Somewhere in the late 90’s I got some 7” EPs from a much older friend who liked this young kid that was me, devouring just everything that sounded remotely heavy. Amongst those 7” EPs was one of Malediction, ‘Mould Of An Industrial Horizon’. So, since I didn’t had so many records at the time, I listened to it quite a lot, so the band holds a special place in my heart. Although the band never really got off the ground in terms of having a proper debut album out, it still had a certain influence on how I listen to extreme metal in general and Death Metal in particular today. I was therefore quite pleased, and surprised, when I found out the band was working on their return. Needless to say, I then do not miss the opportunity to ask the band about the motivations behind it, and some questions about the (nostalgic) past had been burning on my lips for some time…
Hi there Rich and welcome to The Whispering Darkness. Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions about the return of Malediction. The most pressing question, of course, is: what was the motivation behind giving Malediction a third life?
Thank you so much for the opportunity to do this interview, it is very much appreciated!
It needed another shot quite frankly. I was never particularly satisfied with the majority of material we put out back in that 1990-1993 period of time and wanted an opportunity to give Malediction another shot and do something that might meet my expectations.
As I’ve said in a later question, doing Malediction again for me was not about recapturing something, whether it be a memory or a feeling, it was to explore the idea of doing the band again in a new and superior way, not repeating the mistakes of the past.
Put bluntly, my aim was for us to put out a Malediction release that I can tolerate.
Despite having already made an attempt to return around the turn of the millennium (and recorded a 3-track CDR), it really seems to be coming together now. What is it that makes it seem to succeed on this attempt after all?
The time was just right. We’d been talking on and off about doing it again and kind of agreed we’d do it as a studio project because Shaun was living in the USA, but as soon as Shaun moved back to the UK, it “it’s on”. Everything was, or seemed to be at least, to allow it to happen again.
It was just going to be a studio project for a long time, we were just going to hire a drummer off YouTube or whatever, but I met Jon in 2019 and suddenly we were looking at doing Malediction as a full band thing.
Although the all-knowing Metal-Archives states that Malediction was resurrected already in 2015, you have remained pretty quiet as I did not learn about your return only a few weeks back. What happened in the years between 2015 and 2023?
I take a very close interest in that Metal-Archives page I can tell you! I try to make sure it’s as accurate as possible. I’m always being a pain in the arse messaging them about some inaccuracy on that page!
Between 2015 and until the end of the pandemic, not much happened. I was doing other bands, Malediction was on the “would like to do” list but I wasn’t really coming up with anything in terms of new songs and I don’t think Mark McGowan did either. We met up quite a few times, but it was very difficult and a real struggle to write anything new. I had loads of riffs and linked riffs, but just couldn’t seem to get anything into a finished form. It wasn’t until 2021 that I finished two new songs. We started rehearsing again in January 2022 and started the recording of the EP in August 2022.
I suffered from terrible writers block for many years, I still find songwriting to be a struggle to be honest with you, my standards are so high. I can’t hurry the process, I like to write and develop and reiterate and hone the songs until I’ve got what I feel is the best version of the song. “Black Narcissus” from the new EP was like that. I had a version that I shared with the band and they all seemed to really like it. I wasn’t happy and just went back, took the whole song apart and put if back together. The final version we ended up with was hugely superior.
Before we get further into the present situation of the band, I would like to look back a little. Now that we are over three decades on since the first Malediction recordings, you are probably grey and much wiser. How do you look back on those very early, formative years of the band?
They were great times, on a personal experience level. We had a lot of fun, we were probably if I’m being super honest, more about being a social unit than being a musical outfit for a lot of the time. Everything involved drinking heavily and constantly partying, the music came a very distant second it seemed to me. But I was totally complicit in that. We were young and more enthusiastic than talented. I hated the way it ended in 1996, we achieved the goal that we’d worked towards for six to seven years and the band just fizzled out. We didn’t split up, we just stopped.
