Absolute Power
I Always Want Good Songs

04.11.2026

A lot of people know Shane Embury as the bass player of grindcore juggernauts Napalm Death and a member of a multitude of other projects ranging from industrial to black metal. Nearly as many people know Simon Efemey as a producer who has worked with such prominent bands as Paradise Lost, Amorphis, The Exploited, Wolfsbane and above-mentioned Napalm Death. What not so many people know is that they have a project called Absolute Power that does classic heavy metal and is already about to release its second full-length album under the lengthy title of “Needs Must When The Devil Drives”. A rather unexpected choice of style, a 15-year gap between albums, and Simon’s remarkable relocation from behind the producer’s desk to the front mic – the reasons were plenty to request an interview with Mr. Efemey and find out more about this intriguing project. And above that, this was an opportunity to talk directly to the man who oversaw the recording of such genre landmarks as “Draconian Times”, “Tuonela” or “Fuck The System” and did live mixing for Napalm Death when they played in my hometown in pre-COVID times…

Simon, most people know you as a producer. I personally came across your name for the first time in the credits of Paradise Lost’s “Icon” album when it was released back in 1993. But when did you actually start singing – before you started producing other bands, or way later into your music career?

Well, way before. I sang in choirs when I was a kid, in a church choir, and then, when we were very young, 16-17, we had an AC/DC cover band. I was in a couple of bands that didn’t get that successful, and then the sound stuff, live sound engineering and producing and whatever took over really. I’ve always sung, I’ve done a lot in the studio. Sometimes when backing vocals are needed, I can always step in and do that sort of thing as well. To sum it up, I’ve always done it, I did it way before I got into production and stuff.

The press release says that you and Shane are both from West Midlands, and you shared a lot of concert experiences in Birmingham back in the 80s. Did you actually meet each other back in those early days?

Yes, because we traveled on the same transport. We didn’t live in Birmingham, we lived to the West, which is called West Midlands, it’s very close to it, but it’s a different cluster, a different area. And we’d see each other because Shane stood out with his mad hair, you know. Heavy metal fans, as you know, are always very friendly, and you’d see similar faces on the train, on the bus, and at the gigs. We weren’t like best friends or anything, just like acquaintances really, heavy metal acquaintances, and then later on, after Napalm started, I got to know those people, and we actually became friends.

I was asking because you didn’t start producing Napalm Death until about 1999…

That’s right, yeah. It came more about because they changed their management. They had management before, they sort of used various people, and I’d been doing stuff, and then they changed their management, which involved me as well, and it just became a natural progression that I would produce a few records with them. Russ (Russell), the guy who works with them now, was sort of my engineer, then he got more skillful, so they moved on and recorded their latest stuff with Russ, which is not a problem. I enjoyed the albums I did with them, but I don’t want to do too many records with the same people, because you can get complacent.

Absolute Power, as far as I understand from the press release, started as an idea – something like “let’s write our own tunes like those we blast on our tour bus”.

Yes, that’s right.

But what was the first song you actually wrote for the project?

Oh, good question! We were actually recording the “Order Of The Leech” album (2002) when Shane and I were getting into it. It was quite a fancy studio, so we all had accommodation. Shane had a four-track recorder, and he’d be going up there when he wasn’t busy in the studio with Napalm, and he was actually recording some riff ideas for Absolute Power. Probably the track “Land Of Steel” was ones of the first ones, and the track “Sea Of Horns”, and basically then we got the whole first album together. It was, as you said, an idea – back in the day you’d be on the tour bus, and after a few drinks in the back you’d be blasting out old Dio and Priest and all kinds of oldschool metal. We just said one day, “Why don’t we try and write our own?” because we loved that sort of music. As a result here we are, on album two! (laughs)

How do you work on songs – does Shane write music, and you come up with lyrics, or does it go some other way?

No, we both come up with music and lyrics, we both can do everything really. He’ll have a song idea, I’ll have a song idea, and then sometimes we collaborate. There’s no set rule really, I had a couple of complete songs, and he had a couple of complete songs, and we had some songs where he had just one riff, and I came up with the vocal… and vice versa really. We don’t have a set pattern, we just come up with riff ideas and vocal melody ideas, and once we’ve got that, we’ll put the lyrics together, which him and I write together. That’s how we do it.

