, and everything that we wanted it to be. We actually enjoyed doing it, while the last couple of albums were fraught with arguments. It’s one of those things... you go through relationships in life, and relationships within a band are no different to any other relationships; sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Sometime’s when you’ve been with a girl and you split up you think ‘actually, what the fuck did we see in each other?’ Matt, Ben and I have known each other for such a long time, we have this understanding, so John had a hard time at first because he was joining three people that knew each other really well, who knew exactly what they wanted to do. Now that he’s a fully fledged member of the band, we feel like ‘that’s the band’, really. Whereas before there was the three of us and someone else pissing us off.
Do you tend to share writing responsibilities these days?
On ‘Holy Armour...’, the majority of the music was written by me, while Matt chipped in a couple of bits and wrote some of the lyrics. This is the first record where everybody has covered their own area. I’ve still been doing all the bass and stuff, but Ben’s written all of the lyrics, and John’s even come up with a couple of things, for example the idea that we’ve based ‘Eau Du War’ around. I think that everyone’s pitched in; that’s probably the difference in the sound of the album, it feels like it’s a proper band with everyone chipping in. I hesitate to use the word ‘team’ because it sounds so gay but when everyone’s pulling together you get what you want to have, while if three people are focused and another is dragging their feet, you’ll never get what you want to have. Everybody’s taken it really seriously and that’s the pre-requisite to achieving great results really.
Justin Broadrick (Jesu, Godflesh) mixed/mastered an alternative version of the new album, how did that come about?
Yeah, he did his own version of the album. We recorded it all and sent him the basics, and then he took it from there. We’ve been in contact over the years and I think that we share a lot of the same musical background, and when I sent him ‘Holy Armour...’ asking about the new record he said that most of the influences are two of his favourite bands of all time, Killing Joke and Discharge, so he’d love to work on it. It’s really difficult for producers because they have to take on projects because they want the work and they want the money, like most people, and they have to say that they like the band whether they actually do or not because no band or their fans wants to hear that the producer just did it because they wanted the money. It was nice that Justin got back to me straight away and said ‘fuck, I love it.’ It was definitely up his street as obviously a lot of our influences are Killing Joke, Discharge, and Godflesh. Matt and I are more alternative fans and the other two are real metalheads, so we couldn’t find the man to do it originally. Someone would say ‘let’s get Andy Sneap’ but I didn’t want it to sound like a metal record really. We decided to go with John Mitchell for the slick rock and metal sound, and Justin for a real alternative sounding version. It seems that about half of our fanbase are metal people, and the other half are Killing Joke, Industrial fans. Though Killing Joke aren’t really an industrial band, they’ve just got that mechanical sound, but no samples or electronic equipment. I think of Industrial as Rammstein, Test Dept, Boyd Rice, not us or Killing Joke. Anyway... we wanted two versions of the record, because we couldn’t decide on one.
It seems to work well.
I don’t see why anyone’s got any kind of problem with it, we’re not charging extra for it or anything. In Europe we’ve used the John Mitchell version for promotional use but over in the US we’ve been using Justin’s version, and it’s been going down really well. Looking back on it we probably should have gone with the Justin Broadrick mixes, as that’s more like what we sound like live. We’re releasing the Vinyl version with Justin’s mix... I saw it yesterday and have to say that it looks wicked on vinyl (laughs).
Absolutely. The presentation of the record is really impressive, how much control do you retain over the overall artistic direction? The artwork for this record seems to continue with the themes found on ‘Holy Armour...’
I tend to take care of the artwork; the other three members of the band just play in the band and I take care of everything else. We’d used Victor (Safonkin) before and thought, ‘how do we top that?’ When I first mooted the idea of calling the album ‘Our Souls To You’, I was looking through Victor’s work and thought ‘that’s the sleeve, that’s got to be the sleeve.’ People don’t seem to get the joke in that, that it’s ‘our souls to you’ (laughs). Victor’s a fan of the band so we contacted him saying we’d like to use some of his work for the sleeve, and came to an arrangement. That’s about as complicated as it got really. He is kind of fussy with who he works with, and who he’ll let use his artwork, so it’s good that when we got in touch with him we could get some input from him on whether he thought it would fit. He asked what the focus of the album was and when we explained he agreed that it would work, so we went with that.
