Episode 4 — Harmonic remembrance, blues shouting and deathgrind taxonomy
This episode moves from a foggy Remembrance Sunday at Abney Park Cemetery to binaural blues shouting and the nerdiest possible tour through deathgrind. Steve reflects on playing The Last Post and Reveille among white poppies and local rabble-rousing choirs, using the bugle call tradition to unpack the harmonic series, brass acoustics and why a trumpet is basically twenty bugles in a trench coat.
In Entertaining Noises, vocalist Nicole Cassandra Smit drops into the studio to demonstrate chest voice, head voice, whistle tones, mic technique and why blues shouters like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith had to belt. Then comedian, musician and metal historian Andrew O’Neill helps map out death metal, grindcore and deathgrind: Napalm Death, blast beats, Cattle Decapitation, Carcass, drum triggers, gore, vegan ethics and how Philip Larkin accidentally ends up screamed over a home-made deathgrind track.
What we cover
Remembrance & brass: Playing The Last Post and Reveille at Abney Park; white poppies, community ritual and why cold, early-morning bugle calls are brutal for trumpeters.
The harmonic series made useful: How bugles work, why harmonics get closer together, and how three valves effectively give you a suitcase full of bugles.
Entertaining Noises — Nicole Cassandra Smit: Chest vs head voice, whistle tones, mic technique, proximity effect, blues shouting and singing as lifelong compulsion.
Voice, language & emotion: Why melody often comes before words; how ambiguity in lyrics and tone lets listeners project their own stories.
Deathgrind taxonomy with Andrew O’Neill: From Black Sabbath and thrash to grindcore, death metal and deathgrind; blast beats, extremity, politics, humour and obsessive subgenre-mapping.
Programming & authenticity: Drum machines vs live players, triggers, “too perfect” recordings and why metal constantly renegotiates what sounds real.
Larkin meets blast beats: A deathgrind track built from Andrew’s vocals and Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings text as a stealth poetry crossover.
Why small venues matter: Grassroots spaces, Bloodstock, DIY scenes and the infrastructure that lets weird genres exist at all.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I am a musician and composer and performer from London. This is my show, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces. This is the show that tries to help you to hear and understand music in new ways. Thank So, welcome back to the podcast. It is a pleasure to be back with you. Thank you very much for all the lovely feedback for the last show. We covered a lot of fascinating ground, I thought, last time. We looked at Mbo Nkanga, which I still can't pronounce after a lot of trying and a lot of help from my friend Claude Depa from South Africa, who gave us some fascinating insight into the world of Mbo Nkanga and township music in general. And also, we had Tamar Osborne taking us through the saxophone, baritone saxophone, flute and tape delay, which is really nice squelchy tones that was happening there. A lot of people were enjoying that, so if you haven't checked that out, please do go back and have a listen. I think you'll get lots out of it. Coming up on today's show, we have got more guests, still more guests. Really lucky to have had some fantastic guests on this show so far and today's no exception. At the end, we're gonna be talking to my friend, the comedian Andrew O'Neill about that amazing genre that I've been learning so much about in the last couple of weeks, Deathgrind. And also, I had a really interesting chat in my entertaining noises section with the brilliant Nicole Cassandra Smit, who is a wonderful vocalist who I've worked with quite a lot. And she was in the studio to talk about singing, talk about how singing works and demonstrate some techniques, some really interesting stuff with through those binaural microphones. So you can get inside the head of a singer in multiple ways. So stay tuned for that. But first, I wanted to talk about something very dear to my heart, and that is Remembrance Sunday. Now, for those of you living in different parts of the world, or who might not know about this, in the UK, on the 11th of November, we commemorate people who have lost their lives in war. On the 11th of November, Armistice Day in the First World War, I believe. So people wear poppies as a symbol of remembrance, and there is a service of remembrance in most churches and war memorials around the UK. As a musician, especially doing the sort of music that I do, it's relatively rare that I get to participate in a kind of community event like this. I mean, sometimes I have played for funerals and things like that. That can be very moving. But this is something bigger than that, if you like. This is a nationwide recognition of the people who have lost their lives in wars, and particularly at the moment, of course, with so many dreadful wars going on around the world, it feels very close to home. But as a trumpet player, I have the rare privilege to be able to participate in some of these ceremonies. And so for many years now, since I was a kid, really, learning the trumpet, I have been able to play at services of remembrance in churches or in hospitals or for the British Legion or whoever it might be. And I always find it profoundly moving.