As far as looking back on our output, I’m not much of a fan of a lot of it. I think it probably could have been and certainly should have been better than it was and we kept recording killer new stuff and then not releasing it which was an odd approach. I think the recordings from 1994 onwards were far superior to the earlier stuff. The 1992 Academy Studio stuff was a big improvement but marred significantly by not fantastic production and some of the limitations that recording there involved. It wasn’t a good fit for us.
When I look and, more importantly, listen back to the band’s first incarnation, roughly between 1990 and 1996, in that relatively short period I hear a band that actually changed some of its sound with each year. Apart from the recording quality, it comes across to me that Malediction never quite found its niche. There are clear influences of Grindcore throughout your music, but sometimes I also hear bits of doom (like on the ‘Weeping Tears’ promo tape) or a more Thrashy sound. How do you look back on that now?
I think progression is a very important characteristic for any band in any genre really. I think with us, we started out not being very good, more enthusiasm than talent type of thing, and that’s very apparent on the earlier recordings. I think the songwriting overall was good, it’s just our performances were less so because we didn’t understand what we were doing and how best to execute it. Obviously, the lack of experience of studio engineers in relation to the then new genre of death metal also fed into that.
We got better as time went on. I think the songwriting got a bit out of hand on stuff like the 1992 demo, riff after riff type thing leading a lack of focus in the songs, what people call “riff salad” these days. But it just felt like the way to go at the time for me. The songs now are much focused, we still have loads of riffs, but they interrelate much more and the songwriting is a lot more traditional. We’re still not doing verse, chorus, verse, bridge type things, but it feels a bit more traditional to me at least. That’s the aim anyway. The songs now start somewhere, go off somewhere else in the middle and then come back at the end.
The influences of the band have always been a very broad church, there’s death metal, there’s some thrash, some progressive, some grind, some doom, some crust punk, and there’s other stuff we like to throw into the mix too, touches of classical, ambient, and more.
Although I think the 7″ EP’s were fairly successful at the time and demo tapes were also widely traded, it was never given to Malediction to release a full-length album. What kept you guys from doing that?
We were booked in twice at Unisound with Dan Swanö in 1994/1995 but GWB Records who were going to out it out kept letting us down with the financing, so it never happened. That’s such a shame, I can only imagine what that album would have sounded like.
We did record a full length in 1996 called “The Millennium Cotillion” but again we were let down by the label that was going to put that out, so that was shelved.
There are plans to put the 1996 album out in the future, our condition for that though is that a “proper” debut album would have to come out first. I’m currently working on songs for the album, we’re looking at it including nine songs, a couple of re-recordings of old tracks with the rest being new.
Probably the most talked about release from your discography is the split tape you shared with Cradle Of Filth. Of course, it needs no further explanation that that band has come a long way. Dani Filth once commented that their demo period and the hard work they put into it was of great influence on their rise to stardom, including the tape they shared with you guys. However you look back on that tape, it is a much sought-after and almost impossible to get collector’s item. But I have always been so curious about your side of that story, how do you look back on sharing that tape?
I wasn’t really involved in it. I think it was done as a favour to Bill from Pulverizer ‘zine as he’d supported us a great deal. I think our tracks were just a few odds and ends we had lying about, there was nothing special about our tracks.
Personally I always loved that 1994 released one-track ‘Ruinous Opiate’ demo tape. It has that authentic British Doom/Death Metal sound, which to me means it has a certain crunch to the guitars as well as quite a heavy overall production. Even the vocals are somewhat reminiscent to that of Nick Holmes (Paradise Lost) in his prime. It seemed that Malediction was really about to make a different turn at the time, can you comment on this period of the band?
I think “Ruinous Opiate” was one of our strongest songs ever up until that point. I think some of the new songs are better, but it was a high watermark for us at that time. We still play the song in rehearsals and it’s a lot of fun to play. Mark McGowan knocked it out of the park when he wrote that song. I’m hoping for some new McGowan compositions of the same or greater quality!