The first Absolute Power album also features another well-known producer – Russ Russell on guitar. How did he get involved?

Well, that’s because he was my engineer, so it was natural to go with him on the first one. Towards the end he worked more on it than when we started. But this second one is different, because I’d been using a different studio in Cambridge, and I got to know the engineer really well there, and it just became natural that we’d do it in that studio really. So this time we had a bit of a change. I tried to just be the singer in the band, if you know what I mean, but it’s quite difficult to switch off from production duties as well. Anyway, I let them sort of run with stuff and just critique at the end, really.

As far as I understand, you don’t want to produce your own music, you want some other people to be involved, right?

I mean, I can do it, but I’d rather have somebody there, who’s more than just the engineer, somebody who puts some ideas in maybe. It just takes the pressure off really, because being a producer is a completely different thing from being an artist. It’s just nice to be the singer sometimes. (laughs)

Who came up with the name Absolute Power? Does it have anything to do with the Clint Eastwood movie of the same name?

No, not really! It was an old track, one of the tracks on the first album, a track I had, and we just thought it would be a good name. The track was called “Absolute Power”, and we thought, “Well, let’s call the band Absolute Power”. It was quite simple really.

Why did it take 15 years to come up with the second Absolute Power album? When did you actually start writing the material for it?

It’s just because we’re so busy really. Essentially it is a side project even though we’re very excited about it and hopefully we can go somewhere with it, do some shows and whatever. But it just took time because we’re busy touring, making records and so on. We started writing for it about three or four years ago, we had some more ideas, and it just came from there really. It’s difficult as you know these days for record labels to actually put money up to go and record, because all these labels now want bands to do it for themselves, you know, finance it themselves. We got a little bit of money together, and we thought, “Let’s start it, and see what happens”. And then obviously we were lucky enough for Enrico (Giannone) and Time To Kill Records to come in and say, “We really like it, we’ll pay for the rest of the recording”. We were really happy about that. That’s the reason why it took so long – just because we were busy, and we couldn’t find the right time to do it. Fortunately we’ve managed to do it over the past couple of years. It wasn’t done that quickly, but it was done more quickly than the first album.

The new album features Mark Gemini Thwaite, whom people mostly know from The Mission and Tricky. Is he a fan of classic heavy metal, too?

Yes, he’s into oldschool heavy metal. I’ve known him for years, I actually recorded one of the first bands then he was in, then I did some demos with them back in the day. He was always a metalhead - as much as he loves his gothic and that type of thing, but he’s always been a metalhead as well. He plays in the band called The Wonder Stuff at the moment, and that’s a band I actually work with. I got talking to him about the project, and he told me to send him some of the songs I’d written because he was interested to see what he could come up with. Some of the contributions he’s made are really excellent, it’s taken a lot of the songs on this record from being quite basic to having a bit more flavor, we feel like we’ve advanced with a bit more flavor in that way. As I said, I’ve known him for years, he’s a friend. Again, that’s all good.

There are a few songs on the new album that I would like to ask you more about. The first one is “Kernschmelze”. Why the German title? And what is it actually about?

It’s actually Shane’s title that was. I think it was because we like a lot of German metal - Accept, Scorpions, that type of thing. So he decided just to do that, and obviously I wouldn’t mind. I don’t actually know what it means! (cracks) It’s probably not best to put that in the quote, but I’ll have to ask Shane. I know he’s told me, but I can’t remember exactly, if I’m being honest. We felt it would be good to have that just as a little bit of a flavor. Some bands have done it in the past - they have a title that’s in a different language. 

Another song is “Within”. This one is very different from the rest of the album. Who came up with it?

Shane’s always been a prolific writer in all types of music, as you probably know. He had this acoustic guitar thing on his laptop he’d recorded, and I thought it was great. So I came up with the tune, and we came up with the words. I think it was always like, as you probably know - the oldschool metal albums by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Queensryche, Scorpions always had a ballad or a really different song on it, like “Planet Caravan” by Black Sabbath or “Dreamer Deceiver” by Judas Priest or whatever. So we thought because we wanted the album to be in that genre, it could have been from 40 years ago sort of thing, that was the reason why we put something like that on. As a metal fan myself, I always quite liked those quirky songs. You have full-on eight or nine tracks of heavy metal, and then you have one quirky slow ballady-type track. That was the thinking behind that. A lot of people like it. We built it up just from that acoustic thing, and we put some orchestration and everything that you can hear on it. We just thought it breaks the record off nicely.

