Interview: The Wildhearts
The great thing is, Wildhearts crowds sing really fucking loud. So the reasoning behind a lot of the songs that we're going to be playing, is that, I want you lot to get involved. That’s my drug.
The Wildhearts new album The Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts sees the band return triumphantly. delivering another glorious collection of hook filled, life affirming anthems that the band have always done so well. Before the albums release Gavin Brown caught up with Wildhearts mainman Ginger to talk about all things Wildhearts related including The Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts and the band’s new lineup as well as discussing various aspects of Ginger’s storied career with the band and in keeping with the new album’s title, Ginger’s love of horror films.
E&D: Your new album The Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts is out now. How does it feel to be back with this new record and do you feel reenergised?
Ginger: Oh, it feels good, I can tell you Gavin. It feels really good because I’ve been sitting on this album for fucking ages. So it feels double great that people can actually finally get to hear it. The brilliant thing for me is everyone’s picking out different songs from the album that seem to reach to them and I can’t wait until I start hearing everybody’s opinion on the album.
E&D: With being sat in the album for a while, was it just waiting for the right time to bring it out?
Ginger: Yeah, the difference between this one and some of the other ones is, I’m doing it with a label now. We’re working with Snakefarm, and it’s just brilliant. They just make decisions, and they’re saying, No, we’re going to keep the album until March. I get it. It’s a good way of exercising patience as well, which is one of the things that I’m really interested in at the moment. I cannot argue with anything that Snakefarm are coming up with. I just make the music and sit back and wait for the bangs to go off.
E&D: How is the new lineup of The Wildhearts working out?
Ginger: Well, Pontus was standing in because we had a drummer called Cheb Nettles who plays with Gong, and he did the demos, and then subsequently went on to do the album. But obviously he’s really busy, so we got Pontus to stand in for a gig that we had, but obviously Pontus is a single bass drum bass drum player, and we needed a double bass drum player, ultimately. So Charles Evans was recommended. We brought Charles in to do some B sides for the album. He is an astounding and wonderful fellow and way too tall! I thought, I’ll take that nucleus of a band on tour in Europe in December last year, just to make sure that it works before we go out in March. It’s a great band and I know change is weird for people. I understand, you know, I’m a music fan myself. I understand when bands change, it’s a little bit strange, but I like change, and not everybody’s very comfortable with it. So I understand, trust me. In March, when we play the shows, we release the album, all of your concerns will be erased if you have any, and that’s all I can say for now. But trust me, this Wildhearts thing, is much bigger than me. It’s much bigger than a band line up. It’s a community. It’s a family. It’s 30 years strong. This thing ain’t going anywhere! In 10 years time, you’re going to look back at any changes that are being made and just see them all as a colorful part of the thing. People complaining about change, I’ve been through the Endless Nameless chapter of the Wildhearts story. It’s nothing compared to the complaints that happened in 1997!
E&D: It must be good having Jon Poole back in the band on bass as he’s been in the band before and you’ve worked with him so much on solo material?
Ginger: Jon’s just a very special fella. Anybody who’s ever met him could attest to that. He just makes everything better and makes everything funny. The good thing about Jon is, you get used to laughing, which is a pretty addictive drug, especially as The Wildhearts has not always been fun, putting myself in the fire line. I don’t like to blame anyone, especially me, but when Jon’s around, it’s fun. I mean, we spent the whole recording of the album and the demos laughing, with him just being funny all the time. He’s a very brilliant, odd, hilarious character, and I just fucking love the bones off him!
E&D: With the title of the album, did that come easily as a big horror fan?
Ginger: Yeah, well, it was the idea of Andy from Snakefarm Records. I had a title that now, I’m glad that we changed. He wanted a title that was kind of in keeping with the first album, Earth Vs The Wildhearts because that was the first album that he ever worked on, that was his opening gambit, his gateway drug. And my God, what a strange introduction to this business that must have been. So when he turned around and said, I want to do something that’s kind of in line with that, can we think of a film motif? I started looking through science fiction films, and I wasn’t finding anything that was knocking me hat off. I’m a huge horror film fan, much bigger than science fiction, and I’m a huge Hammer film fan. So I went through all my old Hammer films, and one of my favourite Hammer Films was The Satanic Rites Of Dracula and I came back to him and said, how about this for a title and he loved it. It was as easy as that. There was no more thinking about it than that, and if there’s anyone out there that is offended by the mention of the word satan, then, what can I do? There’s nothing offensive about this. It’s interesting to me that people get so offended these days. I enjoy offending the right people, so I hope that this title does offend the right people!
E&D: Are you still as huge a horror fan today as you’ve even been?
