Bill Bailey Interview 2011

I remain a huge Bill Bailey fan. Back in August 2011, I got to interview him at Sonisphere. Bill talked about discovering metal as a teenager through punk and Motörhead, then gradually drifting towards the more intricate world of Sabbath, Judas Priest, Deep Purple and Ritchie Blackmore. He reflected on the old divide between punk and metal, the self-imposed exclusivity of metal fans and how the artwork, complexity and sense of belonging drew him in. Throughout the conversation he explored metal’s underdog status, its unfashionable but fiercely loved identity and the oddly moral code and shared outlook that bound fans together, especially in Britain. He contrasted the genuine community at metal festivals like Sonisphere with the more detached, “subculture tourism” atmosphere he felt at places like Glastonbury.

Bailey also discussed how the internet had fractured and spread subcultures, why some bands stayed deliberately difficult as a kind of filter and how metal could function almost like a religion. He talked about using metal in comedy with affection and respect, from deconstructing the “devil’s chord” to stories about Slayer and surprisingly gentle metallers who loved wildlife. Finally he touched on his enthusiasm for more progressive, complex bands such as Opeth and Mastodon, celebrating metal’s ability to be both brutally heavy and musically adventurous while still giving fans something powerful to throw themselves around to. Here is the transcript from that conversation:

You’re into metal but you’re not necessarily in the industry, when did you first get exposed to metal?

I was a teenager about the age of 14 or 15, I got into Motorhead and I was into punk so it was really through punk music – that was my way into metal. I remember going to see MH and I couldn’t hear for weeks, so yeah that was it really. Sort of fast, exciting metal guitars were just.. loud, there was a kind of sense of, this was not it seemed to transcend the era in a way like a classic sound – an instant classic.

If you were into punk at 76 to79ish, were you aware of sort of other metal at the time like Sabbath and priest?

Absolutely there’d be kids around who were into Sabbath and into Judas Priest and band’s like rush were being played around the place. There was a sense though that that kind of metal was on an intellectual level. You have to really kid of study it, you couldn’t just sit around and bang your head to it, you had to sit around and listen to it and say “hmm, nice chord change” you know? And I like what they’d done there where as punk was a more immediate fling yourself about kind of music.

Do you think that’s the resonance of MH as well because it’s got that kind of meat and potatoes, it’s not that you need to know who Alistair Crowley was?

Yeah it was pretty simple.

So what was the first metal album that you owned?

It was Ace of Spades and if you consider that to be of that genre and then I remember probably Sabbath, also Deep Purple, we had a deep purple album and rainbow Richie Blackmore. Me and me cousin trying to riff like Richie Blackmore and then we did get into some very long conversation about plectrums and harmonics. And it did get quite involved I remember at one stage and the inevitably you’d start talking about plectrums and then Brian May’s name would crop up. Oh yeah then my cousin was “of yeah because he uses a 6pence or whatever, a thrupenny bit. And of course we couldn’t get our hands on a six pence or a thrupenny bit so I remember we had like, a 50p or something or a 10p piece and broke strings and were like, “yeah, watch this” clickclang* “Oh, I broke another one “ clickclang*  “oh no” and then it was like ”how does he do it?” of course it’s bullocks he doesn’t use a thrupenny bit at all, it’s all lies he uses a plectrum, and then we hated him after that ‘cause he made us break all these strings unnecessarily.

Metal’s got both of those extremes the really cerebral thought out and the lets drink beer and touch girls lyrics and everything in between..

Yes, jolly songs about knockers!

So when you were really into punk, what was your perception of metal and your mates who were into metal what were the differences in what it meant to be metal?

There was a self-imposed exclusivity amongst metal fans. Any they were like “I think you’ll find you punk songs are musically inferior”. And actually what we’re listening to is far more interesting and intellectual so yeah not invited, piss off. So there was a resentment about it to stat with but then the artwork on the rucksacks was a lot more elaborate for the metal bands and you’re thinking oh right just writing crash or punk or anarchy just looks a bit rubbish and kind of like, the lettering the way you’ve done that that sort of Roger Dean (Check?) style, that’s actually much more interesting and maybe that’s when I started to veer towards it. Started thinking “you know, maybe there’s more to this, there’s something a bit more involved than just, you know, “oioioi!”

Did you reach a stage where you were able to look at metal objectively but also knowing it from the inside.

