Interview with God Damn
I normally have to say that if I told them the name of my band, they probably wouldn’t employ me!
Despite forging batteringly loud riffs and possessing a monolithic live show, God Damn are unexpectedly lovely. In fact, they’re a band of many surprises, most jarring of all being guitarist Dave’s life-threatening trauma in a horrific car accident just days before releasing their Heavy Money EP in June. Not ones to disappoint, Thom and Ash persisted in the face of adversity - playing a string of intense two-piece appearances, all the while grappling with their ever-popular, but wholly uncertain future. Outline spoke to Thom about the band’s creative processes, how they’ve coped as a duo, and how they don’t even listen to much metal…
So firstly, how’s Dave? Dave’s doing really well; he’s walking, talking, playing the guitar, he’s been in the studio, he’s coming to band practice on Sunday for a little bit of a recap on things, but it’ll be a long time before he’ll be able to tour and be in a live situation simply because of the amount of damage he’s had. We’re just trying to make him as much a part of the band as we can, but the two-piece is working for now.
Your recent success seems to have become a bit of a testament to Dave and a sign of the support for him. Yeah, totally. Dave used to be in a band called Mellotron Overdrive, he’s a bit older than us, and when we (Thom and Ash) were just getting used to the music scene in Wolverhampton and Birmingham we always used to go and watch his band, who were probably one of the best two-piece bands I’ve ever seen. So when Ash and I got together we decided we wanted to do something like his band, ironically. One of the first things we said was “we’ve got to be in a band like Dave’s band” and then we just ended up forming a band with Dave, and now we’re all in a band like Dave’s band. In some arse over tit way there’s a nice circularity to that.
Heavy Money is more varied than you might expect – did you intentionally steer clear from making a straight-up heavy EP? Yeah, I think we just don’t ever want to write the same song again. A lot of bands, and I like some of them that do this, but a lot of bands have the same songs for a whole album, but that’s not what I want to do with a record. Lots of people might have a little outlet, some might be in a folk band, some might play heavy metal or something like that, but we don’t really see it like that – for me, this band represents us as people and the things we like, and we don’t just like metal. In fact, we don’t listen to that much metal – people think because we’re from the Black Country that we were brought up on Black Sabbath, but between us I think we’ve got one t-shirt and their greatest hits! We don’t listen to much metal, but we love playing it – we’ve all been in rock bands before, and I’ve played in a folk band – but I want it to be a band where we can do whatever we want to do and not be bored and having people grow tired of it. And that’s reflected in the way we write songs, and how we don’t really hang around and don’t feel we have to write songs of a certain length or in a certain way. But yeah, we’re fully aware of the sort of biblical, misogynistic, bold connotations of the name, and maybe we slightly regret it, I don’t know, but at least people remember it! We share our name with a French metal band, and they’ve got tattoos of “God Damn” and I feel really sorry for them! I’m embarrassed to tell my relatives what the name of our band is, or people at work; I normally have to say that if I told them the name of my band you probably wouldn’t employ me!
As a child of the 90s, I first listened to music on cassettes, so it was a nice surprised to see you release a limited run of Heavy Money tapes, rather than on vinyl. Yeah, it’s a bit of a gimmick really, but that’s how I first started listening to music too, and it’s how I first started to play guitar. I had a high school friend and we learnt to play guitar together, and we wanted to be in a band before we could play, so we used to send each other little mixtapes we’d made of riffs and recordings of bands we liked, then we’d come together and learn them. So yeah, the first pieces of music I got into were on tape – so it was a bit of a gimmick, and it’s not the best way of listening to music, but in this climate it just makes things interesting, and people have got that nice token. I still enjoy listening to tapes – not necessarily because of the audio quality, but more for the nostalgia really. Maybe we’ll release something on Betamax!
Having seen you before and after Dave’s accident, I think it’s remarkable how you’ve managed to retain the depth to your live show despite being cut down to a two piece, have there been lots of changes? Uh, the most recent Norwich gig, the one after Sound and Vision, I was really ill and I really shouldn’t have played! We were at that big place [OPEN] and I learnt a lesson that night, cause I had a fever, and I was hallucinating and stuff. I was so run down but I still decided to get up on stage because I thought “we’ve got to do the gig, we’ve got to do it” but, uh, I died. But yeah, with the three of us we were trying to sound like a five piece, and we have to try and do that as two. There was a lot of head-scratching, but there ended up being a lot of stereoing, and I’ve got a lot of amps, like, A LOT of amps. I can’t jump around as much as I used to cause I have to be on the pedal board so much; if I stop playing guitar then the music kind of stops! But you know what, it’s taught me to be a better guitarist – I was quite sloppy before, and it was more about the visual performance, but it’s in equal measures now. We tried stuff on loop pedals, but that just didn’t work – we’re too much of a live band. In a way it’s just made the songs rawer, and because of the situation surrounding it it’s given us more intensity. We felt that people were going to be on our backs, and of course they were going to say we weren’t as good as when Dave was in the band, but that just made us want to be a better band than we were before, so that when Dave comes back we’ll be even better still!