Ginger: Huge! I’ve always loved horror since being a little kid, nothing’s changed. It’s still my favorite genre of movies. It’s my go to if I want to watch something. I don’t like 15 certificate horror, unless it’s really well made or psychological. I like good, full bodied 18 certificate, gory as fuck horror. That’s my particular bag.
E&D: What newer horror films have you seen recently that you loved?
Ginger: Recently, The Substance is great. Everyone should see The Substance, because that is just a fucking powerhouse of a movie. Before that, the movie I was telling everybody to go and watch was a film called When Evil Lurks. It was made by the same director who made a movie called Terrified, and what he does is these cliches and horror tropes that you see in all of these movies, just trying to pedal a movie to what is still a very consistent and very large market, which is nice to see. Rock n roll guitars, cars and horror films, they’re here to stay! But what he does is he takes all those cliches and he just gets rid of them all and invents brand new horror tropes that you haven’t seen before. It’s just things with your mind that you’re not used to. That’s all I can say, go and watch a movie called When Evil Lurks and prepare for the unexpected. He’s a fucking genius, and I think he should be given all of these shitty franchises of movies , give them to people like him. There’s some great directors in horror still working, and at some point, same as musicians, they all get their chance to shine. But yeah, that would be my tip for the top, When Evil Lurks.
E&D: You’ve also started a podcast, how is that going and is it something you’ve wanted to do for a while?
Ginger: No, it’s something that’s terrified me for a while! It’s something other people have told me to do for a while. I don’t listen to podcasts. So I was like, Well, okay, I’ll do it, but I’m not going to do it like a podcast, purely because I have no idea what’s going on with podcasts. But that’s how I’ve always approached music, that’s where I came in, just going, can I mix this and this and this. So the podcast has just started organic. It was just was an idea that went into an action, that went into a reaction. And now people can go on Patreon, Ask Ginger, and there’s a free download. There’s a free podcast there for people to watch. If they’re not sure that they want to listen to a Geordie waffling on for an hour, but there’s a free one there anyway. I enjoy doing them. I enjoy waffling on, as you probably noticed, I like people asking me questions that I can take somewhere. I don’t mind if people want to ask me about The Wildhearts or about music or anything, I’ve got a lot of different interests. I can take a question into a wonder about the woods and then come back, because I know I’ve got somewhere to come back to. I love it. It’s a mind workout.
E&D: Are you looking forward to your upcoming tour and will you be debuting a lot of new material?
Ginger: We’ll be debuting a lot of new material from throughout the years. Things, What happened with The Wildhearts last time was we ended up just playing the same set based on the first album. It just got so boring, just playing all those same songs over and over again. What I wanted to do is to spread around a bit. Find some of the songs on some of the albums that we’ve never played or rarely play. Obviously, we’re going to do the ones that people love. So, there’s a bunch of songs that we’d be lynched if we didn’t play, but we don’t have to stick to that first album anymore.
E&D: Is it a difficult task choosing a setlist as you’ve got so many songs?
Ginger: It’s impossible! There’s so many songs that people want to hear that we’d literally be playing for 24 hours, and we could play all the songs that people want to hear. We just go on instinct. Which songs are going to be most effective, most powerful. My main thing live is to engage the audience. That’s the only point of playing live as far as I’m concerned. It’s a give and take thing. I like songs that make people sing. We’ve got a lot of songs that make people sing. The great thing is Wildhearts crowds sing really fucking loud. So the reasoning behind a lot of the songs that we’re going to be playing, is that, I want you lot to get involved. That’s my drug.
E&D: What’s your current favourite song to play live?
Ginger: One of the new ones, there’s a song on the album called ‘Maintain Radio Silence’. We’re not going to start the set with it this time, but we are going to play it. We were starting the set in Europe, so I got to hear it every night, and it’s such a piledriver of a song. It’s just one of those relentless fucking things that we’ve always been fond of doing. I fucking absolutely love playing that one, just because I can get immersed in the power and when you’ve got a rhythm section like Charles and John, who are astounding, it really is like sonic fireworks on stage, it’s primal. Something just gets you in the chest and just keeps you there, and then lets you go a bit, and then gets you there again. I love it. These are my songs I’m talking about. I’m fucking bored of them by the time we record them and finish them. So to be that excited about playing stuff live, anyone who hasn’t seen us, it should be very effective, because I’m still fucking buzzing off it!
E&D: Have you had thoughts about new material at all?
Ginger: The next album is written. I’m always an album ahead, and I can see where this is going to go. I can see it’s very, very exciting where we’re going to take this. For anyone who’s been a part of this community, family, whatever you want to describe it as, for a long time. There’s plenty of good times to come, trust me, and I’m just always excited. I think the whole point of doing anything in life is to be excited, and I’m really, really excited about where this is going. The next album is a good one, it’s an interesting one.
E&D: That excitement has to be there then?