A really amazing thing to be able to do, to be able to be a small part of. Yeah, and it's something that I don't get to do very much in the rest of my career. So for the last couple of years, I have been part of a really lovely service in Stoke Newington in a place called Abney Park Cemetery in northeast London. And this is an amazing, very historic cemetery. It's been around for a good couple of hundred years. And a lot of interesting people buried there, including William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, amongst many other interesting figures. And it's just, I find it a really beautiful place and a very evocative place, especially on a wet November morning, as it was this year. And to be honest, normally is, I find that kind of drizzly, damp, cold November morning fits the mood of Remembrance Services quite well. Because it's in Abney Park, the service is a bit different. So in the past, I played for very traditional services with the British Legion and people like that, military folk involved. This is not that. Most of the people there wear white poppies for peace, rather than red poppies, which is what people wear otherwise normally. A couple of lovely choirs there. You can hear them singing under me now. Really lovely ceremony, really lovely service, with very much a community element. But of course, because the community is full of artists, writers, performers, musicians, comedians, that sort of thing, there's a lot of very interesting people there and a lot of very interesting people involved. So yes, yeah, it was a really great, great event and it felt very respectful, but also with that kind of descent that Stoke Newington is known for. So yeah, I thought it would just be interesting to quickly touch on this association of brass instruments and the military and specifically these bugle calls, which signify the two minutes silence. So firstly, we have the what's called the last post, which is the one that people know best, perhaps it goes like this. And then that signifies the start of a two-minute silence, in which time people reflect on war and remember the dead and all of that stuff. And then at the end of the two-minute silence, we have another military call, which is called Reveille, which I believe is the military call that used to be played to wake up soldiers in a camp the next morning. So the idea is to sort of wake everyone up from their slumber, I think. And that goes like this. Let's play this. Thanks. So as well as being a very moving occasion and a really lovely thing, thank you to Abney Park Cemetery for having me along. I also thought it might be an interesting opportunity to examine a bit of music theory. If you may remember this segment from previous shows, this is where I know that many people understandably are scared of music theory or digging too deep into the nuts and bolts of music, but this is a good opportunity to just sort of demystify a few bits. So, we're gonna talk about harmonics today, and that is something that Tamar touched on last time, I think. We've touched on in previous shows relating to the flute and the saxophone, that kind of
thing, and the shell, in fact, in the first episode. But really what this is is when you play a note on a trumpet or any brass instrument, you can then get what's called the next harmonic up, right? And that means that you're speeding up the air. You're not moving anything apart from the speed of the air. You're not pushing the valves down. You're not moving any slides. You're not doing anything other than speeding the air up. So you're working with the natural resonance of the instrument, the natural physics of the instrument, and just finding where that note kind of pops out. And it pops out here. And then the next one that pops out is here. And then the next one that pops out is here. And the next one here, next one here, and so on. Now, you might have noticed that as we went through each of those notes, the gap between the first note and the second note we played, so this one and this one, was fairly large. The gap between the second and third notes, second and third harmonics, bit smaller, between the third and fourth ones, bit smaller again, fourth and fifth, smaller, and so on, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. Until right at the very top end, we can play almost a whole scale. Now, to be clear, just to reiterate, I'm not pushing any vowels down on the trumpet when I'm doing this. This could be done on any brass instrument. It's to do with the way, the physics of a brass instrument, or indeed a shell, as I demonstrated in the first episode, or in fact anything. You could do it with a coil of hose and a funnel and a trumpet mouthpiece. You can get the same thing, this harmonic series, it's called the harmonic series. And that means that we can play the whole of The Last Post and Ravelli on a bugle with no valves, just by changing the speed of the air. So, all the trumpet is, is the same principle, but with these three valves. You'll be familiar with the three buttons that you push down. Those are valves that are connected to other small bits of tubing. And so when you push one down, it just sends the air through those extra bits of tubing and creates, if you like, a whole other bugle. So a whole other bugle here, a whole other bugle here, a whole other bugle here, and then combinations. And so that you can then combine them and get all of the notes in what we call the chromatic scale. So if you like, all of the black and white notes on the keyboard. But really, that's done through a very clever piece of design that just connects up lots of different bugles. So it's like having 20 different bugles in one that you can just switch between. But of course, you're doing that just with these three buttons, the valves. So there we are, a little bit of music theory in for Remembrance Day. You might have also heard that in the last post I played, I split one note. Now what that means is I went for a note and I didn't quite get it. I missed. And that's because it's, well, frankly, Remembrance Day is a terrifying time for trumpet players and buglers because it's cold, so the instrument doesn't respond very well when it's cold. You're
