Our Stupidly Class Ideas

Yo brain slugs!

Since we've got some time off in between tours, I thought i'd give you creeps the low down on the inspirations behind the songs from our new album, Tales...



Slam Anthem

This one is kind of typical of how we come up with subject matter for our tunes. I think we were on the Overkill tour when we first talked about this idea. 

Philly was reading a book of short stories by a guy called Graham Greene and one of the stories ,the destructors was about a bunch of kids with hammers who destroy an old guy's house for fun. Cool. We thought it was a wicked idea, and lent itself to metal pretty easily. Sort of trying to write a more out-and-out, hard rock song in a thrash/speed trapping I guess. The title comes courtesy of Phil Lynott, who was gona use this or Fatalistic Attitude as the name of his post-Lizzy solo band, who he eventually called Grand Slam. Cheers Philo!




New Eliminators of Atlantis B.C.

One of the latter songs to be written for Tales. It kinda came together over the course of 2 days before a full weekend of jamming at our H.Q in Newry. The influence for this one comes from two very 'Joe' subjects: the B.O.C and Lucio Fulci's later, more nonsense-orientated films.
There are actually a a couple of Blue Oyster Cult references on Tales, but this song is specifically a kind of lyrical homage to The Golden Age Of Leather off their 1978 album "Spectres". 

We liked the idea of writing a epic si-fi story but in a kind of cheap European way. Again title is a kind of our take on a crap movie. This time the fighting centurions AKA:
2072 Fighting Centurions, Warriors of the Year 2072, Rome 2072, Rome 2033-Fighting Centurions, Rome 2033, Roma Ano 2072 D.C.-Los Gladiadores



Three Witches

This was a really great full band writing effort. Everybody had a riff for this one. Philly's vocals are kind of stand out here. Very Bobby Blitz indeed! The concept for this had been about for ages by the time we wrote this song. It started out as "The Third Age of Witches" a few years ago, and then turned into more of a Susperia themed song, eventually morphing into a great E.C style tale about the legendary Shakespearean 3 sisters. One of my personal faves to play live, Paul's rolls at the end are ace!



Last Ninjas Unite

Me and Paul demo'd this one in early 'o9. It was one of the songs (along with polterghost and skeletron) first demoed for the album. Speed was really the main ingredient here, fast single pedal drumming really gives the song an ultra-fast feel.
The Lyrics for Ninjas are really Domo's baby. He just turned up one day with the complete lyrics. Such a great idea for a song, being massive fans of cheep kung-fu (nearly) everyone jumped behind it. It's kind of hard to hear in the mix, but Scott put some wicked karate chop F/X at the start of each verse. Whoa!



Escape From Scarecrow Mountain

Oddly enough this was a song that everybody was kind of worried about going in to record the album. It had been about since the time Citizen Brain was recorded for earache and kind of went thru several arrangements over the year and never felt finished going into the studio. 

The plan was to have bass and drums in the break before the chorus,but me and paul never got round to writing anything. Paul did some fills over the breaks and, while recording my bass tracks I kind of realised it would sound way cooler just to have the kit on its own, with out what ever shitty scale I was trying (and bottling) to do on top of it. 

Credit really has to go to Philly here. The lyrics totally saved this one, and his ad-libs on the drum breaks are really cool. He obviously had all the lyrics worked out in his head and knew the song would be good, the whole while we were saying to him "What are we gonna do? This song sucks!"


Mussolini Mosh

Every album we try and write something a bit more rant-ish. Not because we feel we have to, but just because there's loads of shite stuff to give off about. 

I think Luke (who wrote the song) was showing us the B.N.P members'  list around this time, and we were just checking out the spread of nazis in our local area. 

This is the kind of song I hope becomes dated, so in 20 years people will be asking "Who the hell are the BNP?"



More next week. 

Joe