Martin Walkyier
Third And Final Chance

25.01.2013

*** ARCHIVE ITEM - DATED 2004 *** For nearly 20 years Martin Walkyier has been one of the most charismatic frontmen on the British heavy metal scene, be it with furious thrashers Sabbat or sophisticated folk metallers Skyclad. However, as the new millenium began, Martin quit the spotlight for a while, deciding to put an end to a decade of his work with Skyclad. Some of you might have heard about his project called Return To The Sabbat, but that was just a brief resurrection of the old Sabbat spirit, and now Martin is heading for something absolutely new with a new band known as The Clan Destined. In addition to Martin, the band features none other than Iscariah (ex-Immortal, also Necrophagia) on bass, which alone causes numerous questions about The Clan Destined’s future sound and direction. We decided not to wait and ask these questions, as well as many others, right now and gave Martin a call…

(EDITOR'S NOTE - THE YEAR 2013: Our first anniversary year is now over, but we keep on putting up archive items that our authors penned before starting to write for HeadBanger.ru. We polled the visitors of our Vkontakte page, and poll results clearly show that these old interviews are still of interest to the readers and they want these texts to be available again to the general public. As to ourselves, this is a good opportunity to re-live some of the great moments of our careers as journalists, and we are naturally eager to share them with you...)

As far as we understand, you’re in the process of recording the first Clan Destined demo. Where will be released – through a label or in any other way?

It is the demo recording, and we’re gonna release it ourselves. We’re gonna try and make it as good as we can, it’s a six-track demo, it’s about 30 minutes long in total, and we plan to release it as a self-release, through the website www.theclandestined.com, and see how we go. We’re open to record labels, we wanna talk to a lot of people and look into as many different ways to do it as possible.

So it’s gonna be like in the old days – you record a demo and then send it to all the labels around…

Back to the roots, yeah, definitely! We’re trying to make the demo of really good quality, you can’t really tell from the downloads, because they’re mp3s, but the sound is very good. We’re working with some very good people on recording and producing it. Hopefully it will sound good when it’s done. (laughs)

So far we’ve only heard the rough mix of one song that’s available on your website…

That’s without any lead guitars or vocals and with no production. There’s a new download on the website now with our lead guitarist Lee Cassidy, it’s some of his solo things on one of the tracks. You should check that out, you can see how he plays, he’s a very good musician.

OK, let’s now go back and talk about how The Clan Destined came to life. What was your reaction when you received an e-mail from Iscariah? Were you already familiar with Immortal at that time? What do you think of their music?

I liked Immortal very much. I couldn’t say I was a fan that owns all the CDs and all the T-shirts and everything, but I’d heard of the band and thought it was very good. I saw for that kind of extreme black metal they were one of the bast bands around. When I quit Skyclad in the year 2000, I had many demos of people, people were sending me demos, and a lot of them weren’t very original or didn’t sound different. Then I got a demo CD from Iscariah, and within 30 seconds of putting it on I thought I really wanted to work with this guy. His music is kind of heavy and brutal, but it’s got melody, and it has a strange kind of atmospheric feel to it, and it’s very interesting what he does.

What was on the demo? Did he play your songs, or did he send you his original stuff?

It was things he’d been writing for about two years, he’d kind of written it with my vocals in mind, and he was a bit too shy to e-mail me for a long time. Then he found the courage to send me an e-mail and get my address, and I got the CDs from him and thought, “This is great!” With all the people working on it, it will sound really good when it’s finished.

Was it his initial motive to move to the UK, or did you arrange it for him after you said, “OK, you’re in the band”?

First of all, I went over to visit him in Norway, I’d never met him before, only talked on the telephone and e-mail. I flew to Oslo in Norway and then went on a long train ride, like a seven-hour train ride to Bergen, where Iscariah is from. I met him, and within 10 minutes of meeting him we were like best friends. He is a very cool guy, very easy to talk to, no ego or anything like that, he’s not an arrogant guy, he’s really nice. And 10 minutes after meeting him we were really good friends. Then we decided it would be better for him to move to the UK, because the UK is a lot cheaper. A beer in Norway costs 10 euros or something like that. I don’t know what you have in Russia now, but it’s very expensive.

Wow, your phrase “the UK is cheaper” is quite hard for us to believe, because everything is so expensive there…

In Norway there are crazy prices. A Mars bar is about 4 euros or something like that, this is absolutely crazy. I couldn’t afford to live there, when I went there for a visit, I was a very poor man in Norway. (everybody laughs)

Now can you introduce the other band members to us? You two are well known all over the world, but who are the rest of the musicians in The Clan Destined?