The 1996 album continued in the same vein with lots of experimentation. The piano thing at the start of “Ruinous” came about because Rich Walker from SOLSTICE was in the studio when we recorded it. Carl Stipetic who was engineering was messing around, he’s a phenomenal musician, he can play all instruments to a very high standard. Anyway, he was playing this jazz piano stuff over the intro as a joke and we had a good laugh about it and Rich said “I dare you to put that on the recording”. So we did. I can remember crying with laughter over that in the studio. But now the song would feel incomplete without it.
Because I liked that 1994 track, I have been always curious how your last recordings from 1996 sounded, the on CDR released ‘The Millennium Cotillion’ demo. But for some reason these recordings never really surfaced and they were also omitted on the ‘Chronology of Distortion’-compilation from 2016. Why did you choose to keep those recordings into obscurity?
Yeah, that was a perennial problem with people who contacted me wanting to do a collection like the one that came out on Dark Blasphemies Records. They were only really interested in those first two EPs and I wasn’t really interested in either of them, I thought the stuff we did later, the more experimental stuff was way more interesting. So when Dave from DBR contacted me he wasn’t interested in what I wanted to do, which would have been a 2-3 disk collection of everything including all the outtakes (some of which are on the DBR CD as it turned out) plus the unreleased album. It was his choice what made it onto that collection, but as soon as he heard some of the alternative recordings he was all about them so we kind of ended up avoiding putting the entirety of those first two EPs on the CD.
Regarding the unreleased album, we’ve been talking to a decent label about that coming out, but the stipulation we made was that it could only come out after a proper debut album was put out by the band. So, I think the debut album will come out in 2024 so you might finally see “The Millennium Cotillion” coming out in 2025 perhaps.
I think that if you enjoyed “Ruinous Opiate”, you’d like the album. We talked about CELTIC FROST and “Into the Pandemonium” in particular a lot when doing the album, we wanted to push the experimentation as much as possible. There’s all sorts of stuff on there, a lot more doom metal and experimentation with other non-metal genres too.
Recently, Xtreem Music re-released your 1991 ‘Framework of Contortion’ demo tape on 10″ EP and a few years ago a compilation of all your work saw the light of day. How do you explain this renewed interest in the band?
Dave Rotten just contacted me and asked me if we would be interested in being part of that 10 Inches of Deathcult series. I said yes straight away, it was a complete honour to be part of that series given the other bands that have been released.
There was talk of doing a second 10” with Dave of the first two 7”s, but I’m not sure if that will happen now or not. The Thrash Records box set that should be coming out will include a reissue of our “System Fear” 7”.
I’m not sure where the new interest comes from, maybe that’s just the way of things. I always felt that we were ignored to a large degree when we were active in the early 1990s, especially here in the UK. I don’t think we fitted in with what the other UK bands were doing particularly.
Malediction always seemed to be a band that was off doing something different from what more mainstream death metal bands were doing. It’s still the same, 99% of DM bands seem to be doing the chasmic INCANTATION/AUTOPSY worship thing. I have literally zero interest in sounding like everyone else, I mean what’s the point? If everyone else is doing that, the last thing anyone needs is another band doing that.
The line-up now includes two musicians from the first hour, including yourself and also Mark McGowan who had been part of the band since 1992. At the position of bass and drums, however, we see two new faces, but they are not exactly at all new in the British metal scene. How did the choice come down to the two of them?
I met both Rik and Jon doing other projects in recent years. In 2018 I joined Carlo Regadas’ (DEVOID, CARCASS, BLACKSTAR) MONSTRANCE band on bass after there’d been a lineup shuffle in that band and at that time Rik Simpson joined the band on vocals. Rik is known mainly for his old band, the excellent AUSTERYMN. I spent some time with Rik in his studio near Stoke-on-Trent and found out we loved all the same bands and he was also a fan of what Malediction had done back in the day. I knew Rik was an excellent bassist as well as guitarist, vocalist, engineer and producer, so he became one of my go to contacts. When Mark Fox decided to leave in early 2023, Rik was the only person I wanted in the band to fill the bass spot.
