Natural Evolution: An Interview with Evile

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Ol Drake (guitar) & Ben Carter (drums)

Still leading what many are calling the thrash revival after seven years Evile have now released their third full-length album, Five Serpent’s Teeth, and will spend roughly the next year touring behind it relentlessly. When bands get progressively more popular with each album release, writing and recording the next one often carries increased pressure, but the band found the process for their third album a far more liberating experience than they did for second offering Infected Nations.

Lead guitarist Ol Drake, one half of the brothers who founded the band, is now able to reflect and compare each of the writing and recording processes for the band’s three releases so far, and is far more pleased with how this one went, compared to the previous one. “All the material on the first one was already written before we were signed. So the second was our first album to write, and we learnt so much from that one that on this one we thought ‘right, let’s not do that this time, let’s do this and that,’ and we were just all comfortable in that space, so it’s just been a joy to do. Creating the songs feels fun again. Not that it wasn’t fun before, it just feels like we’ve got something back.”

Drummer Ben Carter shares a similar view of the recording process, “There’s a fun element back in the band which we didn’t have on the second album, for some reason. I don’t know why we were stressing about writing songs or not performing in the studio or what, I don’t know. But this time around it seemed so easy. Maybe it’s because we’re working with Russ [Russell, producer] for a second time and we didn’t have that figuring out period. Everything was so smooth this time round.”

Indeed Evile are still the right side of the familiarity line. Crossing it starts to introduce complacency and has an adverse effect on the creative process, but for now Evile are at their most creative. Disrupting that would be a mistake and it would appear that Russell is a big part of what the band have produced this time. “He’s a wizard,” Carter continued, “He knows in his own head, before he’s even heard the material, what’s he’s gonna do, and it feels so great to have someone working alongside you that can think like that. I think it’s the experience he brings from being around metal bands for so long. He’s got this ability to put people at ease and at the same time gee ‘em on to get the best out of people he works with. It’s such a good working relationship and it’s so good to have someone that is so honest and open about the material that you’re doing. We completely trust him.”

“ If we hadn’t gone with Russ it wouldn’t be the same album ”
- Ben Carter

The relationship between the band and Russell has clearly been a two-way street, and it sounds like the producer has grown into it over the course of the two albums as much as the band have, which is something Drake is only too keen to confirm. “If we hadn’t gone with Russ it wouldn’t be the same album, not just sound-wise but in approach. He’s like a fifth member of the band in a way. He can openly say ‘I think that’s crap, we need to do this’ and we’ll be like ‘Oh yeah!’ And we’ll realise things that we should have realised but we didn’t without Russ’s knowledge. Infact, on the last album he felt it wasn’t his place to say anything. Like if he didn’t like something he didn’t want to say ‘we’re not doing that’. But this time round we’re a lot more open because we know him.”

Similarly, the band’s own attitude to writing and recorded appears to have mellowed, albeit somewhat dictated by Ol’s brother, singer/guitarist Matt Drake. On the previous two albums the band shared the lyric writing, each bringing songs to the table, but that has changed for Five Serpent’s Teeth, as Carter explained, “We all have ideas but Matt’s taken over lyric writing duty and made it his own, he’s taken ownership of it, which is quite good with him being the singer and everything. He’s uncomfortable singing other people’s lyrics.” “I did lyrics for In Memorium,” added Ol, “but we’re not doing that live so I don’t think he feels that uncomfortable about it, but he does feel better to be singing his words, that’s just him.”

And with almost sole responsibility for lyric writing falling to Matt, the meanings of some of them remain a mystery. Some tracks, like Centurion and Cult are obvious, but others like Xaraya are not, and the prevailing feeling is that Matt would rather not disclose the subject he’s writing about. “If Matt was gonna answer this,” Carter explained, “he’d probably say something along the lines of ‘it’s the journalist’s job to ask questions, but it’s the artist’s job to deepen the mystery.’” Ol also tries to elaborate on Matt’s point of view, “He just doesn’t want to give information out because he hates how readily available it is on Wikipedia and all that crap. He likes to leave it open to interpretation instead of just going ‘it’s about that, move on.’”