We didn’t want to make it a supergroup, where everybody in the band has a history and done lots of things before. That is good when bands do that, but for this we wanted to try and find some fresh young people, who are very talented but haven’t really been heard before or in been in bands that much. We were looking for a drummer before we did the demo, we made demos of the songs on Iscariah’s laptop computer that sound really rough. We were trying to record, and we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we managed to get some ideas down, and we sent the demo to a handful of people. One day I was talking to a guy called Tony Dolan, who was the vocalist in Venom, The Demolition Man was his stage name in Venom, and I said, “Do you know of any drummers?” And he said, “Yes, I do. There’s a girl drummer, she’s 17.” I said, “Oh, that’s a bit young!” But he said, “No, no, wait till you hear her play.” And she sent to us a DVD demo, there’s a little clip as a download on our website, and we watched that, and we thought that this is incredible that a girl of 17 can play like that. We had rehearsals down in London, we traveled from Nottingham where we live down to London to have rehearsals with her, and she’s an incredible drummer. She was more professional than me and Iscariah, she was telling us how to play the songs, we were making mistakes, and she said, “No, no, it’s like this!” She’s a crazy girl, really cool. (The girl’s name is Emily Dolan Davies, and she previously played with Tony Dolan in Mantas for a short while – ed.) Then we have a lead guitarist, we have a download on the website with just him playing lead guitar. We met him through Kara Sutra, the female vocalist, and he’s just incredible, you’ll see what he’s been doing to the tracks if you go on the website. He’s been in local bands around where we live, but never really been on the tour before. As to Kara, I asked a few good friends of mine if they knew of any good girl singers with charisma and personality, and they said, “Yes, you should call this girl called Kara.” I telephoned her, and we got on really well. Tony Wildwood, the rhythm guitarist, has been a good friend of mine for many years, he was in a band called The Enchanted, a kind of death metal band, and I went up to visit him one day. I played him the really rough demo that we had done on Iscariah’s laptop, and within one minute he said, “I wanna join the band.” He’s playing the rhythm parts, and Lee is playing the lead guitar parts. On the demo that we’re recording now we’re also working with Les Smith from Anathema, who also used to be in Cradle Of Filth many years ago. We work with him on the keyboards, but then we’re going to look for a full-time keyboard player, I think, because we do need one for this new material. I think that’s everybody, the six people at the moment. (laughs)

You have been the only singer in all your previous outfits, but now you also have the female vocalist. How much is it different now for you? What was the purpose of having the second lead singer in the band?

I thought it would be interesting. What we’re planning to do isn’t gonna be anything like Lacuna Coil. We don’t know yet, this might sound crazy, but because the songs are very new and we haven’t actually tried them with the female vocals on, I will record my vocals soon, and then we’ll have an experiment, we will try different things with the female voices. We wanna do something that is new, that doesn’t sound like Lacuna Coil or Nightwish, it has to be male and female vocals mixed together, but in a very different way. With this music that we’re doing, we’re experimenting all the time. Every day when we work on the songs, we find another dimension, and something else goes on top of them. It’s very interesting, it’s like painting a picture. We don’t know yet how this music will sound when it’s finished. All we know is that we want it to be heavy and melodic, to have the brutality there, some good keyboard parts, some good guitar parts, and write the best songs that we can. But how we’re gonna mix them, we don’t know yet.

The rough mix of the song “I Am Because We Are” is already online. How much does it represent the future sound?

I think it’s hard to listen to a track without vocals, just the backing track, because the vocals and the lead guitar do make a big difference to the songs. Imagine hearing a very famous song without the vocals on, it would be very hard to tell what it was sometimes without the singing. With the vocals on, it will make a big change. With my vocals, I’m gonna try and do a mix between Sabbat, Skyclad and something new, maybe a new sound. This is what we’ll have to work on in the studio.

Whose idea was to name the band The Clan Destined? Does the name have any special message?

Yeah, it was my idea, it’s a kind of play on words again. The word “clandestine” means that something is secret and hidden. And we didn’t do any adverts in music magazines for the band members saying, “A new band needs a drummer and a guitarist, blah blah blah, with Iscariah and Martin Walkyier. Everybody that we met, we met through true friends. When we needed a drummer, I got a telephone call, and we found the drummer. When we needed a guitarist, my friend said, “Oh, I’ll play the guitar for you.” The way it all came together is something that is meant to be, like a clan. We’re a little gathering of people, boys and girls, and not just the people in the band, we have people around us who are doing very many different things – web designers, artists, T-shirt printers. We’re trying to put together a community, a collective of people who strive for the same kind of thing, who want to work and help one another out and look after one another. It’s an idea that I had for a name of a band since about 1996, it kind of fitted good with what we were planning to do.

But as far as we understood, the band members live in different areas…

Yes, that’s right. We live in two kind of areas – half the band is from around Nottingham, and the other half is from around London and Brighton in the south of England. It’s not really a problem, because we have e-mail, we have telephones, we have cars that we can travel on. When we rehearse, we’ll maybe rent a cottage in the country, an old farmhouse or something, and rehearse there to get everybody together to work on the tracks. But for the recording I’ve been traveling down the south of England, and people have been traveling up here. It’s not really been a problem.

