Benediction – “The reason we still do ‘Unfair Mortality’ is you, isn’t it?”

It seems to me that Benediction, in spite of being one of the first Death Metal bands from the UK and still going strong, never got the credit they deserve, especially from the media. The fact that they keep being asked back year in year out all over Europe certainly proves they have maintained, during these rollercoaster-like 20 years of Death Metal history, a faithful fan base that appreciates their straight-forward, in your face sound and the uncompromising live performances that never fail to deliver a hell of a good time. I meet up with founder member and guitarist Darren Brooks and singer extraordinaire Dave Hunt in their hometown of Birmingham, while supporting good mates Bolt Thrower on their acclaimed “Next Offensive 2010” European tour.

Daz, the way I see it, Benediction is a quintessentially Brummie band because of its dual roots, Punk and Heavy Metal, which are equally as important, am I correct?
Darren: Yeah, we are dead lucky to come from Birmingham, which is the birth place of metal but also has a great Punk tradition.

Do each of you have different tastes in music?
Darren: Me, Frank (Healy) and Rewy (Peter Rew) are into Punk a lot more than Dave, probably because he actually wasn’t there when it all happened…

Dave: I do like Discharge and any band that sounded like them though. We definitely share some common grounds.

Darren: Personally I am really into old school Heavy Metal and the rock classics like Pink Floyd, but in fairness I am into all sorts of stuff, depending on the mood I am in. One thing is certain, when we tour we never play any Death Metal on the bus, because it would drive you nuts!

Are you into any new stuff?
Darren: Not really, I haven’t been buying CDs for at least ten years. I’m very lazy when it comes to new trends. Dave is well up to date though, he’s the one with the current knowledge.

So you are the one to bring new ideas to the band…
Darren: Yeah, he just sits there and goes: naaah… Ha-ha!!!

Dave: Actually, there would be no point for me to say “No, no, no lads, you must completely change what you’ve been doing for the last 20 years and sound like this brand new, up-to-date stuff…”. It really isn’t about that, it would be totally pointless.

You certainly have stuck to your guns since you put together the Benediction sound. Was this one of the reasons why Ian Treacy, your first drummer, left back in 1995?
Darren: I think that each band must do what they do best. I mean, Death and similar bands were and are amazing, but they are the sort of band you just stand there and watch. I don’t want to be like that: I want to be a simple band that plays straight-forward Punk Metal to which everybody can go nuts! I’d rather have energy than technique.

Dave: If you go to our gigs it should be more about fun than going: “Oh that’s beautiful!”

Darren: I admire those musicians who can write hard stuff that is also technical, but the fact is that I am an average guitar player so what I want to try and do is write some decent tunes. I like that Meshuggah stuff, but I love simpler stuff better so the kind of music where you play all over the fret board is honestly not for me.

It’s a question of taste. Bands like Slayer, who are not over complicated, just go for the jugular and that’s what they are brilliant at…
Darren: That’s exactly the point. I cannot see why one has to over complicate things… With some of the technical bands, as soon as you start to get into the riff, it changes so you cannot really flow with it… I can appreciate the musicianship, but not the song. I like our music to flow and the best thing to do, for me personally, is to broadly stick to the old formula of verse-chorus/verse-chorus/middle-8, which has been around for ages but gives the crowd a good time. I could never stand on a stage and show off for an hour… So everybody is free to choose the band they’d rather see! We are mainly a live band, you see: we are not interested in selling loads of records, we are purely in it for the fun. For example last night someone came up to me after the gig and he hadn’t even heard of us before, but he bought the t-shit and said he loved us purely on the energy of the show.

Talking of energy, Dave, you are a full time member of Benediction and Anaal Nathrakh, then you used to be in Mistress and now you even play for Fukpig… How do you handle your various commitments?
Dave: For me there is no hierarchy or preference, it makes no difference who I am with at a given time, in my head that’s how it works. Like Mistress before, Anaal Nathrakh is not a big touring band (or at least so far), so when I’m off on tour with Benediction, that’s what I’m doing.

What about writing the lyrics for each different band?
Dave: Well, before I joined Benediction there was already an established pattern so I didn’t want to do anything drastically different with them. With Anaal Nathrakh I can write completely in my own style.

Let me slip in a compliment about your vocal range: you are an incredibly versatile singer as well as doing very powerful vokills! What kind of music do you listen to?
Dave: Thanks, I try! Well, Metal aside, I listen to all sorts of things, it doesn’t necessarily have to be aggressive, but it must be “horrible” and “nasty” music, I don’t do “nice”. So I love Tom Waits, Bjork, Radiohead, because they are quite dark and weird. Let’s say that I am into all “emotionally dark” music, including opera, noise and so on…

Where you a fan of Benediction when you joined?
Dave: Yes, I saw them for the first time in Birmingham in 1993.

Darren: The reason we still do ‘Unfair Mortality’ is you, isn’t it?

Dave: Yes, I liked the song and when I joined I asked them to put it back into the live sets, ‘cos I enjoy singing it.

So when did you actually form Benediction?
Darren: Me and Rewy started the band in 1989. Frank was still in Cerebral Fix and joined us in 1992: he’s only been with us 18 years haha!

What was the scene like in Birmingham when you started?
Darren: I was 19 and it was all starting to happen, with bands like Master, Massacra, Morbid Angel… We were part of that tape-trading thing that happened many years prior with Punk, so we got to hear this new stuff pretty early on. Then Sepultura and Obituary started to release their stuff and more people took notice. We did a demo with Ian (Treacy) and Barney (Mark Greenway of Napalm Death), which was quite edgy and raw, then the scene just exploded and we happened to be on that first boat: Nuclear Blast signed us and that was it. We were very lucky man!

