Blackmail seemed liked an intriging band. We did a review of their "Female Impersonator" last issue. While the review wasn't that positive the band still took it very well. They seemed like a fairly interesting band, so we decided to find out more about them.
Tell us a little about the history of the band?
Blackmail history starts in 1985, when we met at a summer camp where we spent a couple of weeks every summer. In 1988 the camp leaders had planned some musical activities, and by then Jens had taken bass lessons for a few years, and Robert had played the guitar for a couple of years too. Danne had no previous musical experience, except playing with keyboards, but he got a few elementary drum lessons from a camp leader who knew some basics. After a few rehearsals we made our first public appearance on stage at the ending party of the camp, on July 21, 1988. By this time Danne was still 10 for a couple of months, Robert was 11 for the last week and Jens had just turned into a teenager a few weeks ago. We made another appearance at next year's ending party, but after that we moved in different musical directions for a while, until we formed a band with some other friends in 1990. We were quite successful, partly because of our youth, and got quite a lot of publicity, but in 1992 Robert felt that the band would stop developing if we continued with the other two, so we left that band, went back to our original setting and called the band BLACKMAIL. By getting to the finals of a big rock band contest and winning a smaller one, we won studio time to make the four tracks on our first CD "Schizophrenic". We got very good reviews, not only in Sweden, but also from USA, Japan, Germany and England. But no record company wanted to sign us, so we had to make another CD on our own label. "Female Impersonator" have been an even bigger success among critics, and has been reviewed in more countries, like Canada, Australia and Italy. The world wide recognition by Internet zines like Tracks of Creation, Half Creeper, Chemical Peel, Improvijazzation Nation and Ampli-Flier is also very important for us now.
What other bands/musicians influence you?
We have been inspired by many artists from many different styles through the years - blues, classic rock, pop, punk, heavy metal, rap, experimental/alternative music and even more. We have influences from Elvis in the fifties, through Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa in the sixties, Alice Cooper, Kiss and Misfits in the seventies, AC/DC and Guns'n'Roses in the eighties to lots of modern music in the nineties. We just can't name them all. A few examples are Kings X and Freak Kitchen. Freak Kitchen's guitarist and singer IA Eklundh is a friend of ours, and he helped us produce three of the four tracks on our first CD. It's impossible to single out any particular musician as our primary inspiration. Robert would say Jimi Hendrix or Frank Zappa. Danne would say Glenn Danzig or Denis Leary, and Jens would say Alice Cooper or Gene Simmons. But we could never agree on one single name for us all. We sometimes tend to differ a bit in musical taste, and that's one of the reasons why we find it so hard to put a label on our music.
What are some inspirations for song Lyrics?
Many of our songs have lyrics inspired from Monty Python sketches. Female Impersonator is one example. Say No More (we haven't recorded that one yet) is another. We don't want our lyrics to be too serious. There are enough preachers and politicians already, and we don't want to tell people how to live their lives. But humour is deadly important to us. We try to put some humour in most of our songs, and we often try to make a short story of some absurd reality. The title track of our first CD, "Schizophrenic", is about a former psychiatric patient, who used to have split personalities. Compared to others, that sometimes have FOUR, this guy was moderately disturbed, and could quite easily be cured. Now he's mad at his shrink, because he misses his other self and feels handicapped without it. We think you would like that one, Neil. If you want to we can send the CD over. "Female Impersonator" is an equally absurd story about a man who falls in love with a female impersonator and ends up becoming one himself to solve the tricky situation. Not quite an Aria position, but not far from it either. But just like we try to keep our music varied, our lyrics can also be reflections of our own experiences, as is the case with one of our latest songs "Acrobatic Alcoholic", describing how Robert fell from a tree in Denmark after having a few drinks too much. However, music has always been more important to us than lyrics.
What has the crowd response been like at live shows?
Usually they go wild, just like we do on stage. But there have been some gigs at places we shouldn't have played. Five years ago we played with our former band at a restaurant in a neighbour town, where the audience (except for one Nirvana fan) just wanted to hear country music. It was a nightmare. Our latest gig was at the 20:th anniversary of Jens' Ju-Jutsu club. The sound level seemed to scare people at the beginning, and at first they just applauded politely after each number. We had to work real hard, but after a while everybody jumped, banged their heads and went crazy. They just wouldn't let us stop the show.