Have you already considered your future live shows? Will you have any theatrics onstage? What kind of setlist will you have – only the original material, or also something from Skyclad?

No, I don’t think there will be any covers of Skyclad or Sabbat, because the music is in a kind of different direction. We’d rather play all our own original material. We’re already starting to think about things like an image for the band, the way we will look on stage, what the stage show will be like. I’m talking to my friend, who does the lighting for Cradle Of Filth, Dimmu Borgir and bands like that, and I’m talking with him about working together on the stage show to do something really special.

There is a cover version of Julian Cope (“T.C. Lethbridge”) among the tracks on your demo. What was the purpose of recording it?

It’s because we like the sound so much. The original version of the song is very different from the one we do, it’s very metal, it’s got almost traditional metal feel to it, but it’s very different. And the lyrics are very crazy, it’s about a guy called T.C. Lethbridge, who was the guy who wrote books about the paranormal and strange things happening. Everybody laughed at him and thought he was an idiot in the 1920s when he was alive and writing these books. And then scientists today who have read his books may realize that he was actually very right with what he said. There’s kind of rock’n’roll feel to the song, but the lyrics are very British, very kind of… I don’t know, I just like the feel of the song. It’s a crazy idea to do a song about an old writer from 1920s in Britain, who wrote about these things. Plus, Julian Cope is a friend of mine, and we thought it would be good to get him to do guest vocals on the recording. We will see how that goes.

How are your writing songs in this band? Do you add words to Iscariah’s music, or do you write music together, or does somebody else from the band participate in this process?

It’s a little bit of all of those, really. Some of the tracks were written by Iscariah and given to me, and I just came up with the lyrics straight away. Other tracks were worked out together by myself and Iscariah, we put our ideas together and built the songs gradually. Some of them were done with Tony, the rhythm guitarist, a bit of work together with Lee, the lead guitarist, it’s been kind of a mixture. It’s mainly myself and Iscariah at the moment who are writing all the stuff, but as the band gets rolling and things move forward, I think the other people will become more involved in the writing process. They’re very good musicians, and it would be good to have them involved. At the moment we really want to get the demo out as soon as possible, it’s been quite a long year, a lot of things have happened. People think maybe we have been lazy or something, but Iscariah came over in January 2004, and we had to find him an apartment here - he has a three-year-old daughter and a wife, and we had to make sure he had a nice apartment and could get enough money and things like that. Then we were writing the songs and were looking for band members, it’s really been a very busy year, and I think now we just want to get the demo out as soon as possible.

So what is Iscariah doing outside music? He needs to earn money for his family…

We just about can live off our music at the moment, which is OK to me. We’re not rich guys, we exist, but at the moment we work nearly every day on the music and try and push things forward. I have my own T-shirt printing business, where I do stupid crazy T-shirt designs, and print a few shirts for other small bands who can’t afford a merchandizing deal, I try to help people out. And that just keeps this all alive while this comes together. We’re existing at the moment, not living, but it’s kind of good because we have the time to work on the music, and it takes a lot of time. A lot of thought has gone into these tracks, into the music and the lyrics, and how we’re recording them and the people we’re working with. It’s all like a big brainache, the whole thing is like having a baby, it’s been a very slow and painful process. (laughs)

While playing in Immortal Iscariah was not writing that much, and now he’s one of the main songwriters in The Clan Destined. People may get an impression that black metal wasn’t really his cup of tea…

Iscariah likes all kinds of music. He’s like me, he likes everything from the most extreme brutal metal - he likes music that is too heavy for me, it is evil music, and I like black metal and things like that, but not when it gets too extreme – to things like old Duran Duran. He does love black metal and his roots are in black metal, but like myself, it’s very important for him to listen to a lot of different types of music.

Do you share Iscariah’s passion for horror movies? In general, what kind of movies do you prefer?

I like all kinds of things, really. At the moment, I don’t get much time to watch any movies, because I’m too busy doing this. But I love films, I love good horror films, science fiction, if it’s good, and comedies. I like films that make you think about things, the last film I watched was the Michael Moore film “Fahrenheit 9/11”, I thought that was really good. Unfortunately at the moment I don’t get much time to watch TV or movies or go out for a party with my friends, I’m just working. The weekend just gone we were working with Les Smith from Anathema, finishing off the keyboards. I got back yesterday, and last night the guitarist came around to see me, the guy called Doc who works with Julian Cope in a band called Spiritualized, and we were talking about music. Today I’ve been trying my computer, the Internet connection was broken, then it was fixed. Now I do this interview with you guys, and then I’ll be sitting and e-mailing until midnight or something like that. (Our interview started when it was 5:00 p.m. in Britain – ed.). It’s kind of crazy at the moment.

What is currently going on with Return To The Sabbat? Will you continue with this project?

