INTERVIEW HELLFEST - MACHINE HEAD

Paris, 23 november, 2011. MACHINE HEAD is to play the Zenith Arena with Bring Me The Horizon, DevilDriver and Darkest Hour as guests. A few hours before the gang form Oakland, CA is due to set fire to the stage, we have the opportunity to have a chat with Robb Flynn. We don’t have much time: only ten minutes to discuss the current tour and the new album “Unto The Locust”. While being very focused on our questions and cautious about the image of the band, Robb is expecting a call from his kids. Let’s not waste our time!

How is the tour doing so far?

It’s awesome, man. Great! (smiles) We’re playing a bunch of new songs and everybody seems to be going really bananas for them so we’re excited about that.

And you’re playing in quite big venues, aren’t you?

Yeah, mostly arenas.

Did you personally choose the bands on the bill?

Yes. But not me personally: the whole band did. We talked about it. You know, the thing that we really liked about The Black Crusade Tour that we did with Trivium, Dragonforce, Arch Enemy and Shadows Fall is that it drew a lot of diverse groups of people. It4s all heavy music but it drew from a bunch of different parts whereas having bands that sound the same. So we took the same approach with this tour. So that’s why we’ve got the line up that we have and it’s going good.

You took some lessons with a coach so as to strengthen your vocals on “Unto The Locust”. Do you manage to perform live like expected up on this tour?

Yeah. It’s a great help, I mean. It makes it a lot easier (laughs). That’s one of the side effects… You know, we play a 1 hour and 45 minute set here and that’s a long fucking set of heavy brutal fucking music. I wanted to have that stamina more than anything else and not compromising the way that I sing. Some bands tour longer and longer and the vocals get softer and cleaner and I don’t like that. I don’t want to do that. I wanna sing the way I sing and so I taught my way to pull that off.

I’ve noticed that you were playing more and more songs from “Unto The Locust”…

We are really enjoying our set right now. It’s been two weeks that we’ve been playing new songs, opening with the new songs and we’re trying to get the show… We’ve got a lot of visual going in and we’re trying to keep a pretty steady set. We’re playing from five to seven songs from “Unto The Locust” and it’s awesome. So it’s really cool.

Any embarrassing anecdote so far on this tour?

No, nothing embarrassing. The tour has been great so far… We’re having big parties with all the bands and the crew… And we get hammered with vodka, Jim Beam and beer! So we’re having a great time, yeah! (laughs)

What do you think of the reviews of “Unto The Locust” so far?

They’ve been very positive for the most part. Expect in America where they seem to hate “Darkness Within” for some reason, you know… It’s probably the highlight of the show so… What do they know? (smiles) I don’t necessary put a lot on stock in the reviews: a bad review or a good review is kind of cool. When I go out there and play it live and I see the instant reaction of 2,000 people and how they feel about it, that means more to me.

For many years, people always mentioned to “Burn My Eyes” in their reviews whenever you had an album out. Now, people always mention “The Blackening” when talking about “Unto The Locust”. Do you hope that people will compare your next album to “Unto The Locust’? That could mean that “Unto The Locost” is one of your best albums… Do you agree?

No. Because I’m not comparing anything. I’m just writing, not trying to compare the songs we’re writing with the songs from “The Blackening”. We started to write “The Blackening” in August ’05 and we started to write “Unto The Locust” in June’10 so it’s five years from the beginning of the writing period. We’ve pushed ourselves to the limit of our ability when we did “The Blackening” and then we toured for three years and that limit became the new “normal”: we were better musicians, we were better as a band. So when we were writing, especially after all that time, I was just so fucking excited to write again, you know? And I did not want to write like I wrote five years ago because that was five years ago. Why would you want to go back there when you’re here? If you’ve got a Mac, you don’t want to go back to your 5 yo PC! (laughs) Cause you’ve got a Mac! For us, it was just that. Everybody’s comparing to “The Blackening” whether it’s good or not. We’ve got three or four records that people considered classics and we’re very proud of that. I don’t care reading reviews that say this is as good as this, you know. Let time tell.

Do you have complete control regarding everything related to the band nowadays?

Oh yeah! We work with artists, theatre directors, etc. I have a very big say in how it will go and the result. A lot of bands kind of separate things: here’s the album, here’s the package, here’s the video, here’s the tour, here’s the merchandising… To us, it’s just one big thing: the way it sounds, the production, the way the songs are written, the imagery, the cover looks and how it’s gonna tie in the merchandising and in the show… For us it’s a whole big orchestration that we wanna see all the way to the end. We’re thinking about the imagery you gonna have in the package, the imagery you gonna have on the video, how it’s gonna transfer to the different elements of how we’re presenting ourselves. You’ve gotta think in very long term sense. With “The Blackening” we obviously made the decision to go with metal carvings and so on the whole album there was metal carvings. The tour show had metal carvings, the screens had metal carvings. We looked at it: metal carvings from the beginning to the end. And for us, having the control over that is super important. It’s really, really important because if you let people do it, it can easily turn into clichés. We want to keep it different to what other people are doing and be still part of our nitch cause we feel that we got that nitch. We’ve got that sound pretty different to what everybody is doing. Visually, we’re trying to go with that with the cover as well: people look at the cover and realise what it’s all about: ripping your chest and spiting locust, this and that.

Two cover songs are featured on the digipack version of the “Unto The Locust” : Rush’s “Witch Hunt” and Judas Priest’s “The Sentinel”. Why those songs ?

We’ve been talking about doing “Witch Hunt” on “Through The Ashes Of Empires” but we ran out of time… And we were going to do it on “The Blackening” but we ran out of time! (laughs) This time we were like “We’re fucking doing it!”. And regarding the Judas Priest song: we love Judas Priest and they’re a huge influence on us. We had not paid tribute to them yet and we loved that song. It’s kind of a different song which not many people cover and I can’t think of any band that has covered any song of that record (“Defenders Of The Faith”). That was appealing to us, that it was different. And with Rush: it’s just a great song. It’s probably the heaviest song they have written, very metal. Probably the greatest opening lyrics in the history; “The night is black, without a moon /The air is thick and still…”. It’s like a movie! Awesome.

As planned, Robb’s kids are online and wanna talk to their heavy metal daddy so we have to call it a day. After saying goodbye to us, Robb is going back to his computer to chat with his kids with a big smile on his face.

Interview: Wombat  -  Pics: Tchiboul’.

Many thanks to Karine (Roadrunner).