Text: Anne-Marie Forker
Foto: Jake Ten
Hello!
Hi Charlie! Thank you for your time today and congratulations on the record. What does “Tiktaalika” mean?
Well, I have a visual aid, actually, it’s this [holds up a soft toy]. It’s a tiktaalik. Probably a little bit bigger than this in reality. They existed 375 million years ago, and they’re like a transition between a fish and a crocodile – the back end is like a fish and the head is a crocodile. They have fins with bones in. You can go to Arctic Canada and you might find them there.
What inspired you to put it on to music?
In the early ‘90s when I was into these kind of things, I was really getting super serious about learning guitar. And there’s lots of music that came out around then, like “Images and Words” [Dream Theater] came out at that time, Cynic brought “Focus” out at that time, Megadeth had “Rust in Peace”. That 1990-to-’94 period is still my favourite time in music. Whatever kind of musical avenue I go down, I always end up there, like it’s what makes me feel safe, you know.
It’s your comfort zone. Yeah, I get that.
It was at the same time I was doing A levels and one of the subjects was geology. The teacher we had there – it was at Kingston College – he was this guy called Guy Wildman. He was Geology teacher. He was just so enthusiastic, and he made me love the subject and even though I didn’t continue that and went to guitar college, I’ve always maintained this interest in it. I was kind of into art, so I took art, and I was interested in English, so I did English literature. And you had to pick a third subject, right? I didn’t really know what I wanted to do and it was funny because it was only because this guy was interviewing me for the place. He was trying to enrol people onto his geology course. It’s kind of selfish on his part. It actually turned out to be my favourite subject of the three.
The cover is really striking, is it a nod to Sanctuary’s “Refuge Denied”?
Partly, yeah. There’s some “Spiritual Healing” [Death, 1990] in there, “Rust in Peace”, you know, those two albums are my favourite covers. And they’re both printed by the same artist, a guy called Ed Repka. And I’ve just always loved that look, you know. I just remember – again, I’m just such a nostalgic person [laughs] – in Kingston, back in those days, there was a place called The Record Shop, that was the name of it, and it was a real hub, it was like a kind of metal shop, quite small, just a perfect little place, really. And that was like my introduction to a lot of this music. The guys in the shop were really knowledgeable about what’s coming out. That was just Saturday, go there, flick through all the vinyl and look at the art work.
Sounds fantastic.
I would just love like pulling out these colourful paintings. So, I wanted to have something like that. I was imagining someone would come across this Tiktaalika “Gods of Pangaea” and think it was from 1991, something like that. So luckily, you know, Dan Goldsworthy, we’ve become good friends now.
He did “Fauna” as well. didn’t he?
Yeah, and my first album. And he’s like a huge mine of information, like a metal encyclopaedia. I would mention to him this idea, that I wanted a kind of evil priest in a dinosaur church. That’s really all I had to say, and he would say “oh yeah, I’m kind of thinking something like Sanctuary, Spiritual Healing kind of thing”. Then the first thing is just a pencil sketch, quite detailed but still just in pencil, and then every time he nailed it.
This record has a raw and organic feel as opposed to being kind of mathematical and complex. Do you prefer that kind of writing? Do you find that comes easier? Or is it actually harder?
It’s definitely easier. Even though everything is demoed by me, so I’m recording all the guitar riffs, programming the drums, and programming the bass, so at that point in the demoing it is quite on the grid and everything’s kind of perfectly aligned. But then, when I give it to Darby Todd, to do the drums, that’s when I want him to bring that human feel to it, the imperfections and the push-and-pull, not playing exactly on the grid. And he’s very spontaneous as a drummer, so although I’ll send him the demo and everything, he’s got drums on him, really. He’ll pretty much ignore everything I’ve done, really. He would play what he would play naturally. I think he’s just two or three takes, a song – it’s very quick. And normally within a 24-hour period when I’ve sent him the track he has sent all the drum files back to me. Then you can get clinical with the technology and line things up and all that, but I just don’t want to do any of that, I want it to be as it should be, you know, it should sound like some guys jamming in a room.