Well that’s a very metal question. Were you subjective but also at the tie, objective? laughs discuss! Yeah I suppose that’s true because you’re kind of realising that there’s a sort of, almost an inbuilt club nature of it, a self-perpetuating exclusivity about it. But then once you’re involved in that it feels like you’re part of it, you’re part of the gang. You’re part of a sort of, world. And you can come in and out of it, you can think, well, this is all getting  a bit incestuous and then you can sort of get back into it and go, “no actually I really like it” and and enjoy that sense of shared knowledge about chord structures and subject matter so it think that its something which you, over the years and getting more and more into it, and seeing how it changes and how bands change and how the genres have moved on, it’s like feeling at it’s core it’s like feeling that everyone is against you there’s a sense of pride and an underdog mentality which i think appeals to kids and lets face it, it appeals to British people because we like that underdog status so it has a particular resonance in Britain I think.

Over the years, have you seen metal change and evolve or not?

I think this passionate sense of ownership from fans hasn’t changed, I think that’s just incredible and the underdog status as well and the sense that this isn’t fashionable and probably never will be. That’s a central part of its appeal. It transcends fashion, it transcends the charts. It doesn’t trouble the charts, forget that. It’s almost about an attitude, a kind of outlook on life. It’s like, I’m going to wilfully shun fashion and I’m going to actually pursue something that I really love. And that in itself has not changed at all I don’t think.

We had a campaign, you know the census put Jedi, and we had a campaign with Biff from Saxon for everyone to put heavy metal as their religion because people do get a moral outlook and a set of ethics which is bizarre because you don’t necessarily get that from dance music or even jazz or anything you know.

That’s right and you don’t and it’s quite similar it has a lot of similarities in a way, kind of the dress the attitude. But a deeply moral sense of a way of living that doesn’t occur in other genres. I used to go to Glastonbury and I’ve stopped going to Glastonbury and those kind of big festivals because there’s almost like a sideshow sort of feel about it. They just turn up and look at stuff and they’re not really into it. It’s alright, there’s a few fans and it’s like a big kind of jamboree and a lot of festivals are like that and then they’re the ones that are televised and it’s like “oh look, this is what young people like, they all Beyonce and U2 and Coldplay, that’s what they want”. And actually, no they don’t! At sonisphere, there’s far more passionate fans, far more cohesion, far more sense of a kind of shared purpose for being there. I suppose if you wanted to be objective about it, a sort of religious sense or turning up to something which people fear a bond with, they fear a that It sustains people through the next few months of.. Looking for a job, being a student, being in Britain in 2011 which is you know, pretty depressing to the next festival. I really got a sense of that at sonisphere, there far more energy there. If you’re into all that slightly hippyish channelling of energy, but there was!

I feel like at Glastonbury, it’s like subculture tourism. It’s just a load of people watching what they think is it…

Yeah, it’s like, they sort of walk past and think “oh yeah, that’s culture is it? Oh look! There’s a silly hat, oh look there’s a giant mobile phone made out of spoons. It doesn’t feel real.

So what would you see the difference between metal music and the metal subculture in terms, of how music has gone off and been adopted by and used and bastardised by things outside the core band’s and scene.

I think partly the onus is down to the internet and people sharing music. Far more music, all kinds of music not just metal, is available to all kinds of people. More than at anytime in history. There’s bound to be this cross pollination of sounds because people have exposure to so much of it. When I was a kid the music you heard was the music your cousin had and what records he had and all your mates and that was it and what was on the radio and the radio was just god awful.. Radio 1, bloody road-show. To find different music was hard, difficult and then you’d find that a few people had a few records and then you’d listen to them and pass them around and then you might save up and get another one and your music was quite limited, but now it’s vast. It’s almost fractured, so I think that it’s bound to happen but music will always reinvent itself, it’ll go underground when one scene becomes to major another one will happen – it’s bound to happen.

It’s that moment when ACDC t-shirts were available in Topshop, my sister had one, she thought they were called the “Ramons”, it’s like, it’s a Ramones T-shirt, take it off, now.  How do you see the identity and the specialness of subcultures being threatened by the net and is more wilfully obscure.