You have recently covered ‘In Heaven’ from David Lynch’s Eraserhead – were you intentionally playing on the link between heavy metal and the strange and the occult? Did you know that song was actually recorded about two years ago and we’d been doing a bit of digging around and just re-released it! But yeah, I wouldn’t say we were a satanic band at all, and I don’t know enough about the occult, but I don’t know, there are a few skulls in my living room! But no, we just thought it was a really good song - Dave showed it to me, and I thought it was the creepiest chord progression, so thought we had to use it somehow. And you can take a lot from just that one lyric too – I like the idea of writing songs that are just that simple, and you can say the same thing over and over and it continues to work.
It’s interesting you say that, as lots of your lyrics are quite poetic too – how do you find inspiration? You know what, it’s just real life things that have happened to me. There’s a certain amount of wanting to be sincere when you’ve written a lyric – especially when it means something to you. We don’t jump around all the time, so I like to think there’s integrity in what we do. There are a certain amount of stories that I won’t tell people, but you can try and figure them out I suppose. I’ve written some nonsense songs that I thought were just streams of consciousness, but then I’ve found different meanings in them – your stream of consciousness is a very powerful thing. Some of the songs I write lyrics for, but some of them I just stand in front of a microphone and see what happens; “Fought In The Mirror” that was a song that I never had any lyrics for, and I just screamed some stuff, and then I later found out what I wrote the song about. Somebody asked me what “Dangle Like Skeletons” was about, and I told them, and they said they kind of wished they didn’t know. You got to take from it what you will – it’s nothing terribly dark, it’s all stuff we’ve all dealt with, but even so, you’ll enjoy it more if you don’t know.
On the other side of the creative spectrum, the video for Heavy Money is amazing too. Ben Parry, the guy who did a couple of our performance based videos, put some of our other music over a short bit of this film that he had made, and then I said that we had this song Heavy Money, and asked if he wanted to do half performance and half his film footage. So he tried that, but came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t going to work, so he put the rest of this film with Heavy Money, and sent it over saying we could use more bits from that, but it just looked perfect, so we kept it as it was. The first time I watched it back it felt really powerful, and I’m so glad that my song gets to be played to that film. It fits the meaning of the song, and it all came out of a strange fluky situation where the perfect video had already been made, so we owe him a lot for that! It looks like a really high budget video and it’s all testament to Ben’s skills. I can say it’s brilliant because it was in no way my idea! There are a lot of layers to that video, and lots of things that people can learn from it – there’s a fun side to it, a horror side to it, and also this deeper moral side to it. I feel a bit more comfortable talking about the meaning behind Heavy Money. It’s pretty obvious that that song’s about gluttony and people hiding behind their money and thinking that makes them the big man. But really, people who have massive egos, or go the gym and give themselves massive muscles, are just scared little children; they’re no more powerful than children. I’m a teacher by the way, which explains part of it – I’m a supply teacher now as I’ve had to cut down because of the band, but I work in a special needs school, so there’s that in it too.
So how does a band from Wolverhampton get signed to a Norwich based independent, Gravy? Well the Gravy thing came about because we played with Fever Fever; they played some gigs over here, and we kept wanting to play with them – we were like “guys, they’re the girly version of our band” and of course we didn’t say that cause we’d probably have got punched in the face! But yeah, we loved their music, and they kept inviting us to Norwich, and Norwich slowly became part of who we are as a band really. Gravy are part of our soul, and Norwich is part of our soul now. That’s the nice thing about music; it takes you places and you meet people. You don’t make money, and people like us probably never will make much money, but you get to meet some pretty cool people, and Gravy are some pretty cool people.
So just finally, apart from your hectic New Year tour, what’s planned for 2014? There’s probably going to be an album next year, and bigger shows, more festivals, more touring. It’s a big year for us next year, and hopefully towards the end of the year you’ll see Dave back in a few more shows too.
Alex Throssell
God Damn play the Gravy showcase at the Norwich Arts Centre on January 25th. For tickets, go to www.norwichartscentre.co.uk.