Yeah. Those records, from that era you were talking about, feel like that.
Yeah, yeah, but that’s what they were doing. They had to play it.
So did you give the musicians a lot of freedom?
Yeah, 100 per cent. It’s the same with Darby playing drums, Conner playing base, and then all the singers, I don’t want them to feel like they’re doing a job for someone. It’s just an opportunity to have some fun and play, that kind of thing. It’s not every day you get to record an album, so it should be a fun experience, right?
Yeah, to get to feel like you’re putting a bit of yourself in not just following orders.
Yeah, I’d let them loose within the confines of the song, you can only take it so far anyway.
So you have four vocalists. Who is each one and why did you choose them?
So, three of them are guys that worked on the first Tiktaalika record. I kind of knew that they would just do the job. Super easy, you know, the first one was just like a breeze. I couldn’t believe how easy it was, really. The way I do it is I sing everything in my voice, just to place the syllables and the melodies for the lyrics. So, you know, they can just copy it and not leave anything out. Again, I don’t want give them a job to do, just have fun singing this song in your way! And they all have like the ability to record themselves in their home studios, and they just send me the tracks and I put them in the project, and it sounds good. That’s a bonus, working with those guys again. So, first thing you have Daniël de Jongh. And he sings in a band called Textures, who are an amazing Dutch progressive band, really heavy, almost a Sugar-ish heaviness, and they have melodic choruses and these colourful chords. So, he’s an incredible singer, he’s got this amazing rich soulfulness to his voice, which I love, but you can also hear the brutal screams. That’s the beauty of that – you can like write, you can come up with any way of singing in your song and someone can do it. He’s on three tracks. And then we have a friend of mine called Vladimir Lalić. And he’s kind of like Freddie Mercury meets Devin [Townsend].
That’s a good comparison actually.
Yeah. He’s got this kind of ready like unique tone, but, again, an amazing range where he belt out high notes like a West End singer, like someone in Les Misérables. He has actually performed in Les Mis. So, for just a couple of tracks there, it needed that kind of theatrical delivery. And we have Tommy [Giles Rogers] from Between the Buried and Me on one track.
“Lost Continent”?
Yeah.
That’s fantastic.
Yeah, he just sounds great. It makes everything sound cool, he’s got his own kind of death metal style. So you know it’s him and he’s got that cool, melodic vocal style. And fourthly, we have Rody Walker. He sings on the third single we released, which is called “Fault Lines”. Again, he’s an amazing singer. It’s all guys, I’m a big fan of singers. So it’s like a dream working with the guys. He’s from Protest The Hero. In them, you know, their music is crazy, progressive stuff. He’s got this amazing range where he can – you think he’s hitting a high note and then he goes –
Even higher –
Yeah! You know, he’s just got this power. Just amazing.
Yeah, that must be great when you’re writing to know you can just write whatever you want and they’ll be able to carry out.
That’s it. And they always make it better than you think as well, which is great.
How does it feel when you’re singing yourself? You said you send them demos, when you’ve done some singing. Do you have any plans to put harmonies in or put backing vocals on yourself?
Yeah, I’ve put in a few harmonies here and there, yeah. My voice is not what I want to hear on the music, basically! [laughs]
Which track was the trickiest and took the longest to put together, and why?
It was probably the opening track, “Tyrannicide”. I’d planned it to be this “Fight Fire With Fire” [Metallica] opening, short, track, right? All those kind of archetypal thrash albums I grew up with that had this, they opened with a short track. So it was actually tricky to keep it down, I had this limit – I thought, it can’t be more than four minutes.
Oh, you had the four minute structure in your head?
It was just like the arbitrary time I put on it. It just kept wanting to be five minutes! I was very strict about it. That took a while, I actually had to keep rearranging it, put this section here, this section here. And, it was kind of funny because I did all the music first, I had all these structures that I thought were perfect and I wouldn’t need to change them. And then, as soon as I started putting lyrics to them, it made things sound different, so like this “Tyrannicide” one, I put that word against the riff, that typical of chant vocal. I thought that riff was a kind of bridge in my instrumental version, and when I put words over it, I thought – now it’s more like a chorus. So it’s makes that riff seem more important. Then I had to switch everything around – Right now this is the chorus, what I thought was the chorus is now the bridge. Like a puzzle. Other ones were super easy. “Fault Lines”, that just flowed, and “Give up the Ghost” too. “Give up the Ghost” was actually the first track, and that just flowed.