outside, it's the middle of November. It's relatively early in the morning. Okay, I mean, 11 is not early, but for a lot of musicians, it's earlier than you would normally do a gig, especially not in freezing temperatures. It's very high pressure, especially for the military guys who do it on TV and for royalty and to honor their fallen comrades. The pressure for those guys must be absolutely extraordinary. And in fact, I do have worked with some military musicians. I've got some friends who are military musicians, so I will be talking to those guys in future episodes about some of those pressures. But it's very easy to miss, and that's because you're doing it all just with your lips. And so I managed to only, in inverted commas, split one. It's quite a bad split. And it's always, you feel terrible at the time, but people understand, it's the way it goes. But yeah, it can be a terrifying moment. So please do sympathize with anyone you see playing last post who might split a note, miss a note, or slightly fluff it. It is a very hard thing to do, even though the piece itself is not that challenging. The circumstances mean that it is a major challenge and quite a big stress for trumpet players and bugle players alike. So there we are, Remembrance Day and Harmonics. That's how we're kicking off the show today. All right, on we go. So we are on to the entertaining noises section of the show. Now you may remember that normally for this section, I ask people to put headphones on if you can. If you can listen to this with headphones, then so much the better, because this is recorded using binaural microphones, which means the little microphones that go inside the ears of my guest, and they pick up everything that my guest hears from their perspective, if that makes sense. So today we have a fantastic guest in the shape of Nicole Cassandra Smit. Now, Nicole and I have worked together on NOF for many years. We did shows together in Edinburgh for a long time. She is in a band that is I think mainly now sort of semi-retired, but a really great blues band called The Blues Water, who did a history of the blues up there, which I was involved with for a number of years. And Nicole is also a fantastic performer and singer in her own right. She released her debut album earlier this year, which had lots of nice plays on Radio 6 Music here in the UK and lots of other places. And she's just a phenomenal singer and a really great collaborator as well. She and I have written some music together. There's a collaboration with her coming up that I can't talk about quite yet, but is very, very exciting indeed and will be public soon. So look out for that. But meanwhile, here is Nicole donning those little binaural mics in the studio. So headphones on if you can. If you can't, don't worry, it'll be fine. So these are the little binaural mics. Could you introduce yourself? My name is Nicole Smit. I'm a singer. I'm based in Edinburgh. And I started out singing a lot of blues, but I basically sing anything I can get to sing on. But you don't sound like you're from Edinburgh.
No, yes. You probably get that a lot. So it's a fun question. I grew up in Jakarta, in Indonesia, and then in Stockholm, Sweden, and then I've been in Scotland for the last 11 years now. So you've got that kind of international accent, I suppose? Yeah. Yeah, I went to international schools. When I meet other international school children, we always recognise each other. Anyway, we've had a nice day in the studio. Very much. We've been doing some new music. Very exciting, sounding really nice. We worked together in Edinburgh doing a blues show. That's how we met, right? Yes, at the Fringe. At the Fringe. And so you're a big blues aficionado. Yeah, I wasn't really. My first blues album ever was The Simpsons Sing The Blues. Yeah, me too. That's how I got introduced to blues, really. And then when I moved to Edinburgh, I got to know the guys in The Blues Water. And they're the ones that actually said, you know, your voice would suit this very well. Got inspired by a lot of the women, the old blues singers, blues shouters, and then learned a lot about them. And I think because the whole genre or the idea of blues is about feeling, and that's mainly where I sing from, if that makes sense, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The voice is extremely well suited to that stuff. But you were saying you're also, I mean, you're obviously a fantastic singer, but also you're saying you're a bit of a singing nerd, which I suppose we will have to be as musicians. Yeah, because I think you have to really, really love your instrument or whatever it is. You know, your tools to properly get into it, to really get very good at it as well. And looking back kind of from childhood, it seems obvious that I would be a singer now, but I didn't think I was going to be a singer. It wasn't a career option that, you know, lots of the adults were telling me that you could do. But I sang all the time. I just, my parents had music all the time in the house. You know, and I would learn songs. And my dad used to say that I would be able to guess songs on the radio, like from the just the intro. Like I'd get really good at, I know this song, this song. So I was constantly singing. And I have a couple of cassette tapes that I saved, which is the earliest, I guess, evidence of my songwriting. That would have been eight or nine, I think. And then there were probably the first couple of songs. I was just running around with this, my first Sony tape recorder, coming up with tunes. And the two songs that are on those cassette tapes are Misery and Life Is So Confusing. Those are my two first songs ever recorded. I know, Misery. And I only recently remembered that I made two versions of it too, like one in English, one in Indonesian. Wow. As well. But yeah, I would, I just would be singing, even if nobody was listening to me or pay me or any, I just would be singing all