Ginger: People do music if they’re not excited, I don’t get it. It’s such a privilege to make music and connect with people. You know that language, to me, is sacred, and if you’re not excited about that, A, obviously you’re in the wrong job. Or B, you’re just doing it wrong. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be excited making music. You’ve probably just fallen into habits, again, tropes like we’re talking about with the horror films, you can fall into a way of doing it. Well, it’s okay, you know, it’ll do, it’s better than working in a factory or whatever. But no, it’s not enough. You’re not putting enough in. You should be excited. It should be exciting. I’ve got no reason for doing anything in my life if it’s not exciting. All I’ve ever wanted in my life is to be excited. Ever since I was a kid, dear universe, can I have an exciting life? And you know, I neglected to say it, but not the bad bits. So the universe just went, Okay, exciting. There you go. And it gave me a lot of stuff that I didn’t ask for, but fuck has it been exciting. I like things going right. I like things going wrong. I like challenges. I like it all. Bring it on. I love anything that makes me scared. The podcast! Doing podcasts fucking terrified me. Acoustic shows, we only started doing them because I’d see people going up with them and a guitar and nothing else, and thinking, that’s the most terrifying thing in the whole world. I’m gonna do it. And before that, there was a spoken word tour that we did. I saw people like Duff McKagan and Scott Ian going out doing spoken word and I’m like, that’s too scary for me. I’m gonna do it. Usually that’s the only reason for me to do anything, is that it terrifies the fuck out of me.
E&D: What still scares you that you would love to do?
Ginger: Well, there’s a, there’s a few things that challenge me. I’m sure they’re going to get scary. At the moment, nothing is really terrifying, because I’m in that mode now, and I’ve been for about a year and a half, where I’m just embracing everything. I’ve done a lot of research on stoicism, and I find that stoicism prepares you for anything based on the fact that there’s no good or bad. It’s just you’re able to test the skills that you’re developing through using stoicism. So there’s nothing that scares me, because I’m just in that mode where I want to do anything. I can’t think of anything in the world that that would scare me. Probably going to America!
E&D: That’s terrifying at the minute!
Ginger: Yeah, more than anything, isn’t it? It’s looking ridiculous. But again, the future doesn’t scare me anymore. Politics and war used to terrify me. The Gaza thing when it kicked off, nearly finished me off. It drove me a bit insane. Why can’t people see the corruption and the filth? Well, people can’t. So what scared me then was to learn how to divorce myself from politics, divorce myself from the future and divorce myself from the past, all the depression that lives in the past and the anxiety that lives in the future. Scariest thing to me up until recently was being by myself. I had a real phobia of being by myself. The scariest thing in the world for me was, what do you do if you if there’s nothing? So I moved into the middle of nowhere. I’m near the Yorkshire Moors, and I figured, well, shit or get off the toilet, Ginger. I went to what I consider to be the most scary situation in the world, and I spent a year and a half by myself to learn why am I scared of this? And the more I realise the concept of fear and why we have fear, the less that things are scaring me now, because there’s nothing to be scared of. There’s no need for fear in your life. You don’t need to have fear. That was the last thing that I kind of worked on was, What is fear? Let’s go and explore fear Itself. It’s been really fucking interesting.
E&D: Going back to the band. You’ve got a few festival dates in summer as well, are you looking forward to those?
Ginger: Man, I’m looking forward to everything. If we’re talking about festivals where we can have extra pyro or extra this or that, I just want more of everything. A festival is just more, isn’t it? It’s just bigger, more people, more more. All I’m interested in is more, more! Give me more on top of that. If we’re gonna have pyro, can we have 10 times more pyro than we’re allowed? Again, I want life to be exciting, so the festivals are an excuse to push it just a little bit further, and I’m always going to be pushing things as far as I can possibly push them.
E&D: What have been some of the festivals that you’ve loved playing over the years and what festivals would you still love to play?
Ginger: I want to play them all! I’ve never played Glastonbury. I’d like to do that. I know it’s not a festival, but I never played Red Rocks. I nearly did, when I was playing with Courtney Love and she supported Lana Del Rey at Red Rocks, and killed me not doing that gig, but we were on tour doing the Songs and Words spoken word thing. My favourite festival that I’ve played, the Japanese festivals take some beating. When you’re playing Fuji Rocks, and you can see Mount Fuji in the background, and it’s that moment in festivals where the sun goes down! I’ve done a few festivals with Michael Monroe, where we’ve been playing, and it’s been sunny when you go on and dark when you come off, and that point where the sun goes down, that’s a beautiful moment.
