4 Questions with Soul Destroyer

With their fusion of laptop beats and metal riffs, Soul Destroyer have made waves in London’s moshpits with their slick packaging of face distorting masks and sinister onstage personas. 2face, the band’s psychotically charming leader, took some time to fill us on in Soul Destroyer’s plans for USA domination in 2009.

1) Tell us a bit about your song on the No Lip Vol. 2 compilation.
“Seeing Red” was written in about 30 mins in spring of 2008 and concerns the horrors of depression, which are all too familiar to me. At that time I was particularly insane, drinking heavily and experimenting with “legal” stimulants (that really should be banned – they’re way too good) which, on top of prescribed medicines was only making things much, much worse…great fun though.

Anyway, suicide and/or mass murder seemed a fairly reasonable route to take at that point and I guess I was singing about how I could see why these nut jobs who go into public buildings with 3 guns, a rocket launcher and sack of grenades and take out 20 innocent, happy people then blow themselves to pieces, might reach a similar conclusion.

Luckily, I managed to calm down a bit, steered away from the legal highs for a while and, with a little help from my psychiatrist, have not considered any form of mass killing for several months. Not even a little one…

2) How is the music scene doing in your town? What can be done to improve it?
Where to begin? London’s music scene is, more than ever, being crippled by unscrupulous, unimaginative and greedy promoters all looking to make easy money. Luckily for them there’s a never ending supply of unscrupulous, unimaginative and conservative bands all trying to be the next Coldplay/Razorlight/Arctic-fucking-Monkeys, but without any ability. The result? On any given night there may be 100 gigs on around London, most of which are put together without any thought and go ahead without any audience. Pay-to-play is unfortunately still quite common as well. In short, there is no scene, just a ragbag of chancers and no hopers all flailing around in a sea of apathy trying to find a trend to cling to. Fuck ‘em all.

Then there’s the industry machine, which, despite being shaken to its foundations by the digital age, continues to be dominated by sheep blindly following each other to the next big thing (this week), asking each other if it’s any good, reading the NME and wishing it was the 90‘s. The only difference now is that they don’t even have to go out – just trawl round their mates’ recommended MySpace sites. Hopefully this global recession will flush out a lot of the crap in music, because it can’t continue as it is. And maybe the result will be a healthier, leaner, more dynamic industry producing more interesting stuff by interesting bands. Because, although DIY is the way forward (all SD stuff is, for instance, entirely written, performed, recorded, produced and mastered by ourselves) unfortunately, the big labels still hold the key to breaking a band. And, sadly, that is, and always will be, money.

What could be done to improve it? Apart from herding everyone involved into a shed and setting fire to it? I guess fewer venues putting on shite gigs would help. Trying to make gigs proper events that people WANT to go to, not things that they feel obliged to go to because their friend plays bass in that third-rate Keane copyist band who are first on at The Shit and Whistle in Camden…

Less bands would be good as well, because they are almost all RUBBISH. But, as long as the promoters can make a tidy living from charging a fee from five or six dissimilar and unconnected bands to play to an empty pub, I guess any scene will still be dictated by Our Lord, The Right Rev. Geoff Travis (the Simon Cowell of British “alternative” music scene). And he’s about 75 years old.

3) Why did you decide to go with Mohawk Bomb Records on this comp?
Well, apart from the fact that you asked us and we liked the label’s name and you are obviously trying to promote some cool music, we thought that a little exposure in the USA wouldn’t be a bad thing. Because Soul Destroyer is made for the American market, which is far less prejudiced than the British. Over here SD seem to be too metal for the pop kids, too pop for the metallers, too rock for the ravers, too dancey for the Goths and, despite our best attempts, not offensive enough for the punks. We’re also too old and too ugly for everyone, but there’s not much we can do about that…

4) What are your plans for 2009?
We have about 20 tracks recorded for our 2nd album, so we’ll be selecting the best of those and releasing them in a very minimalist way (i.e. download only, direct from our MySpace) in the summer. We’ll end up playing some shit gigs around London (see above) and then I intend to take a few months out and party relentlessly at Soul Destroyer’s cliff top mansion in Guadaloupe. Regrettably, I think Mr 138 (guitar) is due back in jail for a while in his native Sweden and as for D-K (jazz snake), I think he’s returning to the Sri Lankan clinic that fitted him with a new face last year. There’s been a few complications…

Learn more about Soul Destroyer on their MySpace page