Flowers Of Evil | facebook | bandcamp |
By: Dan Salter
We stumbled upon Flowers of Evil supporting Lost In The Riots at one of Chaos Theory’s Facemelter nights and were so impressed by their dark, brooding and slightly twisted take on rock music we, eventually, caught up with them for an interview.
(((o))): I was surprised to find out when I was talking to you the other week that I think you said you’d been around for 10 years as a band. Where have you been hiding yourselves & how would you describe yourselves to the uninitiated?
Lee Haley: The current line up is about three years old, but we’ve all been playing together for over ten years now, in this and other projects. While we do attempt from time to time to engage with industry people, we find that our efforts are best rewarded when spent on the creative side of things. You’ve done very well to find us, in fact, and for that I thank the discerning promoters at Chaos Theory who discovered us last year.
David Burdis: As for how to describe ourselves, I’d say we’re mostly non-diatonic, and keen to explore unusual harmonic modes, chords and time-signatures. Saying that, you can’t beat smashing out a massive 4/4 riff.
Andrew Cleaver: Raw and powerful
Dave Dorward: Confused.
(((o))): We’re doing a big focus on the site this year on grassroots / independent / DIY / whatever you want to call it music. You guys have been around for quite a while, how have things changed over the time you’ve been doing it? What are the biggest challenges independent musicians face?
A: I guess the internet has been the biggest change in terms of communication and online communities and information being easily accessed which is a really good thing which we don’t take advantage enough of really….. I do miss the myspace days haha! whatever, (shotguns own face off) as for diy music, for me thats the only music… all the really great innovators did music because they loved it, they did it for themselves foremost and so on and so on and so on and so on
L: In Newcastle we achieved small time success by putting on our own gigs. Even after overheads like venue, sound-person and promo, there’s always enough money to pay all the bands and to cover expenses, providing of course you get a few people in. Any promoter who doesn’t shell out a bit for a well attended gig is probably either shafting people, or is being shafted. DIY is definitely the way forward!
(((o))): Can you tell us your top 5 UK venues to play? (no particular order & a few words on why for each would be good). What about your top 5 venues to watch gigs?
D: I’ve been to some good gigs at the Barbican, Chick Corea was exceptional, and Meshuggah at the Roundhouse too.
A: The Star and Shadow in Newcastle is my favourite venue.
L: Venues are often disappointing. It’d be good to do a well attended gig in one of the big London churches, like St Pauls, Spitalfields, or St Lukes, Old street. A Hawksmoor church would be great because there are so many references in literature to him being a Satanist. Our Name Of The Devil could work well there, though we would need a sacrificial victim.
(((o))): There’s a distinctly dark vibe to your music (emphasised by titles like Friday The 13th and Name Of The Devil, not to mention the name of the band), where does that come from?
D: From the realisation that, after the optimism of childhood, you have to face the reality that life is absolutely fucking nothing but a long, mostly boring, utterly pointless nightmare.
L: For me its not that dark. There’s a lot of humour in our songs, and black humour is an old English speciality. Not that this is about nationalism. If you can come to terms with the fact that you and everyone you know are gonna die, and then have a laugh about it, then you’ve not got much else to worry about really! I definitely don’t think of us as a heavy metal band, although its easy for people to think of us that way. The heaviness is necessary because people are subjected to a lot of noisy stuff and you need to be able to smash through that with big bold ideas. Nietzsche would have probably answered your question by saying something about how great things must at first wear terrifying masks in order to impress themselves onto the hearts of humanity.
DD: I think the darkness of it all is backdropped on a canvass of humour.
(((o))): Flowers of Evil (or Les Fleurs du mal) is an 1857 book of poetry by Baudelaire. Can we assume someone (or all of you) in the band have something of a literary bent? It’s also an early 70s album by Mountain, so I may have got this horribly wrong!
D: Ready Player One, Patrick Rothfuss, Vonnegut, Alan Moore, Murakami, Borges, Bukowski, Brautigan and Alasdair Gray are among my favourites. We’re not particularly highbrow, and can often be found drinking cans on street corners in the rain.
A: Vonnegut, Alan Moore, Roald Dahl, Black Elk, WH Davies, Jorge Luis Borges!!! I tried to read a lot of 20th century classics but whatever man……… Alan Moore
L: I have in the past been known to read to odd book, although these days I mainly listen to whatever audiobooks and radio plays I can get my hands on. Am currently enjoying Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’. Despite our shared interest in literature though, we are first and foremost a music group, and while compositions such as ‘Chicken Shop’ and ‘Name Of The Devil’ are highly conceptual, their power lies more in the construction and delivery of the riffs and beats than in the lyrical content or in any stylistic referencing.