Of all my festival memories, I have to say my favourite one was in Japan at Summer Sonic in Osaka. It was boiling. Raging Speedhorn were there, and they’d all be out on the lash the night before. They all piled on stage, blistering heat, and they’re all puking up. It was messy. Gwen Stefani followed them, and she was on stage doing push ups and I’m just like, Okay! I don’t know why we were above Gwen Stefani but we went on stage, and we’re like, Well, what’s going to make this special? I had a white BC Rich I remember, and I was going to smash it up. And I thought, No, I’m going to throw it in the audience, because that always looks better when you throw a whole guitar in the audience, complete with the strap and the radio pack, fuck it. I threw this guitar in the audience, and then I turned around to do whatever, and I remembered that the last time I threw a guitar in the audience. Was at Donington in 94 and it was a huge fight, people got hurt. The guitar got torn to pieces. I’m like, Oh, fuck. What have I done? Then I turned round, and in Japan, they don’t do that. They’re not all pissed up, and they’re not all up for a fight. They’re calm. I turned round, and what I saw was not what I was expecting. There were two people that had a hold of the guitar neck. There’s two hands in the guitar neck, and they were going rock, paper, scissors for the guitar. That’s still one of my favourite sights, In England, we fight on the last one standing, covered in blood l, but the one that wins in Japan, is rock, paper, scissors. I love that!
E&D: Will you go back to Japan?
Ginger: Absolutely again, it’s in the pipeline, I’ve got to do it properly this time, instead of just spewing all of the information out, and then some of it doesn’t happen. But, yeah, what is going to happen is we’re going to be going back to Japan. I fucking miss Japan so much. When I was a little kid, I used to eat with chopsticks. I used to always think I was Japanese. I remember the guy that invented the game Street Fighter, he paid for me to go over to Japan and stay with him because he thought we were on the same team when we were both samurai warriors. I’ve always felt a real kinship with Japan. I love so much about Japanese culture and the fans/friends that I’ve got over there are so beautiful and so kind. I miss the place a lot, so I’m really looking forward to going back there.
E&D: There’s a page on Twitter that puts up all the old issues of Kerrang! and The Wildhearts feature so much from 1992-1997. Is it strange looking back at that time and how frequent everything the band did was published in magazines?
Ginger: It’s funny, like a lot of people will say, about the first half of the nineties, if you remember it, you weren’t there. I don’t remember most of this. I remember we were in magazines. It would be one of those times where if you walked in WH Smiths, people would point at you because your face was on a magazine that month or that week. But I was pissed out my head the whole time. I was high as a kite the whole time, and I’m talking for the whole decade of the 90s, I was fucked up. So yeah, there was loads of things that came and went, and being in the magazines was like it. It never really registered to me how well we were doing. It just seemed to be, we were in a band, no one cared. We were in a band, we put a record out. People cared. We were in a band. Everyone seemed to care. But it just seemed like it went with the turf. Everything was getting more and more extreme. So there was more attention, but then there was more drugs, and exponentially, everything went bigger. Looking back now, I just think it’s amazing, you know, because Kerrang! went through a lot of changes in that time. There was a period where they had an editor who wouldn’t put us in the magazine because we were trouble.
E&D: Was that before or after smashing the Kerrrang! office up?
Ginger: That was before, they couldn’t keep us out after we did that! What got us more publicity than anything was smashing the offices up and making a porn film. You couldn’t do either of them now, but we smashed the offices up and got tons of press from that. And the porn film was for a video for a song called ‘If Life Is Like A Love Bank’. All of the dailies, all the red tops, everyone wanted to feature us. It was hilarious, these two things that would now get you canceled twice, were the things that got us attention! Back then, you could offend people. It was good to offend people, and if they got offended, you could turn the fuck off. And now it’s, they of cancel you because you’ve hurt my feelings.
E&D: You mentioned Courtney Love and Michael Monroe there as people you have worked with that you loved but who else have you loved working with?
Ginger: I love working with everyone! Obviously, one of the biggest thrills was working with Jason & The Scorchers. They were the band that started it all for me. I was wowing in a shit job in South Shields and saw them mixing punk and country on the Old Grey Whistle Test and t he next day I left my job, jumped on a clipper bus and went to London! They were that fire up the arse I needed! So getting a chance to write an album with them, they wanted me involved with the whole thing. I wasn’t there to write a song, I was there to co-write the whole album! I was staying with Warner Hodges! I was working with Dan Baird and Jason Ringenberg and Warner Hodges in the same room! For a fanboy like me, you could have put me in a room with The Beatles and it would have meant less! That was possibly the biggest thrill I’ll ever get. I can’t see how things are going to get better than that. It’ll only get as good as that. Then the album came out and it got tons of great reviews, so that’s was extra heartening to know in some way that I’d helped this band to get more favourable recognition. Jason & The Scorchers was my favourite but I’ll work with anyone. I’ve worked with an awful lot of incredible musicians over the years, and fortunately, there weren’t many experiences that weren’t amazing. I’ve been very lucky in that respect.
Photo by Andy Ford