the time. I think that's why I think I'm like a singing nerd because I love singing so much, you know, I might as well, I got lucky that I get paid for it sometimes, but to be honest, I'd be doing it anyway. It just seemed like a very innate form of self-expression. Obviously with this show, I'm interested in where music came from and obviously we've got no kind of archaeological record in the way that we have for things like shells or bone flutes, which we've got before when it comes to singing, but we would have been singing for hundreds of thousands of years, right? It's obviously the oldest instrument. I reckon it would be part of the kind of the storytelling of, you know, early men. And the kind of connection that it has with language is really interesting. And I mean, it's funny because I, as an instrumental musician mainly, I don't really often engage with lyrics very much. I'm listening for the tone of the voice, the sort of texture of the voice. Do you find that as well? Because you've got a whole other layer of things to think about, if you like, as a singer, because you've got the language as well. But singing wasn't always necessarily based around language, you know, what we're doing today, writing a new song. And the first time we went through it, when you were just improvising, just hummed. You're just finding a melody. So that's sort of one layer, and then obviously the lyrical layer is the other layer on top. Do you think of those independently, or do you think of them when you're writing a song or singing? Do you think of them? I guess there's definitely the melody first, but in the back of my mind, I'd be working on it almost subconsciously maybe. In my songwriting process, I'd like to see what organically comes out. Almost like just trust your brain and your own voice, your body to produce something, and then, you know, for some reason, particular noises or consonants, or maybe one word or two would come out while you're doing the first stages of finding a melody, and then I would use that as the core, because I just think, well, this came out for some reason. Your brain threw this out. And that's a great starting point to write the rest of the lyrics. I think, when I'm improvising or even playing trumpet or other instruments, it's still about storytelling, even though you're not using lyrics. So when you're using lyrics, you've got this whole extra layer. But really, even if you're just humming or even if you're playing the trumpet or clarinet or whatever else, you're still kind of telling some sort of story or creating a mood. A lot of the stuff we've been working on, I would say, has been quite kind of not so much about telling a story so much as creating a mood or an atmosphere, right? Yeah, I think the core of all of it is always you're conveying an emotion of sorts and I think that's why people understand music, you know, despite the words or the languages or anything, because you just touch on something, you know, because you're just, yeah, you're
sending out feelings and emotions and they don't necessarily have to be comprehensible. Yeah, they have to be defined and they can be quite open. I mean, I talked about it in a previous show, but where one of the things I think music can do more than almost anything else is to help us express our complicated human emotions because it's pretty rare that we're just happy or just sad or just one thing or the other. It's normally somewhere between or a bit of both. And words aren't always the best way of describing those feelings. And so sometimes even just a sound can be. But then, of course, once you add lyrics in as well, particularly more poetic abstract lyrics, which is why songwriting and poetry are so closely linked in it. Because they're quite ambiguous a lot of the time in the best cases. And so it leaves quite a lot up to the listener and the audience. Yeah, it's tricky. With lyrics, I think it's that you want to find that perfect balance between the words being open enough, kind of vague for people to infer their own ideas. Around it, but still specific enough that it's not just nonsense. Yeah, yeah, well, certainly I think sometimes when I'm playing and I'm trying to put myself in a particular frame of mind or mood, I might conjure up an image of something or even if it's just like a sunset or the sea or something, you know, something that's quite abstract and open, whether you can kind of put yourself inside that. And I do really think that helps to communicate to an audience, you know, that feeling. I mean, because we're talking about the kind of technical aspects of singing. So this section of the show is called entertaining noises. So like we're just talking about, is there any way you can demonstrate the different parts of the voice, things like head voice and chest voice and, you know, all of those sorts of things? When you're singing properly and in a way that you're not going to ruin or tire your voice, every part of your body is working and it's almost like you have to open up your whole pathway. But yeah, head voice is sort of, I guess, the high, like the top range, which for me anyway, it just feels like you're not taking air from too far down perhaps. The top range is also usually, for me, it's the one that disappears first when I'm tired. So this is like I'm not taking any breath from down like my stomach or diaphragm. That's kind of what it sounds like. And then if you almost let your bottom drop and open, so you're able to have so much more volume and project because you're singing like almost, you know, even below your stomach. Well, it's interesting because you opened your legs and like sat up and you can see your stomach working to project. And I would kind of advise people, I guess, if they're practicing singing to do that. You want to actually even like just put your hand on your stomach and see how it moves, you know. But the kind of thing where once you stop doing that and you let your body inhale passively, because that's just what we naturally do anyway. And I've noticed that when you're singing, you kind of want to do that as well. You want to let your body naturally do what it needs to do. And it actually makes it better than you're not extending too much.