Don’t you wish you were there too, Dave? Those were amazing times!
Dave: Oh god yeah!

Darren: It was really great: every day you’d get hold of tapes of bands from all over the world, then you’d realize that all those bands you had been trading with they’d start being signed up and many of those bands went on to become very famous. Sadly at the end everything got ruined because the market was over-crowded with bands that sounded all the same. It started to go downhill in the mid-nineties, because labels like Roadrunner, Nuclear Blast, Century Media, signed up too many bands as they didn’t want to miss the boat in case they got big, so they really flooded the Death Metal market. I think that’s what killed it: everybody got bored of hearing 10 other bands sounding exactly the same. Hopefully now all the crap has gone and the cream of the crop is still there: Morbid Angel, Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower…

Dave: It’s coming back quite strong now actually.

Darren: I hope so, it was really dead for a while, you know…

And I love the fact that you never went away, when others did.
Darren: Yeah, but that worked against us, because when the scene was dead, the bands were so crap that you’d play for small audiences. Instead of jumping ship like every one else, as we don’t do it for the money but because we love it, we had to carry on making a loss or at best break even, but we wanted to carry on because we loved it. Now that all the early bands like Carcass are reforming, there is a mystique about them and they all seem to have gone bigger than us just from that and demand more money. Sadly with us the promoters are used to us asking for a pittance, because we had to do it for the last 10 years, so they still pay us a pittance in spite of the fact that we were one of the originals. But I don’t care, 21 years on and I am still having fun!

In a way I still think you are lucky, because even if you haven’t become huge, you are still together and you are all best friends! I think the new kids appreciate that.
Darren: Absolutely! That’s the other thing, you know: when the scene was dead we only had the old-school people coming to the gigs, but in the last 2 or 3 years we have seen a great resurgence because there are scores of new kids who come out to see us! Last night those kids at the front going nuts must have been just about 13… So it’s still nice to look around and see the old recognizable face, but the vast majority of the crowds now are young kids, and probably their parents sitting at home used to be into us in the first place!

It’s just a pity that they get to see us lower and lower on the bills, but hopefully by reading about us we will get more respect from the promoters too.

To be honest that’s the reason I wanted to do this interview with you guys: you are nice, down-to-earth people, like most people from Birmingham are, and you deserve more credit for what you have done for British Death Metal.
Darren: I think Birmingham was a special place for a long time and that reflected onto the music. We created a scene which was not about bands all copying each others but every single one was original and individual. Benediction’s biggest influence is Benediction. It’s not that we don’t want to progress, it’s just who we are! We are not in it for the money at all; I remember Marcus (Nuclear Blast) asking me to get a female singer for some of the choruses or introduce some keyboards, and I said no way!!… I have seen bands trying got change so that they would make more money, and when it didn’t work they got bitter about it and split up. That tells me that they were not in it because they loved the music in the first place!

You know, when I think about it, I am still baffled of how many great bands simultaneously sprang up in Birmingham and its surrounding areas in the late 80s early 90s, amazingly each with their own individual sound! How did that happen?
Darren: I think we had the Punk influence to thank for on one hand, which taught us to be as individual as we could possibly be, so we never had that copy-cat culture. There was a lot of talent in Birmingham because we had a great metal tradition with Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, so people just seemed to want to be in a band and do their own thing.

Dave: There still is a lot of talent today, actually. Things keep moving but the spirit is still there. Take the Kenney brothers (Mistress, Anaal Nathrakh, Fukpig) for example: Mick has talent in abundance and has put together some amazing projects, so let’s hope that these new bands will be the new generation to make it big from Birmingham.

Another thing that Benediction do that I think is quite humble is to record covers.
Darren: We love doing covers because we are music fans ourselves, so basically we play what we are into in that particular period. We have covered many bands we love, from Celtic Frost to Amebix, on which we had Billy Gould from Faith No More playing bass. I’d like to do a Sabbath cover next, maybe picking up one of their more obscure tracks.

You did a South American tour a few months ago, how was it?
Darren: It was our first time there ever and it was great man! It was pretty tight though, we played every day, got off stage at 1am, got on a plane at 6am, and sometimes even took two planes in a day… it was mental! We did that for two weeks and we didn’t get too see or do anything else, which was a shame. The concerts were incredible though, it was like it used to be like over here in the early 90s with stage diving galore and everybody going nuts! Gig-wise was one of the best experiences in my life, but the amount of travel and lack of sleep was quite tough. We should go back to Mexico at the end of summer, I think, so that would be fun!

Have you ever toured the States?
Darren: Once in 1994: we must have been really bad ‘cause they never asked us back, ha-ha!! I’d love to go back there actually, I am only truly happy when I am out on the road and I would love to see the world before I get too old for this, man! No disrespect to Germany, but we are over there 3 or 4 times a year, and although we love it, I’d still like to see places like Australia, Asia, somewhere unusual.

So what is it like in Europe now, have things changed much over the years?
Darren: Well, Germany is where we sell more records, but I feel they are a little bit spoilt now, while there are places like France or Italy that frankly used to be shit but are really coming up strong now. Eastern Europe is of course fantastic, there’s a great scene there, we have done the whole lot and it was amazing!

Finally, have you got a new album in the pipeline?
Darren: We have a whole load of songs written, so we’ll soon sit through them, choose the best 15 and pass them onto Dave; he’ll pick the best 12 and start working on the lyrics. Its works like that, it’s a good process for us. At the moment we have about 15 finished, and another 15 to finish. By the end of the year we should be ready for recording. It should be in the vein of “Killing Music” because we really enjoyed that album, it was back to old-school Benediction, you know, in your face aggressive Punk-metal, and the reviews were really good. The new songs sound quite raw and that’s the way I like it!