Besides that, the process is a lot more fluid than before, “A lot more tolerance came into the songwriting process,” Carter expands, “A few years ago if we’d have written a riff that wasn’t any good we’d have just binned it and no thought about it, but this time it was just ‘no, that’s cool, we’ve got something there, let’s work on it make it fit,’ rather than being really dimissive about the stuff. And we’ve learnt to change down gears instead of keeping everything at 120mph all the time, but it’s nice to have that ability for something different.”

And according to Ol, at least part of the reason for that seems to have been a desire to mature as a band, “I think especially over the past few years that we’ve had, it’s really made me sit back and think ‘are we in this for good or are we just having a laugh’. We all just collectively thought that we’re in this for the long haul so we have to take it seriously or else where’re we gonna go? So we just wanted to knuckle down and make it something real instead of just a fad.”

Evile’s increasing maturity and quality of output is having the desired effect and is bringing them more fans and more touring opportunities, but they now find themselves stuck in a kind of limbo between being able to headline similar sized venues to the older thrash bands, and making the step up to the next level. Certainly in the UK Evile haven’t been the support act on a tour since Megadeth‘s Gigantour in 2008, although they say that’s not been the plan (Carter: “It’s not something we consciously choose, like ‘Oh no, we’re not going to open for any bands,’ we’re still green and we need as many gigs as we can get.”), but the places they do headline tend to be around the 500-1,000 capacity mark, and the fact that bands like Exodus and Destruction can’t get gigs in venues any bigger than that either is very confusing for them.

Ben continues to explain how the touring market in the UK appears to them, “It’s strange because we’re at this level now where people are pushing us to succeed and be a bigger band than what we see ourselves as,” including record label Earache’s publicity campaigns like the Serpent Venom Energy Drink given away to fans after their London album launch show in September, “and it’s hard to live up to those expectations of the level we’re at. There’s not a lot of bands who will play under us, and there’s not a lot of bands we can open for. It’s weird, we’re going through bands that are headlining at a rate of knots. We keep going out with old thrash bands, and that could be a tag that sticks for a long, long time. We want to branch out and do our thing, but we want to support our heroes and go out on tour with them. It’s sad, and it’s really paradoxical. I mean, every night when we were watching Overkill [on a US tour] I was blown away by how much energy they’ve still got and how tight they are. They’re so professional. And to get a crowd less than 500 people when they come to the UK is ridiculous. They should be selling out 2-3,000 seat arenas.”

But at least there’s no shortage of opportunities to play live on either side of the Atlantic, even if the nature of what’s available is a little confusing. Instead Ol and Ben are unanimous regarding the biggest threat to Evile’s existence: illegal downloading. “People don’t realise how much it affects you,” starts Ol, “because in terms of recording an album, the label pays for it, and you’re immediately in debt. People think that coming to your gigs and buying a shirt will pay for it, but it doesn’t, because the money you make at a gig pays for the petrol to get to the next gig. The only way to recoup the money that you’re in debt to the label is the album sales. So there’s no way around it, you are stealing, and putting us more in debt. People don’t realise what downloading does, they just think it’s free.

“I think service providers could do a lot more. If BT just said ‘look, if you try and do this we’re gonna switch off.’ But whatever way you look at it, it’s illegal. The only reason they think they can do it because there isn’t a security guard there. People say they download to check the album out. Well check the previews out, that’s the point of a preview, and buy the album if you like the previews. Instead of download it and excusing yourself.”

“ People don’t realise what downloading does, they just think it’s free ”
- Ol Drake

Ben meanwhile is an advocate of physical formats as a means of preservation of music. “We’re all fans of having a physical thing in our hand; sticking a CD in a machine, look at the booklet, read the lyrics while you’re listening to it, check out the artwork, and have the package. I’m the same with anything that takes away that physical aspect. I mean, you think of the Kindle. Condensing an entire library into an A4 computer screen. It doesn’t work for me. The human civilisation can be traced back for thousands of years with books and literature. What’re people gonna do in another two thousand years, are they gonna go and find all these hidden Kindles somewhere?”

But all bands are in the same position on this issue, more or less. What Evile seem to have on their side is a strong presence in the live arena, a growing fanbase and material which is increasing in quality. They’ve still got the hard fight financially on their hands, and markets to crack having never played in South America, Australia or Japan, but they’re growing in the traditional way, and that itself is a positive as well.

Photo(s): Andy Lye

Written by Andy Lye
More: 2011, Interviews, Evile