In this band you have been through quite a lot with the death of a past member, the manager and obviously numerous line-up changes. What motivates you to carry on despite this?
I guess the main motivation now is the fans. Even when we want to take time off and we think we’ve over toured then fans pop up in different places and are like “Come here!”. I mean I still get letters, I had a look in my mail box right before this tour and there were a stack of letters from South East Asia from kids saying “Why don’t you come to Kuala Lumpur?”. So we keep thinking we’ve toured too much and then there’s new places that come up.
You played South East Asia for the first time recently didn’t you. How was it?
I was a little sketched out at first like when I got to Indonesia I didn’t realise how popular the band was. There was like people waiting in the hotel, the airport, you know everywhere. People were very excited so that felt good and then we started to get excited for the show. I mean we did a 90 minute, almost 2 hour set and tried to play songs from every album.
It’s well known that you’re really hard working having fronted a TV show and contributing to many different projects, so what are you upto at the moment?
I was doing a lyric book which was going to have loads of road stories then I stopped doing that. And I started writing my Headbanger Ball book. It talks about the four years I hosted a TV show and how I had no experience and the different interviews, so I really want to try and get those out soon. I’m going to try and work on them early next year.
But I do want to get another Hatebreed record out and I do wanna do some shows with my side project. I do have a record which I’m just calling Jasta that I have done. I don’t know when I’m going to put it out.
It’d be nice to do a Hatebreed documentary and we have a lot of old footage which we got fans to send in. I mean we’ve talked about so many different things; a tablature book, a re-release of the first record with lost tracks since that’s coming up with our anniversary...We’ll see. You know we’re going to come back here for festivals next year in between all the craziness.
You’re still doing stuff with Kingdom Of Sorrow as well. Where do you find the time to do so much?
I don’t really have a lot of time and I really need to get home and get my home life together too but while Crobar are touring right now and Hatebreed are touring right now its fine. The Kingdom Of Sorrow record is still kind of fresh and people are still getting turned on to the band. The record came out about six months ago, and we’ve been offered some festivals in Europe that we might do. But I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to do a full tour, it’d be nice to do a full UK tour.
What are the aims with Stillborn Records, the record label you set up?strong>
Originally my old band had no-one to put the demo out so we thought we would make it look like we were on a label and I would sell the demo at the merch table every night. Then I noticed that once people saw that I was doing a mail order and taking music and putting it out on 7 inch, a lot of bands would send their demos. So that’s kind of how it all started rolling.
Now I’m really not doing much with it but I do plan on putting out a couple things next year. I only had two releases come out this year and I moved my offices down to a smaller place. I’m working on a new distribution deal so if I get better distribution in the UK and Europe next year I'll probably put out some new stuff.
Obviously you’ve promoted a lot of shows yourself so do you think this helps you understand the industry?
Yeah it gives me a bit of empathy when the promoters are losing money and the economy’s bad because I’ve been there and I’ve put on a lot of shows. I’ve had shows that have had no presale tickets and I thought oh I’m going to lose my ass I’ll have to sell my car and then the day of the show a thousand people turn up. You know that happened to me with Gwar and Misfits, I thought I was going to lose my ass and then the day of the show everybody showed up and the show made money. This is going back almost 15 years ago but you know now that I’m touring in a really bad economy I can definitely feel the promoter’s pain.
You’re celebrating 15 years of your release Under The Knife, how does that feel?
It makes us feel good. Our original guitar player is back in the band and we’re still going strong and creating new places to play and putting out records. I mean we have been really busy since ‘08 from now. We’ve been to like 30 something countries and did a DVD, a covers record, a studio record and headlined a bunch of festivals. But it feels good now that we can do these four hometown shows and we dug out 100 or 200 of the original vinyls that have been sitting in storage, so we’re going to put them out at the shows.
You’ve done a lot of guest appearances on records, how do these come about?
Well recently I haven’t really done a lot just because I felt like in the past when I was doing them I didn’t know if it was really helping the band. If I can help the band then I want to do it. Sometimes I felt like I was spread too thin and trying to do too many things and I looked back and I was like man I’ve been on a lot of records. But recently I’ve started doing some stuff again. I was on the Acacia Strain record, the Skahead record and the Winter Plague record. So in the last year I’ve done three songs and hopefully all those records do good.
Which record are you most proud to have contributed to?
I mean I was really happy to be asked by the bands that I really looked up to when I was growing up like Biohazard, Sepultura and Napalm Death. I did that here in England and we drove out to the countryside where they were recording and I just sat there and listened to the whole record and talked with Barney and Mitch and the producer. That was a really surreal experience because I always idolised Napalm Death. Even as a young kid I had Scum and all the early records. Plus at that time I was more of a mainstream artist and I could see the backlash of the underground punk and grime fans going “Why are you having this guy who has been on TV and stuff?”. That was like a hard statement for them to put me on the record but it was really cool so that felt good.
When you released Satisfaction Is The Death Of Desire on Victory Records it turned out to be the biggest selling album on that label, did you expect that to happen?
