Malefice

                                                                                                        13 March 2012   York Fibbers

Currently on tour with Rise To Remain, we catch up with Malefice to find out how the tours going so far and what the fans response has been to their music.

MM - Hi, great to meet you both.
Malefice - Great to meet you too.

MM - So how are the Progression tour going so far and the new tracks from 'Awaken the Tides'?
Dale - Really well, we are playing two tracks from 'Awaken' and we have recently done a new track with Jagermeister called 'Omega', that we have been playing every night on this tour, but yeah they are going down really well.  We have quite a short set, we’ve taken a step down in the billing just to be able to get out in front of the younger crowd.  A crowd we don’t really get out in front of.  Plus it’s really hard cramming three albums into half an hour set.  There have been a lot of Malefice fans leaving with bloody noses and a little bit upset because we have not played their favourite song, but we are coming back in September.

MM - Brilliant!  You have made my night!
Tom - I think also, because they know we don’t have a long set they are going more mental than ever, which is great.

MM - Okay, tell me are you playing 'Delirium'?
Dale - We are.  That’s our homage to old school Thrash and has some punk rock vibe about in it as well.  It's fucking relentless from the start to the end.

MM - It’s brilliant, I love that song so much.
Dale - It’s all about taking drugs.

MM - Yeah I know, all good stuff, bit past taking drugs myself, but an excellent song!  

MM - So the bands you are touring with, have you been getting on okay with them?  Do you go out and watch them after your set?
Dale - Yeah, we have really buddied up with Adept on this tour.  A fucking great band and an awesome bunch of lads.  We have been sharing dressing rooms with Adept for most of the tour, so you buddy up with people you are more or less living with every day.  We have not really hung with the other bands so much, but saying that we did hang with Heaven Shall Burn last night and we have known the Arise guys for some time.  I've known Austin Dickinson for a few years, so we have had a few laughs.

MM - What bands currently influences you now and also what did you listen to growing up?
Dale - Everything.  Metal's such a vast genre, we have taken inspiration from the most out there bands, what were we listening to on the way up?

Tom - Young Guns.

Dale - No before that.

Tom - The Star Trek soundtrack, I am not a geek honestly!

Dale - But everyone really, I think in the early days it was Pantera and that’s still kind of stuck with us.  We are very groove orientated in our music, everything has a groove and has a big chorus and that’s really stuck with us.  We have tried to evolve as we have got older and into our third album, we're now working on our fourth album.  We have just tried to stay away from what influenced us and write our own unique sound.

Tom - People always try and pigeon hole us and compare us to other bands.

Dale - It's actually really fucking interesting depending which magazine you read.  Kerrang will put us with Unearth, Metal Hammer will put us with Devil Driver and Arch Enemy.  Terrorizer think we have all these Death Metal elements in our music and I suppose when you listen back to it, yeah I suppose there is a bit of Death Metal in there and a bit of Inflames.

Tom - We don’t want to be one genre, we just play what we want to play through all the genres.  We are just metal.

MM - What would you say are your biggest achievements so far?
 Dale - I think surviving.  We work as well as doing this, we are still a band and survive.

 

MM - Yeah a lot of bands are in the same situation aren’t they?
Dale - Definitely, because we have three albums people get the misconception that we are all well off, which is anything but the case.

Tom - It's funny when people come up to you and they are like ... oh where's your bus?  It’s like well, it’s the small transit van over there.

Dale - You know we go out on massive tours following the other bands.  I think we have had our own bus three times and you know it's fucking hard work.  You know we did a European tour with Devil Driver and a few shows with Anthrax a few summers ago, we slept in our sprinter for four or five weeks.  Six lads sleeping in a sprinter with all of our back line and all of our luggage as well.  

Tom - The idea that it’s a glamorous lifestyle, it’s not!

Dale - It’s a fucking achievement at the end of the day.  Whenever we decide to call it a day we can hold our heads high and know we did everything we wanted to do.  We earned our way everywhere.  We have never had any serious money behind us, or someone in the industry pushing us a 100% of the time.  We have got where we are on morals and work rate.  Like bands taking us out on tour, we get on stage and destroy a crowd and that’s our job to do that.  You know we will all live like rock stars for a month then we go home to our girlfriends and our little houses and literally do nothing, just go back to work, back to what everyone does before our shows.  That’s just us, we are just five normal guys from the UK that have been handed this incredible opportunity to live the dream

MM - What are your plans for the coming year and what can we expect from your next album?
Tom - We have a headline tour that we are looking to sort out for September.

Dale - We have recently announced that in June we are on the road with Unearth and Malevolent Creation, in September it’s going to be a head-line run around the UK and Europe.  The tour is going to be a big deal, we are revisiting 'Entities' a lot on this run because we know we have not given enough of that album live, because we have always been doing support tours and playing a certain release we have not gone back to for some time.

MM - So what’s the worst thing about being on the road?
Tom - I would say it’s the waiting.  We get chucked out of our hotel rooms at twelve.