Yeah. Just came to you. Was trying to stick to four or five minutes in any way to get away from the kind of prog that you do elsewhere, where it’s really long?
Yeah. The nice thing about prog is that there’s no rules. You can do any crazy kind of thing you want that, you can have weird mathematical rhythms, and you can like go on as long as you want, like twenty-five minutes. But for this kind of music, I wanted to obey the rules almost, and use that to challenge myself – can I actually do it? Is prog almost like cheating, you know? Because you can do anything, you can’t really fail. You can just kind of feel like you did something good. So, we had boundaries, so seven rules like – Okay, I’m gonna have like this kind of length song, I’m not going to go on too many tangents musically, I’m not going to use crazy phone numbers for the length of bars, and stuff. It’s going to be normal stuff for normal music fans to follow, So, having those limitations in place just really made you work to find things, like a riff, finding a guitar riff that you can repeat over and over and over, without having to change it in a proggy way kind of thing – “Oh, the four/four time, I’m getting bored with it I’ll add some weird stuff to it”. So in a way, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to feel like the riff’s got to be good enough to me that I can keep repeating it without getting bored with it.
There’s plenty of furious riffage on this record. So, I think you’ve partly answered my next question, which was how does writing for this differ from your experience of writing with Haken?
Well, I mean the biggest difference is, to writing with Haken, is that that’s totally democratic. So, even though there’s six people working on a song, ironically, it takes longer to finish it, because, it has to go through more of a process, you know? Say someone comes up with an idea, that’s just their ideas but then everyone else wants to make so that they like it as well or they think it’s what it should be. That has to go through much more of a mill to come out the other end as a finished thing. But when it’s just one person doing it, you just do it. So, it’s quicker.
Yeah, I can imagine it must be quite liberating actually, to be able to do that instead of having to wait for five people.
Yeah. I definitely need to have both in my life, really. I like to capture the idea and just finish it while it’s fresh, because I think if you keep working and working and working, it’s like you lose sight of the original Idea.
Why did you drop Charlie Griffiths from the record’s name?
Well, I wanted it to be about the project and not about me. I should have done that on the first album. I remember going back and forth on it and in the end we decided to put my name on it just so at least a few people will know what it is. So this time, especially with the album cover the way it is, and Dan did this kind of retro brash logo for Tiktaalika. I don’t want to ruin it by putting my name above it.
Do you have any plans to play this live?
I want to – there’s no there’s no kind of solid plans yet, I haven’t reached out to book anything yet. But yeah, I think I need to.
I guess getting four singers together might be a challenging!
If someone with a lot of money could finance that! I would strip it down into like a four piece, like a Pantera line-up and just play the songs like in a raw, rock-and-roll way and just have one singer who interprets the songs.
Did you go see Pantera? There were recently in London.
Yeah. I can say I’ve seen every headline show Pantera ever did in London, and twice when they opened for Megadeth in Hammersmith as well.
Wow. What did you make of the lineup with Zack?
I was expecting it to be a great celebration of Dimebag [Darrell] and Vinnie [Paul]. I was kind of thinking, you know, it will sound good because, you know, Zakk Wylde’s amazing in his own right, incredible. Charlie Benante, he’s one of my favourite drummers, from Anthrax. And I was expecting it to be good, but I was actually shocked with how amazing it sounded. Because it was as it was as good as a real thing. I would say,
I never saw the real thing, so I’ve not been able to compare really.
You know, they were great. The mix, everything, you could hear everything. It was super heavy and, when they play when they do the heavy breakdowns, they pull back the tempo even more than you need to and it just makes everything feel so much heavier. Organic, you know, although they are a bunch of like professionals. Absolutely loved every second.