No, not anymore. This time I’m really working full-on with The Clan Destined. It takes up too much of my time at the moment, and it’s very important for me to be writing new music now. I did a good break for two years, when I left Skyclad, and I played the old Sabbat tracks, which was really good fun. We had a lot of fun doing it, but I think the time is now to move on to the new band, to The Clan Destined. We have a live recording from a show in London, we did it at the club called The Garage, which we hope to release in a limited edition, maybe on the website again, so if any of the real fans didn’t get a chance to see Return To The Sabbat live, they can buy a live CD.

By the way, why are only two original Sabbat members involved in it? Why did Andy Sneap decide to stay out of it?

We talked to Andy about it, and he was interested, but he was too busy. He’s a very busy guy with all his producer work at the moment, and he didn’t have the time to commit to a project like that, which I could understand. The old drummer, Simon Negus, I don’t think he plays drums anymore. I’ve had no contact with him, I don’t think he’s played any drums for 15 years, and I don’t think he would be able to do that. The idea of was a kind of – when I left Skyclad I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and I thought it would be a good chance to go out and play those old songs to give people one last chance to listen to them.

How much successful were the shows? Did you draw many fans to them?

We didn’t really do that many shows, the last ones we did were around one year ago, in December 2003. Unfortunately the guy who promotes the shows didn’t get really good promotion. The shows were really good, and the people who were there really enjoyed it, but it was kind of strange, because without having a record deal for that and without having a management, it was a bit of a hard thing to promote. In a way, it was good, because it just kept the name Martin Walkyier in the press and the magazines while The Clan Destined was coming together. It was a little bonus for the fans if they wanted to hear the old songs one last time, and it also kept me practiced. I wouldn’t say it was a great success or anything like that, but to be honest, it was never meant to be. All it was was just something to kind of keep the ball rolling, if you understand what that means, to keep things moving forward.

You said that you left Skyclad because of financial problems and the attitude of other band members. In your opinion, why did their attitude to the band change? You were together for 10 years, all of you worked really hard for the band – at what point did it go wrong?

The old Skyclad thing is not something I really want to talk about, because it’s a long time ago. From round about 1997 I had a bad feeling like things weren’t going quite right. You know, why we wanted the younger people in The Clan Destined, the new people is because they have the hunger, they have the fire inside them and the passion for the music. Most of the guys in Skyclad, to me, seem to have lost the passion, and it became kind of, “Let’s do an album every year.” It wasn’t working for me on a creative level at all, I felt it was really time to move on and do something new. I tried everything possible to make things better in Skyclad, and to make them change, but it didn’t really happen. In the end, I had to make a decision, and I decided that I wanted to do something else. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, it would be a lot of hard work, and it has been, but I think we’re getting there now. It’s the first release of The Clan Destined, and we have such big plans for the future, but the thing is that we have to make one step at a time. The first demo we do will be like the tip of the iceberg of what we have planned, we have some very crazy ideas. But first of all, before we do the crazy ideas, we have to kind of release the demo and say, “Here we are, hello everyone, and here is roughly what we’re doing.”

Does it mean that the Skyclad chapter of your life is closed forever? Or shall we expect a project like Return To The Skyclad 10 years from now?

When The Clan Destined is running, and hopefully everything goes good, I would love to do something one day, maybe do a concert of Skyclad cover versions, maybe with the guys from Elvenking. I have received a CD in the post today - we get a lot of e-mails and letters of people – and this one’s from a guy from New York called Michael Shulman, he’s a violin player, and he’s absolutely incredible. He sent me a CD today, and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard. Who knows, maybe. At the moment I’m really busy with this, it’s my main priority, but it would be nice some time, maybe in the future, to do a special concert for the fans and play some old tracks. But at the moment I can’t really think about that.

You have just mentioned Elvenking from Italy. Are you familiar with the guys? Are you friends with them?

Yes, I am. I did some Skyclad covers with them at the Bloodstock festival, which we have in England every August. It was really good, the guys came over, we had one rehearsal, and we played 30-40 minutes of Skyclad material. Maybe one day I would like to do that again, I’ll have a talk to the guys, they’re good friends of mine, really nice guys. I’ve heard that Davido, his stage name is Damnagoras, is back in the band again, he had to leave for a while because of illness, but now he’s back, which I think is a really good thing. These guys were really good together, they had a good style.

There were rumors about your involvement or influence on the lyrics of the U.S. thrash band Exodus. Their lyrics on the latest album – “Scar Sprangled Banner” and stuff like that – they sound very Skyclad-ish, don’t you think?

Very strange thing! Actually I got a copy of that album from Andy Sneap about one week ago, I was reading their lyrics, and I’m gonna send them an e-mail saying how good I think the lyrics are. For an American band to have the balls to say that at the moment is very brave – the things they say about the government in America. I like their album very much, I think it’s very good.