Well, you're not introducing too much tension. No, exactly. You're sort of controlling it. But one of the reasons you practice is to get that sense that it just comes naturally, because it's to try and give yourself the tools to be able to not think about it. And you just think about it in practice and then you stop thinking about it when you're... I recently discovered the whistle tone, which I don't know if that counts as a head voice, but that is like, it feels like the air is coming out of your nostrils in this weird way. I don't know if I can do it. That's incredible. So I learned that I could do that maybe a couple of years ago. And then I've not practiced it so much, but I can't, I don't think I can sing words through that. Just because it's a nostril thing. Yeah, you've really, I mean, it didn't look like you were singing at all with that bass head. No, yeah. It feels like it's coming out of your eyeballs at the same time. And I think I was practicing it with that Snow White song, which is like, I'm wishing for the one I love to find me today. And then she goes really high. Hi. I'm not super warmed up, but yeah. If you practice that, then it actually can sound really good. It sounded really good already. Yeah, so I thought maybe to demonstrate some of that. Because the other parts of the equation as a singer, as well as the sort of singer that you are and the music that you do, is very related to the microphone, right? And obviously that's not the case for an opera singer or for a classical singer, who mainly don't use microphones for amplification. They might use them to record. But I think it's often overlooked. Yeah, well it's definitely part of the learning experience. You know, like when I started out singing, I was just doing like acoustic gigs with friends. But when you start playing with a loud blues band with like several guitarists and horns, I think you would pick it up naturally, but it is, and I think this is a really important part of learning to sing or practicing is listening. Your ear really has to be very good. You need to know what you sound like, exactly how it sounds like to other people. That's part of the practice. And I think so with the mic technique, that's where it comes in. And generally you see it in kind of in younger, or like people are just starting out performing. We can tell from the mic technique. And it's just practice. I don't think you can be good at it immediately. If you know how you sound like, you know your volumes, then yeah, you're just gonna know how far you need to be with the mic or close. And also don't, if you have to swallow the microphone almost, then clearly you can't hear yourself and you're trying to be as close as possible. And you shouldn't need to. And you also shouldn't need to be, you know, too far. But yeah, it's just learning the timings to pull back when you're, if you have a holding a long note and it gets louder and just practice, isn't it?