What are future touring plans?
We have just started the "Getting-a-recording-contract" project, and next month we'll start the "Summer-festival-booking" project. We hope that all the fantastic reviews we have received will help us get a summer full of festival gigs. At other times of the year it is hard to get gigs with our type of music, which isn't very big in Sweden. But we are working on it.
Are there any plans for a new album yet?
If our "Getting-a-recording-contract" project is successful, we hope to release a full length album next year. If we have to make it on our own for the third time, we can't afford all that studio time. We have talked about recording three or four tracks on the digital portable recorder that we recently bought and add the material from our first two EPs, starting our album career with a "Best of Blackmail" album. But it is hard to do everything by yourself. You need money, equipment, expert knowledge in lots of areas beside music, contacts, time, routines etc., to an extent that we really don't have. So we'll do our very best to get a contract.
Any expected lineup changes?
For a couple of years we have talked about getting a singer who can concentrate on the vocals, but it isn't easy. We have practically grown up together for the last eleven years, so we are really a tight unit. The new member would not only have to be a damned good singer, but also very adaptive while still keeping his own identity. We'll probably continue as a trio for quite a while.
Your response from magazines, mainly small zines, has been quite amazing from what I hear. What were your initial thoughts when our review didn't come back as positive as you were used to?
Well, first of all, although most of the reviews on our previous CD were from small zines, we also got good words from Sweden's BIGGEST evening paper, and some fairly big daily newspapers on both national and regional levels, as well as from established music magazines. "Female Impersonator" has until now mostly been reviewed by quite important media. The small zines' reviews will probably start to drop in soon, they have long intervals between the issues - we have only received three small paper zine reviews yet. I suppose you don't consider Internet zines like "Tracks of Creation", with their huge reader potential, to be small? OK, back to your question. Of course we were a little disappointed that it was reviewed by someone who didn't like our kind of music. Although we've got some VERY good reviews from critics that normally listen to styles that are far from ours, our best reviews have been written by people who love the kind of music we play. But, under the circumstances, we were glad that Kevin still found things he liked in it, and we really appreciated that he tried to give an honest and fair review after all. We make a point of that in the News page in BLACKMAIL HOME CAVE, our www home page.
Do you sometimes wonder if many people give smaller bands a better review just because of the nature of the band?
Well, let us put it this way... We do hope that, when writing a review, the reviewer takes the economic situation of a smaller band under consideration, before he starts comparing the quality of the production to giants such as Metallica or Guns nī Roses etc. Naturally, bands like ourselves don't have the possibility to use the finest studios and studio technicians in the world, and of course we can't afford making retakes every time we are not 100% satisfied with a recording. But of course a reviewer shouldn't glorify bands just because they are small. There has to be a quality to point out that really exists. If a singer sings out of tune or the music lacks musicality the reviewer shouldn't lie about that, or make it a virtue. Too many bands, that are mediocre or even bad, have been hyped by media, labelling their incompetence "charm" or "creativity". On the other hand, we do believe that many big bands often get better reviews than they deserve, because they are big. Just as well as they sometimes get worse if the reviewer had too high expectations, expected the new record to be like the last, or expected the artist to have developed more... In fact, we have always thought that a review often tells more about the reviewer than the object for examination. If you read our best reviews on "Female Impersonator" - from Paul Autry of The Half Creeper and Joakim Utriainen of Arbetet, one of the large daily newspapers in Sweden - and compare them to the worst - from some anonymous critic in the new Danish zine Join Kao - it is hard to believe that they write about the same CD!
You seem to pass off the very negative review you got from Join Kao. Do you feel that despite the not-so-good reviewing style, that they had some valid points to make?
