Anaal Nathrakh – Our music is serious stuff

Dave: Yeah, I gathered that you thought that. We don’t see it quite the same way – the changes over the last three albums have possibly been a bit more subtle but they were still there. To me, Hell Is Empty seems a bit lighter. It’s not a bad album at all, and there are some great parts on it, but the effect with Constellation is to draw less from that album and probably more from Eschaton, but to push it down a darker, more intense path than either. There’s a sense of blackness about the earlier albums – I don’t mean black as a style of music, more as a feeling about the albums – and I think that is far stronger on Constellation than on any of our other recordings since the first one. In fact people I know who have heard the album have said exactly that.’

‘That’s me – Zeitgeist Memento from Repvblika did the main vocals on ‘Oil Upon the Sores of Lepers’, but I did everything else on the album. We like to have the odd guest appearance, it breaks things up a little and makes everything that bit more interesting for both us and the listener. Different flavours of bile.’

‘Philip Best. He has a truly twisted imagination. We actually asked him to appear on this album but he couldn’t do it. Still, he was very nice about the whole thing.’

‘Yes, Mick knows how to play the drums as well as what our music should sound like, so he knows how to programme drums properly so that they sound natural for our stuff. Some people seem to think a drum machine is a device that you switch on and then play instruments over the top. It isn’t, and if you treat it like that it’ll sound shit. It’s better to look at it as a proper instrument that you give as much attention and skill as any other instrument. For us using programmed drums isn’t a shortcut, it’s a choice to use that instrument.’

‘Yeah we’ve thought of it, of course. But there’s just never seemed to be a compelling enough point for us – we’re perfectly happy with the way we work, and doing things the way we do doesn’t seem to detract from how the end result sounds. It’s a drum machine, yes, but it doesn’t sound conspicuously like one, and for the most part neither we nor the people who listen to our stuff seem to notice or care. If we got a drummer in the studio they’d just be playing the same beats anyway, and we’d be trying to make sure that the drum sound came out how we like it – which is exactly what we already do. Maybe we will use a drummer for recording in the future, but it won’t make any difference to our sound.’

‘G.G.F.H., Extreme Noise Terror, Whitehouse, us and Yamataka Eye – I think he’s changed what he does nowadays but in the past he was a fucking lunatic. He once drove a digger through the wall of the place he was playing at.’

‘No shit, Sherlock! What gave it away? There are times when the world drives me mad, when virtually all other people seem like a society of repulsive, mirror masturbating insects and I fucking hate them. If you think everyone’s wonderful and the world is an unequivocally happy place then you’re a fucking idiot. Anaal Nathrakh lyrics come from those times.’

‘Actually there isn’t really. There’s plenty of humour between us as individuals, so there’s a lot of humour around Anaal Nathrakh, but the actual music is serious stuff. We just don’t take ourselves particularly seriously outside of the music – we’re people, not comic book characters.’

‘Some of these riffs explode! Actually, some great music and obviously some iconic comedy came out of the early 80s, but I think it would have been a pretty depressing time to live, at least in this country – Thatcherism, massive unemployment, the miners’ strike, the Falklands and so on. A turbulent and interesting time, but potentially quite depressing.’

‘There are plans for some live shows, yes. Tours I’m not sure about yet, but it’s only now that we’re looking at that sort of thing – up until this point we’ve been focussed on getting the album finished and getting it out.’

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