But also it's understanding, I think, that a mic isn't just there to make you heard. It obviously is a way of amplifying your voice, but also it's a tonal device, right? You can change the tone of your voice to a degree with how far you are from the microphone. And certainly for some microphones, the closer you go, the more bass you get, right? So there's a way that a lot of singers and instrumentalists, I certainly use that on the trumpet, on stage. If I go closer, you get a thing called the proximity effect and you get a lot more sort of bass end. So yeah, so singers, you can really exploit some of that stuff. Yeah, I think you make it as part of your instrument, the mic. You integrate it as much as possible to your singing. Bing Crosby, this kind of original crooner, that crooning wasn't possible with a big band behind you. You couldn't do that. Because your voice won't travel. Yeah, so obviously you couldn't do it without any amplification at all, but also with early mics and things, you couldn't sing in that style. So the invention of the microphone and the development of the technology meant that a whole genre was kind of invented. A whole genre and a whole kind of score of singers. And Bing Crosby had just the perfect voice for that. And by like the opposite of that would be the old, you know, like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, they had to sing unamplified. That's why those blues singers were called blues shouters, because they had to sing over a loud band in it. So when you listen to Ma Rainey's records, she can't, it's not like she sounds funny, but I am very aware that she would have probably sounded very different live, because it was suddenly a very, you know, then she couldn't actually project, because the microphones then wouldn't be able to take her volume. Yeah, just going back to that Bing Crosby thing, it made me think of it, sorry, it's a bit of a funny name drop, but Hackney Colliery Band did a session with Jamie Cullum at Made Of Iron a few years ago, and it made me think of it because it was the studio where Bing Crosby recorded, I think, his last record. We were all in the same room, which is, for those who don't know, often in recording studios you record in separate rooms so that you can combine signals afterwards and you can mix it more easily and stuff, but it's more fun to do it all in one room, it's a lot more risky. But trying to do that with a singer and a nine piece brass band with two drummers in it is quite challenging. But it was really interesting, particularly because it was in that room where Bing Crosby had recorded. It was a real lesson in mic technique because we were doing this ballad actually, you kind of couldn't really tell in the room if it was any good. You're like, what's going to be all right? And sure enough, we went in to listen back to what we just recorded and it was amazing. Like, his mic technique was made to do. Backed off when he needed to, moved closer when he needed to, to project the out to be heard, but also to use the mic as a creative tool for this wall of noise from brass and the two drums. I just thought it might be quite an interesting experiment if you wouldn't mind just demonstrating, going from the whistle tones of the head voice to the belt and moving in and out of the mic in
different ways. Yeah. So I was thinking about my rain either, so. Such a difference in tone quality as well. I mean, just completely different, right? Yeah. Just, and it's amazing range of... Possibilities. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And anything to plug? You've got your record came with your fantastic solo record. Yeah, my record is out on Spotify and Apple Music and all that. It's called Third In Line, and it's under sort of my solo full name is Nicole Cassandra Smit, because my parents named me after a tragic Greek lady. Thank you. Oh, and I'm going to be at Celtic Connections on 26th January, which is a while still, but I think tickets are already on sale. You can find me there as well. So we come to the section of the show called the Genre Tombola. Now, if this is your first time listening to the show, this is the section where every episode, I look at a completely different genre as chosen by a random list picker of the 1300 genres listed on Wikipedia. So I feed the 1300 genres into a list picker, it picks a completely random one, and I look at that genre in the following show. So I've spent the last two weeks since the last episode came out listening to nothing but Death Grind. That's right, Death Grind. And I knew next to nothing about that. And so when I started looking into it, it occurred to me that there was one person I knew who would be able to help me out, and they were very kind and gave up lots of their time to talk to me this week about this genre and to help me make some music in the genre as well as you'll hear shortly. So my guest for this episode is the one and only Andrew O'Neill. Now, Andrew is a really fantastic comedian and musician and author. They've written a book called The History of Heavy Metal, which is based on a show of the same name. And also Andrew was in a band for a long time called The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, who I've shared a bill with over the years who were absolutely phenomenal live. Great band, great songs, great fun. So without further ado, here's my guest, Andrew O'Neill. So 1300 genres, and I put it into a random list picker each episode. And this episode it picked Death Grind. I thought, I know just the person to talk to about Death Grind. Heavy Metal comedy hotline. Exactly. So you might be on speed dial for future episodes, by the way. So yeah, so just if you wouldn't mind, for the sake of the show, introducing yourself and why I might have called you about Death Grind. My name is Andrew O'Neill. I'm a comedian and a musician and a metalhead. And my pronouns are they, them and I wrote, I did a show years ago called A History of Heavy Metal. And then I wrote a book called A History of Heavy Metal. And as a