Why did you decide to cover “Sheer Heart Attack” by Queen? Why not something by Dio or some New Wave of British Heavy Metal band?

I think doing something like that was a bit too obvious really. And the Queen thing - because we are big Queen fans. I’ve always liked that song, it was quite a revolution when that song came out - for Queen, because Roger Taylor had been influenced by punk at that time. I never liked the mix of it, because there were no drums in it, if you listen to the original version the drums sound really bad. So it just came about, we thought we could do it close, not change it too much, just have a much better sound on it (laughs), with the drums and everything. That was the reasoning really, we didn’t want to just do the obvious cover version, that was a bit too cheesy to do something like that. We decided to take something from a different type of genre and do that, heavier too.

Now that you have two albums with Absolute Power, have you considered bringing it to the stage?

Oh yeah, definitely, we’re fully intending on doing some shows next year. We did do some shows for the first album, we played “Download” and a couple of smaller shows, that’s all we did, but this time, with the record company as well, they want us to do some shows. Predominantly we want to do festivals, because it’s a sort of like a fun band, a party band, and that’s the plan. We’re looking to see whether our time schedule works out and we could go out and do some gigs. That’s definitely the plan.

I also have a few questions about your producing career, if you don’t mind. On Wikipedia the list of your works starts with punk and alternative rock bands that don’t have anything to do with metal and then in 1992 you moved on to produce Paradise Lost. How did it happen?

I had a small studio in the town where I was from. We opened that studio, and I was working with that band that I have mentioned, called The Wonder Stuff, they were much more pop/indie type of thing. And a lot of bands that would come and support them on the tours, I would say, “If you want to come in and record, come to our studio”. And the town we were in, this town called Stourbridge, was a very happening town for bands, a lot of bands were coming out of it. There was The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself, Diamond Head came from there, Robert Plant’s from there. So I was recording more indie-type stuff, even though I was a heavy metal fan. And then I went on tour with a band who was managed by Andy Farrow, who manages Paradise Lost. I got friendly with him, and he was telling me about Paradise Lost and saying that they didn’t want to go down the route of having a producer like Colin Richardson or somebody like that. Greg Mackintosh wanted somebody a bit more on the indie side. So he asked if I was into it, and I said “Well, yeah”, because deep down I was a metal fan. It sort of came from there. The irony was that even though I was doing that indie stuff, I was actually a metal fan, I’d been in metal bands myself, and when we came to do the record, I knew all about metal, and it blended quite nicely.

What do you think about the re-recording of “Icon” that Paradise Lost made a few years ago?

I didn’t listen to it, to be honest. A good friend of mine, he’s in a band called Solitary, he listened to it and said technically it was better, because obviously these days you can fix anything, and back in the day we just recorded on tape, and you could only be as good as you could be, but these days you can do anything really. He said technically it was better, but it lost its soul. That was the reason why I didn’t listen to it, because I remember when we made that record, and it was fun; we had four weeks in the studio, and it captured that moment, if you know what I mean, it captured the energy. There are mistakes on it, there’s out of tune singing and whatever, but that’s just how it was, that’s what they could do within that timeframe. I didn’t wanna listen to it, I thought it was a silly idea really. When you record something, you capture a moment in time; if you wanna change it, change it up a bit live, you can improve it or whatever, but to re-record it is just a waste of time really. That’s just my opinion, but I haven’t heard anything good about it, and I didn’t read anything good about it in the press, so I don’t think people were too enamored by it.

Your production and engineering works cover a wide range of styles. Is there any style that you would never agree to produce?

Probably hip hop or rap. (everybody laughs) I just don’t like it. Pretty much everything else I would do. I like all sorts really, I don’t mind some pop music, obviously I like my rock music, I like my softer rock music, some indie stuff’s okay, I don’t mind some country rock, because I always want good songs… I’d never take on any hip hop or rap, because I don’t get it, so I’d be the wrong person to have on it, I suppose.

I’ve talked to a few people who work a lot in the studio as producers or engineers, and most of them say it has become difficult for them to listen to music just for pleasure, because they automatically start analyzing how it is made. Is it also the case with you, and if yes, how do you deal with it?