Never heard the Mountain album. Boredom is a reoccurring theme in our music and so the association with Baudelaire’s Fleurs Du Mal works for us. It also hints at the duality of things, and the light and dark aspects of our music. For the most part though, our extra curricular activities are less scholarly. At the end of a hard weeks graft we enjoy nothing more than all us of getting shit-faced and watching Wrestlemania VIII feat. Hulk Hogan and Undertaker, or something of a similarly base nature, like endless hours of gta 5; resorting at almost anything in order to stave away the suicide-inducing boredom of everyday life.
DD: I consider myself the most highbrow member of the outfit. There is no evidence to support this claim.
(((o))): What else do you draw on as inspiration for your music?
D: Just life, the universe and everything.
A: David Burdis
L: Most of us enjoy most forms of music, provided it be of a decent quality. This includes jazz, world, classical, classic/contemporary pop/rock, avant-garde, hip hop, you name it. Each of our songs is different in terms of its influences. ‘How To Pass Through Ghosts’ for example, is a Latin themed song based on a montuna style riff, with lyrics about Pac-man, featuring an extendable salsa section with awesome guitar solo. ‘Ambitions As A Writer’ is loosely based on a Tupac song and features chords inspired by JS Bach and Hector Villa-Lobos. I like using various combinations of 3/4 and 6/8 rhythm, as heard in either flamenco or in African music, but sounding different when applied to a heavy rock ensemble. Dave writes with lots of different time signatures, especially odd ones. But also a lot of our stuff is very straight forward down-the-line, no messing about, and minimal.
DD: My inspiration comes from a more desperate place. Being secretively highly competitive , I find that my hardwired difficulty to accept being shit at anything forces me to stay up late furiously practicing odd musical phrases and time signatures, in order to not look like a tit the next time I’m faced with it during a rehearsal. In all honesty I actually don’t like music, musicians and definitely not the drums.
(((o))): Your Facebook bio says the band is originally from Newcastle but are now based in London. Did the whole band move en mass and why?
D:In phases, really. I moved down for a band that didn’t work out, then I think the lads felt they were missing out, and so followed over time.
A: I moved here to get rich…. and see my old mates. Not rich yet
L: Came hear to start a band with the lads.
DD: I moved away from them all first ( around 11 yrs ago )in a bid to get away from the idea that underpins my answer to the inspirations questions, however they loosely followed and I’m suffering once again.
(((o))): As a band, do you have a ‘plan’ or are you just making it up as you go along?
D:Just the same plan as always, which is to try and be mint, and if we do that, hopefully everything else will come together.
L: Having established a small but firm following, and with 4 London releases behind us now, we’re all set to work on our début album this year, for which there will be no shortage of great material. Fortunately we are not dependent on any label for this and so no compromises need be made with any aspect of the recording, which, rest assured, will be of the highest quality.
DD: The plan has always been the same, which is to be on a constant ramp of progress, even if the ramp is shallow in angle at times, it is nevertheless a ramp. My secondary plan is to make my way to Syria in a bid to finally escape this shenanigans.
L: ‘Name Of The Devil’ is now available on itunes, along with our previous 3 eps. For me its an attempt on our superstitious fears, and to command these evil spirits into existence just for the sake of having them all out in the open. Names are carefully sourced from ancient texts (a lot from Old Testament), and chanted, quietly at first, over a minimal 3/4 groove, which becomes hypnotic as the song gathers momentum. It is a conjuring of demons, a rallying call for lost souls, and a soundtrack for armageddon. I also believe that Plato, who is said not to have liked most kinds of music, would have loved it. ‘Friday The 13th’, available with it, continues the superstition theme by listing many bizarre curses and bad omens.
Our album will feature some great songs such as the awesome ‘Ballad Of Evil’ a haunting bittersweet rhapsody showing the Flower’s softer side! And ‘Flower Power’, one of our silliest songs yet, inspired by Mahmoud Ahmed of Ethiopia, featuring a James Brown style chant, and a rapping section, but with a big heavy diminished riff, lyrics from Castaneda, utter madness! I write some of the songs, but Burdis is a more much more prolific writer of music and even has an awesome current duo side project with Andrew called Black Shape, to accommodate to overflowing of ideas from our group.