Well when the first couple 7 inches and the first demos started to sell a lot I thought we need to make a good choice about what we do with the album because there is the potential that it could be big. That big I didn’t expect no. But also the success of that record came in later years. That was a time when you could tour and then you could go back and then there would be nobody there. There was such a quick turnover. Kids would be into hardcore and punk then they’d go okay I’m into emo or techno and you would see that one day there was a scene and then the next day they're gone.
So we said right we need to tour with different bands and gain different fans outside of just the punk hardcore and underground scene. So that first two years of touring we did Warped tour 1998 which was Deftones and Kid Rock and Rancid and that gained us a lot of new fans. Then we did shows with Danzig and Soulfly, Motorhead and Dropkick Murphys and so we started grabbing people from outside our little circle which then helped that record to go on. Then of course we did the Slipknot arena tour and Ozzfest in 2001, so from 1997-2001 we toured just one record which was insane. We should have had like five albums out.
With Ozzfest you’ve played it quite a few times. Have you ever had to pay to play?
We were one of the very lucky bands that didn’t have to pay and I have to thank Slipknot for that because they really championed us and helped us get our first manager. They came from nothing and Paul and Shaun the clown were at our show singing along before Slipknot were even signed so they’re the real deal. They totally helped us become that breakout band and we were like the first hardcore band to do Ozzfest.
and now slipknot are headlining major festivals...
That was the funny thing because I said to Paul when he first gave me the casette, "If you ever get huge and sell millions of records will you take us on tour?" and they totally did and that’s a beautiful thing.
Your music is influenced by metal and hardcore so how do you target the different audiences or do you think they merge quite easily?
Now with the Internet people are very opinionated and they’re very outwardly angry and anonymously on the internet so I think it’s harder to be yourself without having a bunch of people critique you. So if you look at a band like Lamb Of God, they’re very talented at what they do and they ‘re probably the best at what they do. Randy's voice is very unique. So it’s either like you love it and its great or you’re like I don’t like it it’s not my thing.
But on the Internet everyone fights like well I like Hatebreed, I like Lamb Of God. I like both, I don’t like both. You know, it’s all stupid because all of the bands were doing the same thing like touring or working hard and writing music and we want the fans to be united which I think we’ve done pretty well with Lamb Of God by touring together. But there needs to be more of a crossover with the punk and the metal and the hardcore. We had Discharge and The Verrucas at the show the other night and we’re thinking of doing a tour with them to try and bridge the gap a little bit more and to try and get rid of some of this animosity that you see on the Internet .
You’ve toured with some amazing bands but who has been the most fun?
3 Inches of Blood. Those guys are great, I could tour with them until the day I die. Same with Toxic Holocaust, I could have those guys around for months and months and never get tired of them. Their anecdotes are always funny and there’s always something crazy happening where everyone’s talking about it.
What do you think about Leeds festival? I always find it weird that an indie pop band is on the main stage at the same time that the Lock Up stage is tearing it apart.
It’s cool because it’s like those guys have moved on, they were into hardcore music in their teenage years and now they’ve moved on and like Muse and other stuff. It’s funny to see them come over and when we’re playing they lose it and they start smashing people and it’s like they’re re-living their youth so that’s kind of interesting to see. You’ll see a guy in an Arcade Fire shirt, punching people and kicking people and you’re like what is he doing but he knows the words, he’s singing along.
What’s been the proudest moment of being in the band?
I would say every time we put out a record and it does good that’s a very proud moment. All the last four albums have debuted at number 40 in the UK and the US and our DVD went to number one that was a huge achievement for us. So like things that you never thought would be really possible but that’s pretty cool that the fans made that happen for us. Headlining with Full Force was huge for us as well, just to have like 40,000 people stay to watch just us, that was crazy.
There are certain Hatebreed songs that always really get the crowd going what’s your personal favourite?
I love playing Live For This and I Will Be Heard and This Is Now. I mean those songs never get tired, it always has some sort of new energy. Even last night 200 people with tickets couldn’t even come and I thought this is going to suck, everyone’s going to be bummed out and tired and they’ll have to leave but it was like 200 people who sounded like 20, 000 people. When we’re doing those songs they mean just as much to them as they do us and to see that translate in such a small little setting on this miserable cold night is cool.
So the live DVD that’s been out a couple of years now what was your reason for doing that?
Well he had a deal originally with Roadrunner where we thought we were going to do it with them and then different things happened and then we thought it was going to be delayed. But then we made it so we could do it with a different company and when they said to us that they wanted to make it a front line release and give us a nice budget, cranes with different camera angles and a great director and sound engineer, we thought it would be cool to get the real experience down on film to document.
It was good that we were able to do it because Sean left the band not so long after so I’m glad we got a really good show with him in there because he was such a force in the band from Perseverance to the Supremacy album. Now with Wayne being back in the band it would be cool to do a new DVD but that DVD was cool to do just because we really spent the money and tried to make a quality show.
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