But you know, there were some rumors, or maybe just a joke spread over the Internet, that you kind of helped them write these lyrics…

No, no! I’ve never really met the guys, I just got a contact of their manager the other day, and I want to send them an e-mail and say, “Great job!”, because I think their record is really good. They have captured the spirit of the old times, it’s like “Fabulous Disaster” in a new version.

Who is your favorite lyricist in heavy metal?

In heavy metal I’m not sure. My favorite lyricists are the people like Justin Sullivan from New Model Army, I like him very much, and Kate Bush, I like her lyrics very much. In metal I like a lot of different things for different reasons… Let me think… The new Exodus, they have very good lyrics… I can’t really think of that, to be honest. I listen to a lot of metal, but where lyrics are concerned, I mainly really like other things outside metal. Have you heard of a guy called Dave Matthews? I like his lyrics very much, I think they’re very good indeed.

And what poets have influenced you most of all?

I like Edgar Allen Poe very much, I like Lord Byron, I think he’s really good. I like some of the anti-war poets from the 1st World War like Siegfried Sassoon, lots of different things. I think Shakespeare is absolutely incredible, the way he used words and invented words hundreds of years ago is really good. The things that Shakespeare wrote, even though it’s a very long time ago, they still tell stories that could be of mafia or something today. Things like “Romeo and Juliet”, they’re kind of eternal stories, they can work at any time or any place. I think to be able to write something like that is very clever.

You mentioned Justin Sullivan, and with Skyclad you covered a New Model Army track…

Yeah, “Master Race”, I’m a big fan of New Model Army, I like the old stuff very much. I’ve not heard anything by them for quite a while, but my problem is that at the moment I’m too busy with The Clan Destined, I have no time to listen to other music. It’s been a very strange year for me, all I’ve really listened to is what Iscariah has given me. (laughs) It’s sometimes sending me mad - I have to listen to a track a thousand times, write lyrics, and then listen to it again and again. I’ve spent a very long time on the lyrics for this, trying to get everything as good as possible. We want to do a kind of “Mother of All Demos”, something really good as to the music, the lyrics, the packaging, and everything. It’s been hard work, because we have no label or no management, we’re doing it all ourselves. And that’s the way we want to keep it for the moment to keep control over what we are doing. When the demo’s out, we will talk with record companies, we will talk with managers, we will talk with anybody really, we just wanna make sure that anybody that we work with are nice people, honest people, professional people. We wanna try and avoid all the mistakes we’ve made in the past with record labels and things like that. This is the third and final chance that I will do something, and I really want to make sure it’s done right this time and for the right reasons.

Speaking about Iscariah, is The Clan Destined his only band at the moment? In addition to Immortal, he used to be involved in Necrophagia and Wurdulak…

I think Iscariah is still in Necro… Necrophagia (Martin pronounces this as [nekrε’fei dzia] – ed.). I don’t know which one is right, maybe you guys are right, and it’s [nekrε’fa:dzia]. I think he’s also doing some session work for a band called Amok from Norway. But most of the last year he’s been here, and we’ve been working on this. The Clan Destined is his main priority at the moment, I think, because he’s very involved. He’s been 90 percent songwriter, writing all the music and everything for us. It’s kind of like mine and Iscariah’s little baby at the moment, we’re very proud and really trying to do the best job possible with everything.

Talking about pronunciation - what is the right way to pronounce your last name? In Russia nobody knows how to pronounce it properly…

Martin [‘wo:lkiε]. Actually my oldest ancestor I’ve found comes from Warsaw in Poland, from about 1813 or something. That is the oldest ancestor that we could find, so I think it’s kind of an Eastern European name. I think we’re from somewhere in the east, my family comes from nearer to you guys than to England. It’s definitely not an English name. Some of my ancestors had very crazy names, my grandfather was called Wallier Orlando Walkyier, and I have a relative called Melkio Orlando Walkyier. I got the boring name, I got Martin. (everybody laughs) I would love to be called Melkio, it would be a good name for a singer in a metal band, but not if I’d been a bus driver or something. I would get beaten at school every day for a name like that.

If your name was Melkio, everybody would come over to you and say, “OK, that’s a cool nickname, but what’s your real name?”

Oh, people say that already! I’ve met people who thought Walkyier was a stage name. But it’s on my passport! (everybody laughs)

Talking about record companies and managers – could you recall the worst thing that the music business has done to you?

The worst thing is not the music business, it’s people, it’s human nature. I don’t like people who say one thing when they mean another thing, and people who pretend to be like your brother and then the minute that your back is turned, they will put a knife in your back for a handful of dollars. Brother will kill brother, they will kill one another, you know. I think that’s the most disappointing thing about the music business, when you realize that people that you’ve thought of as friends are only really interested in you for writing lyrics and to use you. That’s kind of disappointing. I can’t complain about the way the music industry has been to me. I think if somebody cheats you once, it’s their fault, but if you let them cheat you twice, it becomes your own fault, because the music business is a business. I always say to young guys: “Before you sign a contract, get it checked by a lawyer, be professional about it, don’t sign something without reading it, this is kind of a very stupid thing to do.” The music industry has been like a school for me, and it’s taught me some very difficult lessons, but I like to think I’ve learned from them. And the same thing has happened with Iscariah. What we really want to do is make sure that all the mistakes we’ve made in the past, we never make them again.