I met Jon in 2019 I think when we were both in HELLBASTARD. Jon mentioned that he was a fan of Malediction and pretty much from first meeting him he said if we ever decided to do new Malediction stuff, he’d be very interested in drumming for us. I knew of Jon from BRUTAL INSANITY, SERMON OF HYPOCRISY and of course GOREROTTED. Jon is an absolute beast on the kit and I have to pinch myself to remind me that he’s in the band. The band sounds night and day better than it ever did because he’s behind the kit.
Before breathing life into Malediction for a third time, you don’t seem to have been active in bands. Is that correct? But you must have seen the light somewhere since you also temporarily joined Godthrymm and Hellbastard fairly recently. Did you do anything else musically between 1996 and 2015? And what do you take away from the years you spent with Godthrymm and Hellbastard?
I started doing music again in early 2016 after twenty years of inactivity. Something changed and I just decided I wanted to get back into it. The opportunity came up to join a crust punk band BASTARDISED with Carlo Regadas, Ben from EXTREME NOISE TERROR, Chaz who used to be in SOLSTICE and Nick Barker was going to play drums. It was one of those Facebook projects, loads of talk but no action, but eventually that led to Chaz asking me to join a new band with him and Hamish Glencross and Shaun Taylor-Steels that eventually became GODTHRYMM. Me and Chaz both played on and wrote parts of their debut EP before we were both kicked out of the band. It all ended rather acrimoniously for me I’m afraid, but it’s a learning experience. I learned a lot from being in that band. I also got to know Wouter from Cosmic Ket Creations from being in that band and got to know Dan Mullins a little as he worked on the recording of the EP.
I got offered the HELLBASTARD gig shortly after that. I also helped Rik’s old band AUSTERYMN a couple of times live on bass. Lockdown killed HELLBASTARD for me and I decided to leave in mid 2021. But the important thing was that I’d met Jon and knew he would be interested if we decided to do Malediction again.
It was like I was picking up all these little pieces that would later come into play for the relaunch of Malediction. Without meeting Jon and Dan and Rik and being in contact with Wouter, the new EP wouldn’t have even happened.
You guys are about to release a new EP, through the Dutch Cosmic Key Creations label, which previously raised the also-British Enchantment from oblivion and was responsible for Godthrymm’s first recordings as well, so possibly not an unknown partner to you. How did you come together like that and what can we expect from the new EP in general?
I just messaged Wouter on Facebook as we’d become acquaintances in 2017 or 2018 whenever the Godthrymm EP was being put together. I just messaged and said, “I played on this release you put out, I’ve got this new thing here if you want to hear it”, I appreciate how busy he and probably every other label guys are, so kept it minimal and low key. He replied and said sure, send your EPK (Electronic Press Kit – red.) to my email address, so I did.
After a few days Wouter got back to me via email. It was quite funny really because he wrote quite a long reply and the first half was all the reasons why he wouldn’t be doing the EP with us. But then the second half was all about how much he liked it and wanted to put it out. I think the fact that Malediction wasn’t a brand new band helped us out a bit too, as it won’t require that he launches an entirely new (and therefore unknown) band. He’s already expressed an interest in doing the album with us too, but I’m sure that depends entirely on how well the EP does. But it would be great to have the continuity of working with a label over multiple releases. I really hope the EP does well for him.