Well, there’ll be some other mode of dissemination of the subculture which will somehow transcend the internet, that’s what’ll happen, it’ll go full circle and will actually go low fi, low-tec and it’ll be you know, people handing notes to other people and it won’t even reach the internet! laughs it’ll be like some festival in the woods in Czechoslovakia called ‘Deathstock’ or something and there’ll be about 400 people there and it’ll all be done by passing people fliers in bars. People are very inventive, people will find ways of doing it and I think that musically some of the bands, the music is difficult, it’s hard to get into. And it think that that acts as a little firewall for people that are kind of just skipping through and are like “ooh I like that” it’s like you say, there’s’ a sort of Woolworth’s pick and mix feel about a lot of culture. So I think that’ll get rid of a lot of people and the people who are more curious will pursue it. There’s a broad enough audience and a vast appetite for it that can sustain little offshoot, the fractured nature of it.

What are the rules of putting metal in comedy? Is there anything that you can’t say or do amongst the metal crowd?

It’s almost like something that I would sense myself and there are things that I wouldn’t think of as fair game. The style of music, the convention of metal that have become clichés, you can clearly identify those and I think that any musical comedy that I’ve done over the year, you have to understand the genre, in order to make fun of it in a respectful way but also in that slightly irreverent way. But in a way that understands the genre like one of the things I was doing recently and that was a blog for Sonisphere and that was deconstructing the metal chords, the actual music itself.

The building blocks of metal like you have the devil’s chord, this sort of diminished fifth and it crops up so  many times in metal music because it immediately gives a sort of edge to it and it sets it apart from conventional musicality and you think “that’s it!” that’s one of the sort of essences of it almost and this has a line which traces all the way back to the 16^th century when music that contained this chord was deemed the devil’s music and that was called ‘satan’s music’ and was deemed to be evil. It sets people on edge, it’s dissonant, it’s discordant it causes problems in your brain! It makes people start to question things.

And you think, that is the very root of metal music that’s why it is as it is. And then you realise so this isn’t actually something new, this is something that’s been around for centuries. It taps in to something else, the darker side of our natures, the subject matter we’d rather not talk about. That Slayer Song, ‘Angel of Death’, how many bands would consider ,you know, Joseph Mengele, like a boy band sitting around ”well, what haven’t we covered? we’ve done girl fiends, splitting up with the girlfriend getting back with the girlfriend, what about experimenting …”as I said in this piece, conventional music, the sort of chord structures that from the vast majority of pop music just will not work with this subject matter.

So if you get into on that level you realise you can actually make fun of it, I mean, you could play a slayer song using the conventional music and hear how wrong it sounds I think you need to understand it to get the most out of it. One of my favourite stories that is used to tell was about Marilyn Manson playing at Milton Keynes, you know, shouting Milton Keynes over and over like it was a mantra it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. There is an inherent absurdity about it, but I think it’s affectionate, it come fro understanding it rather than just saying “oh it’s just a load of noise and racket who’d like that?” You just think, well you clearly don’t understand it so you’re not qualified to make fun of it.

Have you ever had a negative reaction?

No, funnily enough people are just nodding and shrugging going “yeah you’re right”. It’s extraordinary though how resonant though if you reference metal bands in comedy how this sort of filters through. A few years ago I was talking about slayer, like “imagine Slayer at home” you know, passing the salt at breakfast. In fact they’re quite sweet guys. The impression is sort of dangerous, aggressive, metallers and then they sort of finish a song and say “thank you” very respectful, like a lot of metallers are. Very respectful very polite, a lot of them like lizards, like animals, like that natural world. I did a wildlife programme about dormice, trying to get dormice to shag basically, and we built a messy tunnel between two trees to try to encourage these dormice to meet other dormice and widen the gene pool and

I was walking in town and two massive  metallers came up to me, tattooed up to their eyeballs and pierced.. like, just a mass of metal and scariness and they were like erm, Bill, did the dormice get through to the other side of the wood?” and they were really concerned that the dormice hadn’t bred and I was like “well, we don’t know yet” and they go “right, ok, thank – keep up the good work” that’s what I love about metallers – it challenges your preconceptions. Anyway I mentioned slayer, I was talking about the music and I was saying about how I imagined a musical, you know musicals are always based on the bloody work of whatever, ABBA and I thought imagine a musical to the words of slayer – that’s something I’d go and see. And then I performed a bit of it and like “oh mum, I wana go up the town” “why? – don’t go to the city”, “why not?” “CHEMICAL WARFARE!!”  and that was great fun. Anyway turns out slayer’s agent was in the audience and I got all this stuff, I got records, DVDs, CDs of slayer and t shirts and all this stuff, it was brilliant. So then of course every opportunity I could I wore a slayer t shirt. I was on TV programmes I was on Jonathan Ross and all this kind of stuff. And I forget about these things, that sometimes I’m in the public eye. I just kind of blunder on regardless and then at Sonisphere I met Slayer’s manager and he came up to me and said "we really appreciate what you’re doin’ for the band and for the guys” and I’ve become like a cheerleader for them! It all sort of meshes into another, It’s about understanding it. If you love it and you’re passionate about it, then that comes through any apparent mockery.