Let’s now discuss your early days. Before joining Sabbat you played in a band called Hydra…

Yeah, that was a school band I was in with Fraser Craske, the bass player from Sabbat. That was our first band together.

What kind of music were you playing?

Sabbat grew out that, if you could imagine it. It was heavy and it was probably very bad. I’m sure somebody has a photograph of me somewhere with short hair and some very strange clothes on, playing an early concert. I know was it was like – it was a bit like Venom. The upcoming Return To The Sabbat live album will include a track that was originally a Hydra track, it will give you an idea what Hydra was like. It was kind of like Sabbat, but a lot less complicated and more simple, we were 15-year-old guys playing in a friend’s bedroom. (laughs)

And how did you become a metal singer then?

By sheer accident. I used to be a guitar player, and one day we were having a rehearsal, but the singer was ill and he didn’t come. Just for a joke we were playing “At War With Satan” by Venom, we started the intro to the first part of that song, and just for a joke I started singing along. Then all the guys in the room just turned around and went, “Wow, you’ve got a horrible voice! You’re the new singer!” (everybody cracks) I couldn’t play guitar and sing at the same time, it was too complicated for me, so slowly I started playing guitar less and less. It was kind of by accident! I always wanted to be an actor before that, at school I was always very interested in acting and things like that. Here’s a funny story – with Hydra, the first band, we rehearsed within a church around the corner from where I live now. It was a kind of Christian church, and one of the guys in the band knew the priest of the church, and he asked, “Can my band rehearse there?”

…And you played “At War With Satan” at the church!

I’m very thankful that the priest from the church never listened to what we did! (everybody laughs) We had black metal lyrics at that time, they were all about Satan and everything. If he’d heard us one time, we wouldn’t have had a rehearsal room, we would have been kicked out straight away!

You had two demo tapes before the first Sabbat album. Were they already by Sabbat or still Hydra or from a kind of shifting period?

They were Sabbat. The first one was called “Magic In Theory And Practice” and the second one was called “Fragments Of A Faith Forgotten” with “For Those Who Died”, “Hosanna In Exelsis” and “A Cautionary Tale” on. That was the demo cassette that got us the deal with Noise Records. The demos were copied one at a time, my parents had a hi-fi with a twin cassette player on it, and each of the cassettes was hand-copied in real-time recording. If anybody’s got one of those, it was recorded on my parents’ hi-fi. They were recorded on computer tapes - before disc drives, the first computers had a cassette instead of a CD, and we recorded on those tapes, because we had no money, and we had to do it really cheap. (laughs)

Have you ever considered re-releasing these demo tapes on CD, probably as a bonus to the live CD that’s in your plans?

We could do it, the problem is that the quality is really bad. We don’t have the master copies anymore, they were lost a thousand years ago somewhere. Maybe we’ll re-record something, I don’t know yet, we’ll see what we want to do. Noise Records, or rather Sanctuary Records, were talking about re-releasing “Dreamweaver” (1989) some time in 2005, so maybe, I mean a big maybe… I’m talking to Andy Sneap about getting together and recording “Blood For The Bloodgods” that was only available as a flexi-disc, maybe we should record that as a bonus track. But I can’t say that yet, because I don’t know what will happen with that.

If we understand correctly, you were wearing a kind of make-up in the early days, right?

You see, we were influenced by a band called Hell. This band was from around the midlands of Britain, they were kind of Satanic black metal, and they all had eyeliner on and goaty beards. They looked really cool, and we were very influenced by Hell and what they did. In Return To The Sabbat I also wore make-up, because it’s a kind of tradition. If you look at www.martinwalkyier.com, there are some crazy photos of me looking a bit like someone from Cradle Of Filth. That’s what we used to do, we used to dress up and try to put on a bit of a theatrical show. I think the reason why I like wearing black eyeliner around my eyes on stage is because when you’re in a big hall and there’s a lot of people there, it makes your eyes look better, you look possessed.

Why did you sign a record deal with Noise, not with any British label?

Because Noise were very interested in us. They were the first company that mailed us, and a lot of the bands we liked, bands like Celtic Frost, Helloween and Kreator, they were on Noise. We thought, “Oh, it’s great to be on a label with all our favorite bands!” It’s just something we kind of did. When you’re 18 and a label that’s doing really well at the time hands you a record contract, we just signed it without really thinking about it, which is something I would say to young bands, “Be very careful of doing that.”

You toured with many UK thrash bands of the late 1980s – Xentrix, Lawnmower Deth, etc. Who were the best touring partners?

