Eight Octaves: India has been a hotspot for international acts lately. In the past one year we have had Metallica, Opeth, Lamb Of God, Megadeth, Children Of Bodom, Kreator, Slayer and now this huge Indian Metal Festival. What are your expectations from the crowd?
Phil Tolfree – Well we expect everyone to go crazy! We want to see the whole festival become a mosh pit! We have heard a lot about Indian metal fans so they had best live up to their reputations!
Eight Octaves: And surely you’ll get it! Terrorizer Magazine called you “a soldering-iron hot, thrashing death metal band”; you’ve played in the gigantic Bloodstock Open Air twice; your debut album scored really well in critics’ books. So much success in so little time. How does it feel?
Phil – It feels great. Playing Bloodstock was kind of a big goal for all of us. We’ve been going to Bloodstock for years and to finally get to play on the Sophie Lancaster stage was a real honour. Little do they know that we plan to come back soon on the Ronny James Dio stage to slaughter everyone! MWAH HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Eight Octaves: Aah, I must have a drink or two with you sometime, maybe you’ll spill some beans!Haha! Enlighten our readers with your experience as a band in the early days. How did you manage to rise from being just a local band to an international act?
Phil – We all got together because we live in a very small town and there isn’t much of a scene here. When you find musicians who are all on the same wavelength in Taunton it’s quite incredible! We’ve worked extremely hard to get where we are today and we don’t intend to stop until we’ve crushed every continent!!! INDIA YOU’RE NEXT!!!
Eight Octaves: Shed some light on your newest grind, Death Hammer and the reason for choosing an Irish label to go through with the release.
Jon Whitfield – As our first full album we had a lot of expectations for Death Hammer. It’s a result of years’ worth of writing and practising together. We’re happy with it, it’s given us a great start on the music scene, and it’s gonna be good to build on that. We went with Grindscene because we wanted to keep it as DIY as possible, and to own the rights to our music and merchandise 100%, which is what we got from Pete at Grindscene. He took care of all the distribution and album printing, we do the rest. So it works well for us both.
Eight Octaves: Your music amalgamates death metal vocals with thrashy riffs, two of my favourite genres. Who is the force behind the composing and songwriting in the band?
Jon – It’s usually Thurston that comes in to the practise space with a killer riff or a collection of riffs written out, then we all work together on making it in to a song. It wouldn’t be the same without one of us there, we all have an input. Phil takes care of the lyrics though, he has a sick mind…
Eight Octaves: Yeah he does come out with some mind-crushing lines! So, shed some light on the incident of Nathan leaving the band to become a full time hippie. How did you manage without a bassist for 3 years especially with a performance at BOA in 2010?
Phil – Sadly Nathan decided that Death metal was too death metal for him. He grew a vagina overnight and started playing bongos and saying things like ‘you will grow rich soon as Saturn is orbiting Uranus’. We decided that we couldn’t have a hippy in the band and so he moved away to grow organic cabbage on a commune near Stonehenge. Not having a bass player for so long was cool as it was what we all wanted at the time. We then discovered Paul ‘Turbo-Hawk’ Williams and knew we needed his skills in the band.
Jon – That is all completely true.
Eight Octaves: Well, hope he’s having a good time with his life. Moving on to Bloodstock Open Air, how was your experience when you played there for the first time?
Phil – Awesome. Drunk. Grind. Bitchin’.
Jon – Yeah the first time was insane, it was the biggest show we’d played at the time so we loved every second of it.
Eight Octaves: Nice! So tell us something about your band mascot, Steve.
Phil – Steve just came about because I kept drawing him when I was designing our logo and we all grew quite fond of his grisly little face. We thought it might be cool to have a mascot like Vic and Eddie. And so Steve was born…
Eight Octaves: What’s your schedule during the time you are in India? You have planned to go sightseeing or it’s just going to be a trip back home after the concert?
Jon – It’s gonna be pretty much just straight home afterwards. We’re in Bangalore for a couple of days beforehand though, so we’re planning on exploring the city a little and seeing what’s on offer. We’re all looking forward to eating and drinking a hell of a lot.
Eight Octaves: And Bangalore will surely fulfil the “drinking” part! So what else does Flayed Disciple have on its plate? Some more shows or back to the studio to start over another killer album?
Jon – We have loads of shows for the early part of 2013, there’s some European shows supporting Vader on tour in January, then we have Hammerfest in the UK and Burning Sea Fest in Croatia. We’ve got a small tour of the UK in February and loads of one off shows too. We play live as much as we can, but we do have the next album in mind too. Writing and pre-production has begun already, so we’ll be done before the end of 2013! Watch this space!