Your music is, and always has been highly intense, and consistently heavy in tone... what do you listen to on a personal level? I’d imagine that it could get a bit much if you were constantly spinning Godflesh every day of a tour...
I think that every kind of music has its place. It’s like when you ask someone whether they like football, and they say that they only ever watch one team: it’s a bit boring. I’m a football fan and I like to watch lots of teams to see how they play, I happen to be quite neutral in that sense. When it comes to music, I must have listened to fifteen different types this morning, a bit of Joy Division, Killing Joke, I think I played an Iron Maiden track. I grew up in the anarchist punk scene, when there were great tribes of people and everyone belonged to something. These days there are no great tribes... when somebody asks me what I like I tell them that I like everything. I like Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ for fuck’s sake (laughs). Admittedly it’s not something that I’m passionate about and I’ll probably hear it about twice in my life, while I’ll play Killing Joke’s self titled from 2003 for the rest of my life, alongside Black and White by The Stranglers, Motorhead’s Overkill, Black Sabbath. That’s the kind of music that I love. I find a lot of the stuff that’s out there at the moment sterile to say the least. I think that’s why we’ve shaken some people, because all of a sudden here’s this band with socially conscious lyrics, playing that kind of music. Even when we’re on tour we’re like ‘why are you singing about corpses?’ (laughs). People look at us like there’s something wrong with us for singing about things that we’re concerned about as individuals. I don’t get why we’re the odd ones out in that. (laughs).
Do you usually receive a decent reaction when out on support tours? A little while ago you toured with Fear Factory, a band who one would imagine have a fairly mature audience. How do people respond to your serious, socially/politically aware edge?
Well, we really want to be a great band. It’s really important to us that we’re as original as possible, as free as possible, that we can do what we want to do with as few constraints, if any. We don’t really sit down and think ‘let’s make a record’, but it really gets up my nose when people do. All the great bands made records because that’s what they did, it was just what came out of them as people. What made them amazing records was how they bared their souls, their ideas. These days you can look at new albums and samples on the front of magazines, and see that the bands have really set out to sell some records. We’re not concerned with that kind of thing. It’s not meant to be some up our own arse attitude, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to do any of that. I don’t want to be in a band that just does what everyone else is doing, then disappears overnight. We may struggle in some departments and we certainly do, but it seems that these days people are starting to really appreciate what we are doing. We set ourselves a difficult task, but I hope that in the future people will look back and say ‘fuck, they were amazing.’ We’re only trying to do what we want to do; there’s no conscious effort to not fit in or anything, it’s just how it’s happened. Sometimes you get loads of people with blank faces in front of you at a show, but I’ve been in loads of bands which have gotten that reaction at times. It’s not my problem that some of those people aren’t prepared to open their ears or mind to different things.
When we were playing with Sylosis about as many people got us as got them. We had some people coming up to us after the show and saying that they thought we were amazing, and others saying that they really didn’t like it... that’s how it is. We’re not afraid of criticism, everyone’s entitled to their opinion. Sadly. (laughs). There’s a really great line in a Helmet song that says ‘I’d rather be insulted by you than by someone I respect’, (laughs). That’s my attitude towards it really. But it’s a free world, we don’t blame anyone for not getting it.
Do you have a particular conception of what you see October File doing in the future?
I think to be honest it’s part of what we decided after ‘Holy Armour...’ because I got ill and couldn’t tour with Prong, which made things difficult as ‘Holy Armour...’ was really well received and was selling really well. When I got better and we got together we said ‘well actually, we don’t really want to be part of the crowd.’ So we just went off on how we were going to conceptualise the ‘Our Souls To You’ album. We were under a lot of pressure to do things, Ben and Matt are married and John’s quite young, so we couldn’t just flip out of our jobs and tell everyone to fuck off because we were going to go on tour for two months. We’d come back to nothing. So, we thought about what really matters to us with the band, and the main thing was that we did want to stay together and do as much as possible with the band. We decided that we were going to get on with this album, and then we’ll see what happens. A lot of stuff has come along since then, the shows with Fear Factory, the City Of Fire tour, the film that we’re featuring in soon... so we’ve got plenty to be doing. We want to enjoy what we’re doing, because if there’s too much crap it’ll wear everybody down.
Great. Where are you heading to film your part in ‘Zombie Driftwood’? Sounds like fun...