What is it about Slayer for you personally; they’re almost like the ultimate metal band…

Yeah definitely, I think so. It’s almost no compromises is that Slayer mantra, there sort of credo, you know – louder, faster, more aggressive. That’s it and they probably are and unfortunately I wasn’t abele to see the set because I was doing a gig with deep purple f all people but I watched the footage of it and yeah they’re every bit as munch metal and passion as when they started.

In terms of other comedy, there is a handful of these comedians now that seem to do exclusively the metal based comedy whereas 20 years ago you wouldn’t have been able to do that. People know that if you say “capital decapitation” (!?!?) that that’s probably a metal band and that they’re probably heavy. Have you ever seen those people? Obviously Brian Posehn’s made a career out of it and Andrew O' Neil sort of up and coming. Have you ever seen any of them?

I’ve seen footage of them yeah but it’s like you say – there’s almost like a critical mass of information and perception about the genre that people can reference it and enough people will get it.  I think that that’s a good thing, it’s great for metal that it’s almost reached that stage of popular culture.

But is it almost like a sort of Victorian freakshow in that your average comedy audience at Jongeleurs it’s setting itself up rather than being the in joke. People are laughing at the sort of haha, difference between black and death metal jokes by the man with the long hair.

Yeah well I was thinking more of playing metal festivals or to music fans, there’s much more sense of a shared communal joke rather than what you’re talking about which is taking it into a comedy club, but you know. I think that happens about all kinds of things. Comedy, you almost can’t stop it. It’s almost mercurial it’ll get round every sort of subject and it’ll turn in on itself and it’ll reinvent itself and you can’t almost control it.

On one level I’d say it’s a cheap shot, to just make fun of stuff that people don’t really get. They’ve got some vague perception of these guys that shout a lot and hold sticks in the woods. There will always be that kind of comedy, but to get a sort of greater depth to it you’d have to maybe. That audience wouldn’t go with you on greater depth talking about the music and how it’s formed and that. On a superficial level yeah it might be funny, yeah look at the bloke, of what’s the band called? Pig Destroyer, oh that’s funny isn’t it, we destroy pigs har har har! But then that’s as far as it goes and then it won’t go any further than that. But so much of comedy is very superficial anyway so it doesn’t go beyond that.

But on a totally objective level.. to use the subjective/objective motif, in some way, in a grim way of accepting how some subjects are now in the public domain that is a measure of how much resonance metal has had in pop culture . it’s no longer “unseen” shall we say – people are aware of it and in a way I think that maybe people will go away and investigate it. “Oh hang on, what band is this, I’m going to go and have a look at them”. So it’s sort of putting it out there in a way, that’s probably no the best kind of comedy but at least it’s allowed the genre to build a level of respect and visibility that it didn’t have a few years before.

Why are you such a big fan of Opeth?

It appeals to that sort of prog. side of me the more involved songs and the err, the complex musicality and wilful avoidance of three minute pop songs. Opeth, they were doing a 45 minute set at Sonisphere and the joke was, well that’ll be a couple of numbers laughs so I like that. And they’ve been plugging away for, 20-odd years now. Only the last few years I’ve become aware of them, I saw them in Bonoru actually in Tennessee, music festival there and er, it was brilliant seeing them there it was really eclectic mix of stuff there and they were great.  I mean bands like that, bands like, Mastodon as well I’m a bit of a fan of because there’s a something a bit more involved, it really appeals to me. And it can get pretty heavy, pretty metal but also there’s a nine minute trilogy lurking around the corner.

Well it’s that. You can throw yourself about but there’s also something to think about as well while you throw yourself around.

Do you have the new Opeth?

Do you know what, I was about to listen to that right now.

It’s amazing completely different. Awesome.

Well, I’ll look forward to that.