Dale - Yeah the waiting gets so bad, it’s just a daily ball-ache.  You have to be at a venue for 4 pm and you are not on until 8 pm.  We drove from Carlisle to York, we were here for about 2 pm and then we are not on the stage till 8.15 pm, so we had a walk around York, had a Nandos and chilled out, but it is definitely the waiting.

MM - What are your feelings on the current Metal scene?
Dale - Dunno, it's changed, it’s in a bit of a limbo and it doesn’t seem to really know what the fuck it’s doing.  It’s really difficult for us as we are writing a new record and we don’t really know where the fuck we are taking it, but the metal scene is changing quiet a lot, so I don’t know.  There are some decent bands coming out of the UK, it’s got some fine exports, I mean you have got us, you've got Sylosis, Rise To Remain ...

Tom - Young Guns, Yashin, although they have a poppy edge.

Dale - I think what is nice about the UK at the moment is the fact that’s kids aren’t looking to the US for bands now.  Thing is about UK bands, they are always trying to re-invent things.  Whereas you have bands from the US who have sold like 40 million records and then release the same kind of album three times, and three albums down the line they are only selling like 200,000 records and they are like ... oh fuck what’s happening? ...  and it’s like well everyone's fucking bored. 

Certain bands you can pick up a third album then go back to the first and it’s the same shit!  You get success from one album and they are thinking fuck, we have got to do it again, then you find a formula and they will play it a little bit safe instead of experimenting and progressing.  You have to be bold, look at Bring Me the Horizons latest record, it’s such a bold statement and it has worked.  It’s totally out there and different for them to do.  Everyones like, fucking fair play to them.

Tom - They get a lot of hate and I was never a fan myself, but then you keep hearing how good it is and then you listen and yes it is really good.

Dale - And then you start going back to their previous releases and I get it now.  They have sold me on their new release and I have gone back and yeah I am sold on them and can see where they have progressed from.

Tom - See that’s why it’s really important for us to keep an open mind and not be repeating ourselves, it’s got to be different.

Dale - At the end of the day it’s a product and if you keep releasing the same product, like Dyson for instance, if they kept re-releasing the same hoover, people would be like why the fuck do I keep needing to buy the same hoover?  I don’t want to buy it in a different colour! ... and that’s exactly what it is like with some bands.

MM - You recently met Marcus Hahnemann (Everton Goal Keeper) to record a song for the Jagermeister sessions.  He is a bit of a metal-head isn’t he? 
Dale - Yeah we stayed at his house after the Norwich gig, he put us all up for the night.  He is a really good guy.

MM - A mansion I bet.
Dale - Yeah a nice little house just tucked away in the countryside and he is a total metal-head, but more importantly I think the reason we got on so well is the fact that he is really down to earth and a proper family man.  He’s not a dick-head, he has had a lot of success and is very modest.

Tom - We had the best morning ever with him and his family.  His kids have got like air soft ball rifles and automatic weapons and we were firing at the kids and each other and running around with smoke grenades, it was so cool.

MM - I watched the making of 'Omega' with Marcus and you can see you are all having a brilliant time.
Dale - Yeah we hadn’t met Marcus until the day of the recording, we recorded the track in just one day and I had only previously spoken to Marcus on the phone. So he just turned up and broke the ice with a lot of Bourbon Whiskey.

Tom - I am glad you can tell we are having fun and the banter was excellent, it was a twelve hour day, exhausting but great fun.

MM - How do you exercise your voice before a show?
Dale - By smoking and drinking ha ha!  No to be fair I do warm up.  If we are doing the headline shows, but on this tour I have no actual singing on this tour and on the stage for just 30 minutes it’s all scream.  When I am singing for a hour plus, I do warm up, but because I am not singing on this tour and my voice loves screaming, my voice is robust, so singing shreds my vocal cords.  But as am only screaming on this tour, I don’t tend to worry too much about warming up.

Tom - We are quite well oiled, we don’t really need to do anything, I just pick up my guitar and get onstage.

Dale - The last festival we did in Germany we drove our van off the autobahn and drove through the festival to the back of the stage and stopped twenty minutes before we were supposed to play.  So we literally unloaded our van, chucked everything on stage, our drummer was wheeled on to the stage on a rolling riser still setting his drum kit up.  We put our stage clothes on and just went for it.  I think only British bands can do that, it’s the old punk rock kind of ethos, just turn up, play and fuck off and that’s exactly what we did.

MM - What would be your ultimate band to tour with?
Dale - Me personally, Mastodon.  They are my favourite band for so many reasons.  Again going back to the progression thing, I don’t think any band has done it better. From their earlier stuff to what they are doing now, I think they have progressed really well.  They started going towards where they are now two albums ago.  

MM - Well guys that was a brilliant and insightful interview thanks ever so much for your time and we shall catch you soon.
Dale / Tom - Thank you, appreciate it.

Interview by: Seb Di Gatto