Het was een erg leuk telefoongesprek dat ik had met metalicoon Robb Flynn van Machine Head. Ik mag dan ook wel vol trots zeggen dat dit interview een van de beste is die ik de laatste jaren gedaan heb. Dat heeft vooral te maken met de relaxte manier waarop een geïnterviewde artiest praat. Vaak komen er alleen maar standaardantwoorden uit, maar dat was hier zeker niet het geval.
Een stukje uit het interview:
How come a lot of the early Bay Area bands are influenced by British punk bands?
We had this very influential college radio station called KUFF. On Saturday nights they would play metal and thrash and punk and hardcore. The DJ was a big personality. He was funny and crazy. The Metallica dudes would come to the studio hammered drunk and they would talk crazy shit about Slayer.
It was funny and entertaining, but that guy was also responsible for turning a lot of people I know onto bands like Battalion Of Saints, Discharge, Broken Bones and GBH. He played a lot of British punk. We hadn’t been exposed to any of that stuff before.
I think the thing that a lot of metal heads in the Bay Area gravitated towards was that it had this kind of metal overtone to it. There were hardcore and punk bands that had a kind of rock ‘n’ roll thing going and other ones had the evil notes of metal. I was always drawn towards that sound. The British bands definitely had that. Discharge especially had these dissonant notes and I liked that. I think bands like Slayer took that and combined it with metal and took it into a different direction.
I still have a lot of those bands on my iPod. When you listen to those records now, it’s really amazing how many of them stood the test of time. It’s so vital and alive. The energy gives you goose bumps. Metal was about perfection at that time, everything had to be perfect. When you listen to Poison Idea you can hear that the drums don’t sound very good and the guitar tone isn’t great and the vocals are all over the place, but when you put it all together it’s fucking perfect! It’s not metal perfect, but still it fits perfectly.
That’s why we refuse to record to a click track. That punk rock element, the human element, is important to us. You know how you start off a song and at the end it’s 10 BPM faster? That’s great! Every band now records to a fucking click track and I hate it. It’s like a drum machine, even though there’s a real dude playing it.
I love it when a song ends 10 BPM faster than it started. We want to keep that unperfectness about it when we record. I always keep my feedback in and you can always hear me breathing when I record my vocals. I always make a point to keep that in, because all my favourite punk rock and hardcore records have it. They didn’t clean it up. It’s real.