A little bit, I gotta be honest. It can be, if I hear a track on the radio or somewhere, and I think, “Oh, I’ll check that”, and then I get it at home, and play it, and it’s not very well produced or whatever, that can be a bit of a pain. But generally speaking, I’m okay, I can accept stuff. I’m a real hi-fi fan, I’ve got a really top end stereo setup and headphone setup, and I do tend to listen to stuff that is well-produced, but I can also listen to stuff just for the songs. I can take myself away from that and just hear the song, and if I like the song enough, I don’t really care what it sounds like. But it’s a bonus if it does sound good. (laughs) 

What do you prefer – recording bands in the studio or doing their live sound?

Eh, a bit of both really. I enjoy the buzz of the gig, the excitement of being in a club or stadium or whatever with fans and the adrenaline of that. Then obviously with the recording you’re doing something that’s gonna be out forever. Once you’ve recorded it, and it gets released, it’s never going to go away, so there’s the satisfaction of that. I like the mixing process most of all in the studio these days, back in the day the recording was more fun, but I find recording now… I like it, but I like the mixing side slightly better. And the live side I just like for completely different reasons - just for the vibe of the gigs. When the gig starts, and if it’s a good show, it’s great, afterwards everybody’s buzzing, that’s a good feeling.

What are your future plans as a musician? Do you plan to do more albums with Absolute Power? Or do you have other projects in other styles on your mind?

There’s a project Shane and I are talking about that he wants to do, more sort of a gothic type style, as in The Mission, Peter Murphy, The Cult, that sort of thing. That’s going to materialize at some point. Definitely we’ll never shut the door on Absolute Power, because we’ll always come up with songs for that. We’ll see where this one goes really. I mean, the first album - we never released it properly, it was only ever put out on our own, and it never really went into the shops, we only sold it online or at Napalm Death shows or Shane’s shows or whatever. We’ll see how this one goes, but yeah, there’s always projects. Shane’s a very prolific songwriter as you know, he’s always got ideas, but the gothic thing sounds quite exciting, because I’ve never actually done a proper what you cluster as a gothic record. Obviously I was touching it with Paradise Lost, but that’s more goth metal, whereas this one with Shane is not going to be metal. And Absolute Power will keep going until whenever.

And on the production side, whom are you producing or recording at the moment?

I’ve just done a live thing for The Wonder Stuff, a live album recorded at their shows, and they’re out now doing their 40th anniversary tour, can you believe that? That’s record’s out and being sold at the gigs. There’s this band I work with called Solitary, oldschool thrash metal, but brought up to date and obviously with the modern-day production and stuff, it sounds really heavy and good. I’m working with them. And then the Shane stuff,  the gothic thing I was telling you about with Shane, that’s in the pipeline. I’m pretty busy at the moment with the live stuff, because I’m actually out on tour with The Wonder Stuff, we’re doing about three or four shows a week for a month. I’m back home now because we’re not doing any shows on a Monday or a Tuesday. And then Napalm Death are going out in November for the Eastern European tour. It’s always busy. (everybody laughs) 

Okay, my last question for this interview: what do you think about the use of AI in making music?

Well, yeah, what do I think? I’ve heard some stuff that’s really good, but I don’t know. It’s soulless, isn’t it really? I’ve tried it myself, I’ve done it on the app on the phone just to see what comes out, and it’s crazy what can be done. I do like the fact that you can’t upload that stuff on Spotify, Tidal and all the streaming platforms, because if they could do it, you’d just be flooded with stuff. I’m not happy about the fact that somebody can just go “la la la” into a phone, and a whole song comes out, and then they claim it’s their song. But what can we do about it, Roman? It’s here, it’s gonna stay, it’s not gonna go away. I take no notice of it really, I still like to think that if I come up with a song, it’s come from my head and not from some computer. But we can’t do anything about it, because it’s all here, a part of our everyday life, really. 

Absolute Power on the Internet:
https://www.facebook.com/AbsolutePowerUK/
https://absolutepower.bandcamp.com/

Special thanks to Luca Pessina (Anubi Press) for arranging this interview

Interview by Roman Patrashov
Photos by Gobinder Jhitta (courtesy of Anubu Press)
October 12, 2026
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