The EP is intended as a total relaunch of Malediction. We’ve assumed that most people won’t know the history of the band, what was released and even what songs were released. So the EP is effectively year zero for Malediction. As such, we’ve re-recorded two songs from the very first 1990 7” in new and improved versions, one of them with entirely new lyrics and title. We have also re-recorded “Sky Written Rapture” from the unreleased 1996 album. It sounded great in rehearsal and Jon’s drumming took it to a whole new place. The two brand new tracks are “Black Narcissus” and “The Omerta Masquerade”. “Black Narcissus” is probably the most melodic song we’ve ever done, but it’s still raging and full of blast beats, it’s an entirely new angle for the band. “Omerta” is much more straight forward death metal in the vein of MORBID ANGEL, IMMOLATION, VADER, that kind of thing. “Omerta” was the song that broke my years of writers block. I gave myself a week to write the song and the brief that it had to be MORBID ANGEL worship song and in a week I had the song. It was then further honed and developed as a demo recording. Once that was done, the block was gone and I was writing parts for multiple songs, so the experiment worked!
The new EP, which is called “The Soil Throne” by the way, is in my opinion the best thing we’ve ever done by a significant margin. Even the old songs, like the re-recording of “Infestation” are closer to what was originally intended rather than an improvement. It was like “this was the original structure of this song, let’s do that but with better playing and production”. We made sure not to make the recording sound too polished, it has a deliberately old-school grit and feel to it.
If we zoom in a bit more on the musical direction of Malediction anno 2023. How does it compare to the band’s many faces in the 90’s? Will there still be those raw Grindcore influences to be heard or will it go more in the doomy direction?
It’s more straight down the line death metal now. There’s the odd grind-inspired breakdown riff, I totally love those NAPALM DEATH breakdowns you find on “FETO” and the “Mentally Murdered” EP, so that will always be something we do from time to time. But the main thrust of the music now is a purely death metal band with a few other influences thrown in for good measure. We still love a bit of experimentation, so that will happen from time to time. We’re not doing the whole “chasmic” death metal thing that everyone else seems to be doing, so no doubt will be horribly unfashionable as usual! Everything is better played, better written, better recorded, better produced. The only reason to do Malediction again was to do it again, but better in every way. I have zero interest in nostalgia or recapturing my youth. This is an anti-nostalgia endeavour as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve just today finished a new song for the album called “Sonata in Flames” and it’s like you say, the many faces of Malediction! There’s probably the most melodic riffs we’ve ever done in it, but it’s also a punishing mid-paced freight train of a song with some very evil sounding harmony riffs. Another example of our schizophrenic song writing! I try to make songs different from other songs we do. There’s nothing more boring than a nine or ten track album where all the songs sound the same. I just try and write stuff that I find interesting.
And overall, how do you now view musicianship in general compared to those tumultuous early 90’s? How has getting older marked your musical taste and scope, if at all?
I’m a far, far better musician these days. I look back at some of the stuff I did back in the day and roll my eyes over it. I think with age comes experience and there’s a hell of a lot more quality control in this band than there was in the early 1990s. It just has to be that way, if only to mitigate my own anxiety over what we put out there!
I think the thing with getting older is that more of my influences are manifesting themselves in what I write. Malediction is a death metal band for sure, but I find myself writing in a much more thrashy style then I ever used to, and I also find some of the stuff I write sounding like my favourite non-death metal metal band, NEVERMORE. It’s all metal to me, it’s all music, it contains notes. I write to please myself. I always ask myself “if I heard this song and it was from another band, would I enjoy it?” It’s been a joy to have the musical smarts and improved chops to do some things that acknowledge some of my guitar influences as well, something I would never have been able to do back in the day. I think from that point of view and in my opinion that must be the ultimate manifestation of Malediction for that reason alone.
Okay, Rich, I would like to thank you most sincerely for your time. As I said, Malediction played a role in my own musical development as a teenager, for that, of course, more than thanks too! I’ll gladly leave the last words to you….
That’s wonderful to hear. I always said that if our music touched just one person, it would all be worthwhile. I’m just constantly amazed when I hear that someone likes our stuff.
Thank so much for the interview, some interesting questions rather than the usual generic ones!
“The Soil Throne” will be out on 12” and CD via COSMIC KEY CREATIONS in November 2023. MACHO RECORDS will be releasing the cassette version.
We can be contacted via our website www.malediction.co.uk and all the usual social media channels.