Either! I like them all, it was really good back in the old days. All the bands were really good, like a gang of friends all traveling round. The scene was really good in the UK, so all of them really. I like Xentrix, we had some good fun with them on tour, drinking beers and things like that. They were the good old days when I was a young man! (laughs) A long time ago.

Are you still in contact with any musicians from those old days?

Not really, because all of them, apart from me, have probably grown up, got normal jobs and have families. I’m the only one who’s still crazy and trying to make a career in music after 20 years. (laughs) I’m the mad guy you never stop. I don’t really see them. I have met the guys from Lawnmower Deth a couple of times, because they live around the same area that I do, around Nottingham, so sometimes I meet them when I’m out shopping. But I don’t really heave much contact with anyone from the old times, apart from the guys in Sabbat.

Already your second album with Sabbat, “Dreamweather”, was a concept record. Why didn’t you ever do a concept album with Skyclad?

It takes a lot of work to do a concept, and it was really difficult to do. In the future I have an idea for a crazy concept, but that’s three years away yet. First of all, we will release one or two albums with The Clan Destined, and then hopefully we will have a very crazy concept, on which we will be working together with a lot of other people. At the moment I’m trying to make plans for three years in the future, while at the same time doing the demo and working on the immediate things we have to do right now. I’m talking to some very interesting people that will hopefully want to work on what The Clan Destined will become eventually, which will be more than it is right at the moment. At the moment it’s like a baby, it’s an embryo, what we’re doing at the moment is like the first baby steps. What I plan to do in the future is a very big concept, but at the moment I think we need to give people just an album, not confuse them too much with anything too crazy or too adventurous. Just for now we will give a kind of an introduction to the world of The Clan Destined.

Is it true that Skyclad originally started as a side project, and none of you had the intention to leave your previous bands?

No, I’d quit Sabbat by then. I got together with Steve Ramsey (guitar) and Graeme English (bass), and we wrote the songs, and they were still in their band Pariah. In the beginning, when we were doing the demos, for the guys it was like a project, but when they realized that the music was going good, and given the fact that the other guys in Pariah didn’t want to tour very much or do much work for the music, Skyclad took over from that.

As far as we understand, Skyclad have always been more popular in continental Europe than in Britain. What is the reason? And how are you planning to avoid it with The Clan Destined?

I think metal in general is a lot more popular in continental Europe, although the climate is getting much better over here, the scene is kind of opening for the more extreme and more crazy kind of bands. The way we can try and beat that happening again with The Clan Destined is to write songs that, even though being brutal and heavy, have a kind of melody to them and a catchy chorus that people can sing along. What we’re trying to do, if it makes sense, is to do very extreme metal with very dark lyrics, so the young guys in the front can be headbanging like fucking madmen, but at the same time you can have goth girls in black rubber dresses dancing to it in the back. We’re trying to do a mix between brutality and catchiness and melody of some modern things. The music of The Clan Destined is a bit of contradiction, because in many ways it has a lot of influences from the 1980s metal, and in other ways, it’s got things in it that are totally new. We’ve got some crazy ideas for the vocals, too. We’ve been working a lot on our sound, really taking our time to develop it, and we’re still on, we still don’t quite know where music’s gonna go yet. Hopefully when people hear it they will like it, and it will do very well, but there’s also a chance that what we think is very good, other people might not like. At the end of the day, we make music for ourselves, and we are very happy with it.

Do you think that the fans of Skyclad and Immortal will appreciate the music of The Clan Destined?

Everybody we’ve played it to at the moment, whether they like more mellow acoustic music or whether they like extreme metal, thinks it’s very good. Julian Cope’s guitarist came round last night, he likes thrash metal, but he doesn’t play it, and he listened to the stuff and thought it was very good. Iscariah went for a holiday in Norway about one month ago, took a very rough demo and played it to all his friends when he went to bars with really extreme black metal guys. And he said even the guys that he thought would say, “This is not extreme enough for me,” said, “It’s really good, I like it.” We’ve had a lot of interesting people working on this and helping us and being very nice to us. Nick Barker, the guy who was with Cradle Of Filth and Dimmu Borgir, heard the music the other day and liked it very much. Hopefully people will like it, but all we can do is our best.

We’ve seen people on the Internet referring to The Clan Destined as a pagan metal band. Do you think that’s correct?

I think we’re kind of all. The idea is to put together a collection of people who are open-minded and free-thinking. We try to write intelligent, sensible lyrics which have something to say about the world in which we live. Personally I call myself a pagan because it’s an easy thing. People in Argentina and Russia can look in the dictionary and see the word “pagan” and understand the rough idea of what it means. What I believe is a mixture of a lot of things, I have my own philosophy on life and my own ideas. I’m not really into the kind of things like Christianity, with a kind of hatred and a kind of fighting all the time, this is not my idea of what religion or what spirituality is about. In the same way that you say “heavy metal”, it can be anything from Bon Jovi to Bathory. If you say “heavy metal” to a trendy guy, a disco guy, it’s kind of a general term, a general thing that covers the sound of the music. The same thing is with saying “pagan” – we’ve all got our own ideas in the band, we’ve all got our own beliefs, but it’s something that we can say, “Yeah, this is what we are.” So yes, in a way. Yes and no. (laughs)

On your personal website there’s a poem called “New Year’s Evil”. When and how did you write it? Was it really on a New Year’s Eve?