Hm, this interview tends to get more focused on reviews than on music. But OK, we probably have ourselves to blame, since we've made such a big deal of all the terrific reviews we've got. Or are you hinting that we don't listen enough to what those who criticise us try to say? When we get criticised, we always try to learn something from it, even if we make our own decisions in the end. Sometimes people can point out something that we have missed or make suggestions that we hadn't thought of, and we can use their reactions to develop and become better. Other times their values differ so much from ours that we can't use the criticism, even though we're grateful that they shared their opinions. It is OUR music, and we can't do something we don't like, just to please someone else. But for the criticism to be useful, it must have some specific substance, like "the bass is too muddy" or "the voice is too weak". When someone just uses our music as a vomiting bag, getting rid of all the shit he's got inside by putting words like "shit" and "ass" in almost every sentence, we find it hard to see valid points. The only point we can make of Join Kao is that you can save some money by a more thorough investigation of the zines you send your record to. But that takes a lot of time. If we had checked out every zine like that, it would have taken months before we could send the promotion material. Just to find the addresses was a hell of a job.
I have to wonder about the remnants of glam that are still in your music. Many of the small bands I've heard lately have this old, distinctly 80's, element. How do you feel it still fits with the music of today?
We're not quite sure what you mean by "remnants of glam". Maybe we have misunderstood it all, but to us glam is very much associated with Gary Glitter, T Rex, Sweet etc., bands we have hardly heard, except when our parents sometimes dust off their old LPs. If we have elements from them, it is purely unintentional, and we find it very hard to comprehend. But if you mean that singing a melody instead of just growling or talking is "glam", then we are glad to hear that more new bands emphasise harmonies. Maybe we can start a new trend? The trends in the 90-ies has, to a large extent, focused on removing humanity from music. It has been more and more computerised with one or two musicians programming and running all the machines. Bands that still use human instruments often try to sound as if they were primitive animals, who only care about rhythm and aggression. Many musicians today try to hypnotise the audience through repeated monotony, instead of musical brilliance. They make us tired alright, but we don't go into trance. We prefer to go somewhere else. We read an interesting article in last issue of "Tracks of Creation", where Jason Sorens made a distinction between "alternative" genres that exclude melody and musicianship, "progressive" genres that, in our view, sometimes exclude rhythm and intensity, and "crossover" genres that incorporates all elements. To us, exclusion means reduction, making music narrow, small and poor. We want our music to be rich and varied, without excluding neither musical competence, melody, rhythm or intensity. We want to expand the experiences of ourselves and the audience - not to reduce them. We guess you could say that we share your vision of true freedom of expression, with unrestricted imagination and creation. If our harmonies don't harmonise with the restricted music of today, they will probably fit better with the music of tomorrow. We are still young, so we can hang around for a while, while people learn to love the music we love!
Do you feel you are alienating a potential audience because of the distinctly glam style elements? In particular, sing-along choruses?
We probably do. But if your goal is to please everyone, you'll probably end up doing nothing, or something nobody wants to listen to. One problem to reach the audience that's alienated by musical competence and melodies, is that many of them have already alienated themselves so much that you must be emotionally disturbed, or pretend to be, to attract them. We are pretty harmonic and balanced, so we don't fit into that image. The big Norwegian metal magazine SCREAM recently wrote that we emerge as a happy band, and they have a point there. We want to enjoy life and get natural kicks. Playing music - both in studio and on stage, in fact even on rehearsals - does make us happy. If we can share our musical kicks with others, it's great. If some people don't want to share, we won't force our values on them. They can do what they think is good for them.
How positively do you feel the reviews in other continents have helped you? Considering that you aren't likely to voyage from yours anytime soon to do a concert.
Don't be too sure of that. We might tour Canada sooner than you think. It depends on when we get our recording contract, and when the critical mass gets enough fed up with what have been popular for too long now. Seriously, you're probably right about the time for our world tour. But good reviews from USA, Canada, Australia and Japan actually means a LOT, even though we don't play there right now. First of all, they give us strength and energy to go on, when the wind blows the wrong way. The biggest help from the international reviews is still to come though. We believe that they, together with BLACKMAIL HOME CAVE - our new Internet Homepage, will make A&R managers at record companies curious enough to really listen to our CD, instead of just giving it ten seconds, saying "too long intro", and throw it away. They will also help us getting gigs at summer festivals, we hope. Without the reviews, it would be almost impossible, except on the smallest festivals, but now we have good faith.