We’re actually filming on a beach, next to a bar, in the Cayman Islands (laughs). What a fucking drag! The director really likes the band and asked us if we’d up for featuring in the film, and we said definitely. It’s a bit of a bizarre thing as on the surface we seem like these really big serious, anti religious, apocalyptic doom merchants, and here we are in some comedy horror film. We’ve actually got some speaking lines as well (laughs). I think that you just take those kinds of things with open arms and say ‘look, fuck it, let’s go and have a laugh.’
I guess that very few bands can claim to have played to a packed out beach full of zombies in their careers...
Absolutely. It’s funny that even though he’s only about twenty four, John’s about the most serious of all of us, as the most of the time the rest of us are just joking around; we are quite a jolly bunch really. We were just thinking shorts, suntan, beer... (laughs). Really, we’re just four guys with instruments, we don’t have any more insight into the planet earth than anyone else has. I don’t get the whole pedestal thing with musicians.
Nice. For the fellow bass nerds out there, could you tell us a little about the kind of equipment you used on ‘Our Souls To You?’
Sure. I used my Warwick, through a... big amp, I can’t remember for the life of me what it’s called (laughs). I also play a black precision bass, and that’s because my childhood hero was Jean- Jacques Burnel from The Stranglers; in fact he’s still my favourite bass player of all time. We’ve all taken a lot of lessons from The Stranglers, as Jean-Jacques’ bass was really powerful and abrasive while the guitar was more stripped back, washing over what the bass did. They were really angular, really nasty, and really experimental, I mean if you check out the albums ‘Black and White’ and ‘The Raven’ they’re basically prog albums, prog punk. I love the bravery of The Stranglers, they’re doing what we do; everybody knows ‘Golden Brown’ but if you back into the history of their albums, records like ‘The Raven’ are mad, experimental, nasty rock records. There’s a real bravery in them doing just what they wanted to do, which was what nobody else was doing. We try to take the same attitude... We’re not concerned about what anyone else is doing, this is our band. We’re not making it for mass acceptance, and I think that’s the problem with a lot of modern music. It’s made to please other people. Anyway, with Jean-Jacques and his bass sound, I just thought, I’ve got to play bass, I want to be like him. Except I don’t want to be French (laughs). I recently asked him for a fight actually. He’s a karate guy and I do boxing, so I said ‘give me a shout and I’ll punch your fucking head in (laughs). He’s fifty eight now so he just wasn’t up for it. I had to wait thirteen years to ask him for that fight.
(laughs). So, your music comes across as socially and politically aware, something that’s really important given the current situation here in Britain... do you get involved with grassroots politics, or take any particular ethical/political stance?
Well, I’m more passionate about it than anyone else in the band, but, to be honest we don’t really take particular sides on our albums, like the song ‘A Public Display Of Anger’ from the latest record, we were going to call ‘Riot.’ But we decided that we couldn’t just call it ‘Riot’ (laughs). I would like to see more riots in Britain. It’s the apathetic, giving up mentality that I can’t stand. ‘I’m not voting, I can’t be bothered’. I mean, do you know how many principled, decent people died so that you could do that, and you’re just going to flip it off? Really, the band isn’t political in any other way than the fact that all of us fucking hate stupidity. If people thought more about things and had a bit more respect for everything the world would be such a better place, look at when someone walks down the street and tosses a bit of rubbish away. Why couldn’t they just put it in the bin? Their badge of honour is ignorance. The least someone can do is to stop being a moron and think for themselves. I think it was Marx who said that it’s the duty of every civilised citizen to debate. I don’t think that sitting round in a pub is boring. I think that politics is interesting, the world is interesting, people are interesting. I just wish that people would do a little more thinking.
Cheers for your time today, and all the best.
Thanks, take care.
They will support City Of Fire on the following UK dates: October 2010 - 02 – (UK) Millenium Hall Cardiff, Wales 03 – (UK) New Civic Wolverhampton 04 – (UK) Rock City Nottingham 05 – (UK) Academy 3 Manchester 07 – (UK) Cathouse Glasgow, Scotland 08 – (UK) c orporation Sheffield, nantucket 09 – (UK) Thekla Bristol, Southwest 10 – (UK) Underworld London, 11 – (UK) SUB 89 READING, UK
Thanks go to Darren Toms and Steve Beatty.
Baffled And Beat Dear God... It's like someone gave Bjork a disco Biscuit and set her free at Altamont... Someone get me me raving trousers... Sh*t is going down... ...read album review