I think it was around the time of the Millenium, the year 2000. I wrote it because all these people are celebrating the new Millenium, making fireworks and drinking champagne, but at the end of the day, nothing ever fucking changes. We had a new Millenium, we could have had a chance, as the world, all the countries and everyone, to get together and say, “We’ve had 2,000 years of bullshit and fighting and hatred and world wars and genocide and racism. Let’s all get together and make the next 1,000 years something special.” And if you look at the way the new Millenium started off with everything that’s happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, it looks to me like we’re making the same mistakes again and again. And it’s about saying that it doesn’t matter when everyone says, “Happy New Year!”, and all the fireworks are exploding, because nobody really does anything to make it a happy new year. That’s what the song was about.

Does it mean that New Year is a sad holiday for you?

Yes, it can be. I normally find this time of year quite strange, because I don’t like all the commerciality that goes with Christmas, people going out and spending lots of money on their credit cards and buying 10,000 presents they can’t afford. For me the real reason is not Christmas, the reason Christmas is on December 25 is because for our ancestors for thousands of years it was the shortest day of the year. The mid-winter solstice is on December 21, it’s the shortest day when our ancestors would go out and celebrate that the spring would come again next year, the food would grow, and the animals would have babies and all this, so that everyone could live. Whereas now it has been kidnapped by the Christians and kidnapped again from the Christians by the capitalists. They invited this “spend-spend-spend-go out-get drunk till you fall over-have a big party,” when really it seems to be a waste of time. It’s a strange time of the year, everything seems to do with money and not really thinking about the things that matter.

But on the other hand, there are people who don’t have time, who don’t talk to their relatives too much, but on this holiday they’re meeting and making presents to each other. There’s also a positive side to this…

That is good. If it brings people together, then it’s a good thing. But I think a lot of people in England, a lot of people I know, feel a lot of pressure in this time of the year to buy presents and things like that. For me, if I get a present from somebody, and it’s something they’ve made for me or a poem they have written or something like that, that is far better than, you know, they bought me something they can’t afford to buy. I agree that it’s a good time to get together with your family, have a party and meet your old friends. Yeah, that’s good, but it’s like everything else, a good side and a bad side.

Do you believe that the music of The Clan Destined can change the world or some persons for the better?

I hope so. It sounds like a big dream and a lot of talk, but I really think that everybody has a duty. If you’re intelligent and you see evil things happening in the world, whether you’re a journalist or an actor or a painter or a poet or a musician, whatever you are, I think everybody has a duty in the world today, in these difficult times, to try and say what is wrong with the world and try and do something. Whether The Clan Destined music will change the world, I don’t think so, but it might change a few people, and it might do some good. And as long as it does something, I feel like I have a duty to try. Over the years I’ve had a lot of bullshit things happening, and it would have been very easy for me many times just to quit music. But something inside me won’t let me do it, because as long as I have something to say and I can write and express myself through my music, I feel like I have to do it. It’s part of me, it’s something I have to do. And if this band was successful, I would say to the people out there reading this, “Please support The Clan Destined! If we get somewhere, we would do really great things. We would try our best to be the most original, unique, honest, strange metal musical collective that the world has ever seen.” But we need help with that, we need the support, we need people around the world to get together to go on the website, go on the forum, send us their ideas. We’re about bringing people together.

Can you name a band or an album that managed to change your own life?

I think the band Hell, the band I talked about earlier that never released anything. They were the band that had the greatest influence on my life, because I went to see them, it was my first ever concert I went to, I was about 15 or something, I can’t remember. I went to this concert, I watched Hell play, and I thought, “That’s what I want to do with my life.” I watched their singer, all dressed in black, with eye make-up on and a beard, looking evil and singing about dark things on the stage, and I thought, “Oh, that’s good, that’s what I wanna do!”

And now a very stupid final question – what do you know about Russia? Do you know any Russian bands?

I’m very sorry, I don’t really know that much about Russia. What I have seen on television where I watch travel programs about Russian nature and wilderness, it looks absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, we don’t get to hear about Russian metal bands over here, so maybe you could tell me about some good bands I should check out. I would really love to come, if we can make this actually happen - it’s been four years of work so far to get to this stage of doing this demo – if we can make this happen as good as it should be, I would love to come to Russia and play. I just love playing live, and I would really like to come out and see the places I’ve seen on TV for real and find out more about Russia, because it’s a very interesting and beautiful place.

Roman “Maniac” Patrashov, Felix Yakovlev
December 6, 2004
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