How negatively has the issue with the name dispute affected the band?
It has cost us money. Consulting lawyers isn't cheap. We also had to pay a lot of money to get the matter continually reported to us by the Patent authorities. We would have preferred to put that money into record production instead. It has also cost us time. First, we had to spend lots of time writing letters and making phone calls, but most important is that it delayed our record production, not only economically. We couldn't invest all that money and labour in a CD release until we were reassured that we could keep our name. Otherwise the investment would have been all in vain. Both our CDs are part of a long term plan to create a position where we will finally SELL records. Most of our production until now have been used for promotion.
Is it almost over with now, or does the other group still try to use the name, or otherwise be annoying?
We haven't heard anything from them this year, but our lawyer advised us to demand damage for future guardian measures too, since they have purposely infringed our rights many times before. Right now we look straight ahead, and work hard to make it in the future, but when we get more time - when the promotion work for "Female Impersonator" slows down - we will sue them if they don't pay voluntarily for the expenses they forced on us. If we have to make a third CD on our own, we really need the money.
If you ever look around in the metal newsgroups you'll probably see the posting of a metal list from Zev Toledano. This list is a great place to look for resources on the net. We thought it'd be interesting to find out a little more about the list and the guy who maintains it.
When did the Metal List get started?
About 6 months ago (give or take 3 months ;-)).
Why did you decide to do the Metal List?
I have always been looking for good sources of metal info. I live in Israel where the metal scene is almost non-existant and I have always been out of touch and behind on metal news. My only source for a long time was MTV's Headbanger's Ball and we all know how comprehensive that is.
When I finally got on the 'net I immediately set out to find the best metal lists so that I can chat with friends and try to catch up on things other people took for granted. To my suprise, I found that although mailing lists and e-zines (IMO) are the best and cheapest sources, most of them are very hard to find. The few collections and lists that I found were very incomprehensive and scattered all over the place. Some addresses I only learned through other subscribers in other lists. I decided one day to try to compile a list of all these addresses I was finding. I figured I would try to make the headbanger's life easier by collecting everything in one place. My only problem now is to make my list easy to find!! ;)
About how long did it take to put together initially? How much work is it to keep it updated?
About 95% of it is stuff I initially found when I first put it together (some sections were added later). I surfed the 'net for about 3 days putting everything together and then posted the list wherever I could, hoping that I would be able to fill in lots more just through the feedback I would get. I made a couple more general searches since then but most of the time I just keep my eyes open for new stuff without actually looking for anything. Lately it's just maintenance.
I always enjoyed organizing and categorizing things so I actually enjoy doing this (I guess that would probably classify me as a nerd ;)).
What type of response do you get from people? -Do you get any response from anybody on your list?
This is the important part. I'm kinda disappointed with the feedback and as I mentioned in my list, this is very crucial. I got a few responses but no way as close to the amount I expected. Either people don't know much, or they're too lazy to e-mail me, or I was more comprehensive than I thought! :)
I wish people would put all that flaming energy into something more constructive...
Do you see any other forms of indices and resources that may eventually replace the need for your list in the form it is now? -Do you [want to] contribute to these other resources?
As I mentioned before, there ARE other compilations - one or two even official (whatever that means on the 'net) - but they obviously aren't working. There is a collection of all mailing lists, a collection of all musical mailing lists and a collection of all e-zines. Ironically though, I found most of my stuff on Web pages and pathetically little on these official Internet resources.
This is because these lists rely on the list and e-zine owners to register themselves whereas Web pages are compiled by people who actually go out and look for things themselves. If this improves in the future, it will probably be because the organization and bureaucracy will have grown and that might not be a good thing for the 'net. I realize that I seem to contradict myself regarding organization, but sometimes the exciting things emerge from chaos (as in the scientific Chaos theory) and I believe that bureaucracy would only suffocate and kill the magic of the Internet.
I would gladly allow anyone to use my list for public use - that was always my plan for it.
As to future forms of indices - it would be very hard to collect these addresses automatically. E-mail lists cannot be found automatically like Web pages because anyone can create a list using a simple nickname or alias list on his/her mail program. The only thing that might work is a standard dynamic e-yellow pages on the Web that would have to be as ubiquitous as your local phone book.
What are you favorite genres? Most liked bands?
I am what I call a 'good-music' lover. I am not a metalhead in the sense that I can't stand any other type of music - I will listen to anything that strikes me as particularly good. I listen to music ranging through Vivaldi, Bach, Billy Joel, Suzanne Vega, Clapton, Dire Straits, Rush, Ozzy, Metallica, Paradise Lost, Fear Factory, Sepultura and My Dying Bride. Nothing can give me eargasms like metal though.
I realize that I probably would be 'excommunicated' or called a wanker for some of the things I like but I really don't give a shit. Those 'pure' metalheads who chant 'metal or die' are nothing but lost empty people who completely missed the message metal is trying to give. There are no rules in metal - that would be a paradox. And I'm not preaching non-conformism - that is only another rule. You're supposed to do what YOU think is correct and if your peers set a standard, you decide whether to conform or not.
OK, I'll stop now. :-)
I like my metal with epic sounds, killer riffs, and/or powerfully melodic. I don't like 'kick-ass' songs that just stir up a whirlwind without varying it a little. The absolute classics IMO are Master of Puppets (Metallica) and Symbolic (Death). It would be pointless to give you a big list of bands I like so I'll leave it at that.
How long have you been listening to this kind of music?
8 years more or less.
What genres do you feel holds the most promise for the future?
I think that only more progressive and changing-with-the-times bands can survive. Cheese and predictability are going out of style. There will probably be many more standard bands coming out but, like dance music, it's superficial and loses any charm it might have very quickly. It's bands like Led Zeppelin and Rush that will probably be listened to in 50 years (I hope) while many others will fade to obscurity. A controversial example of change would be Metallica. While I like their last 'Load', it is beneath them and not as revolutionary as it should have been. I am happy that they are always experimenting and trying to change constantly but I sincerely hope that they will get their act together soon or they will cease to be the giants they were. My Dying Bride, NIN, Fear Factory, and many others are pushing the limits of music and they will not die as long as they don't become stagnant.
I guess it doesn't have anything to do with genres, it's what new and interesting things you can do with the music.
Where do you see the various kinds of heavy or hard music going in the future?
Although I probably wouldn't like it as much, I see it moving into a more abstract and unpredictable form. An example of the future would be the band Painkiller. They use noises and sounds to paint pictures - I wouldn't call it songs anymore. I didn't really enjoy it but I think they are way ahead of their time.
In the more immediate future, I see the music becoming more unpredictable instead of becoming heavier or faster. Non-metal people keep telling me that metal will just become faster and louder but I think we have hit the limit in that direction since anything more than that would be silly.
It's interesting to note that metal is constantly the music genre that is putting out revolutionary new stuff. This is because change and freedom from robotic societies is inherent to the metal philosophy.
How do you feel the net is helping the metal community? -What do you see as the major drawbacks of the net for the purposes that music has with it?
Information and marketing obviously! I found lots of stuff that I like thanks to the net that I would probably never have gotten to without. An unsigned band can advertise, offer music samples and can practically get their career launched thanks to the net. There is also the personal advantage, i.e. meeting friends to talk to and enjoying a mutual passion with other people.
The only drawback I can think of is that unless you are a proficient surfer and have hours of time to burn, all this wonderful information is useless. That is why I think e-mail lists and e-zines are so important since all you have to do is subscribe once and then receive everything you want right at your doorstep every morning. But even this is useless if you can't find the addresses and this is where my Metal List comes in... ;-)
The latest hypertext version of my list is currently set up on the Soul Tumor e-zine site at: http://www.uct.ac.za/depts/fitzpatrick/netzul/docs/misc/zevlist.htm
I also try to post the txt version every once in a while in metal newsgroups.
To subscribe to my list and receive it every time it is changed, send me an e-mail at: zeevt@superstudio.co.il