result, I get an email every month from a different person moaning about the lack of inclusion of a different band. Metal is a sub genre, but it's well, it's a genre of music, but it's also a community, and it's a subculture. And it's something that has given me, gave me a massive sense of identity when I was a gender dysphoric, confused teenager, and then I was listening to, you know, Sepultura's We Who Are Not As Others going, hmm, this is good. So thanks very much. So this death grind, right? This now I know next to nothing. Well, let's call it nothing about metal. And it's, I mean, it's an enormously complex world, right? I mean, as soon as you start digging into metal genres, it seems like some of these genres only have about three bands that make music in that genre. And so I started digging into death grind, I've been listening to a lot of death grind whilst doing admin this week, which is, which is quite... Did you do the admin quicker as a result? It was, yeah, I think I did. My typing speed got faster. My understanding of it is that it is, it's a kind of fusion between death metal and grindcore. Is that roughly... Yeah, but death metal and grindcore were already indistinguishable to the untrained ear anyway. So death metal, they're both essentially the ultimate extension of guitar-based music trying to become its heaviest. So they come from slightly two different places. Death metal just comes from heavy metal. So you've got Black Sabbath who originated it. They were the sort of amniotic fluid that became, or primordial soup. They had all the ingredients and then Black Sabbath were the first band. Then you have in the mid-70s Judas Priest, who were the first band to detach heavy metal from its blues roots. And then you get Motorhead, who a lot of people argue aren't a heavy metal band. You get punk, you get the new wave of British heavy metal. And that's when heavy metal really, really starts to sound completely like its own thing. Then very quickly you get Thrash. And some people see death metal as a development of thrash. But I see thrash as a, like a base camp stop off point. So death metal was always going to happen. Metallica pretty much invented thrash. Malcolm Dome, the British journalist, coined the term thrash metal. Thrash metal is extremely fast. It has the influence of punk and hardcore punk. It's fast, it's kind of chuggy with often political lyrics. And then a band called Possessed from San Francisco did a demo called Death Metal. And their first album, Seven Churches, is widely believed to be the first death metal album. So Black Sabbath were influenced by horror films. They wanted to make music that was frightening. And also they expressed their kind of disillusion with the kind of hippie subculture that they didn't, you know, there wasn't much flower power going on in the bombed out streets of Aston. And then, but the ultimate extension of that is with death metal, whereas Sabbath were influenced by kind of classic horror and hammer horror.
And, you know, this is before the 70s, occult horror stuff, really. Whereas death metal bands were influenced by the kind of video nasty, gore exploitation films of the early 80s. So possessed morbid angel, obituary, cannibal corps were probably the most notorious, partly because Jim Carrey was a fan. And they have, you know, the covers are incredibly explicit and gory, and their song titles are, you know, so that's, so that's death metal, generally with a very deep, guttural vocal, something inside me. This microphone is no good for that, but because you can't play it in the same way. And some of them very fast, some of them obituary, very slow and chuggy, but and lyrics about death and decay and murder and some of them kind of go on the sort of satanic side. And it's it it's bands trying to sound as heavy and as brutal as and, you know, kind of scary in the way that Black Sabbath were doing, but it's something that's kind of like full force. At the same time, you have a development from punk. So punk comes from Detroit, really, with the Stooges and MC5 and then and then through New York. And then you have the British bands, the Pistols and the Damned. And then you get hardcore punk. So the early 80s bands take what they did, turn up the speed and you have GBH exploited. And in America, you got Minor Threat and Black Flag and then we have Discharge. You then get crust punk, incredibly political, they're anarchists, they are peaceniks. And these bands are really pushing a political agenda. They're taking what the Sex Pistols kind of loosely pointed at, but connected to a political agenda, but also turned up the speed, turned up the aggression. They're listening to bands like, you know, kind of Motörhead. And as you say, genres are porous, so they're all influenced by lots of different things. Then you get this ultimate extension of crust punk, which is Grindcore. And this is Napalm Death in the early 80s, they're formed in Liverpool. There's a Napalm Death song on a Crass compilation CD that sounds nothing like the band that we listen to now, and a lot like a lot of the other Crass punk. And they had a kind of revolving door of members. So by the time they did their first album, Scum, none of the original members of Napalm Death are in Napalm Death. Oh wow, really? Yeah. But also on the second side of Scum, so there's two sides, there's only one member that's on the first side. Wow. Which is Mick Harris, who's the drummer. He's the guy that coined the term Grindcore. Mick Harris, he invented the blast beat. So, crust bands had a D beat, which is motorhead influenced. The blast beat is like essentially 32 notes on the snare and double bass drumming. Yeah. So, either two bass drums, again, motorhead popularized that. There were jazz bands that did it before, but as with everything. So, you've got this on the bass drums and the snare matching those drum beats. So, then you go from this almost slightly groovy, catchy crust punk to grindcore, which becomes the ultimate expression of speed. But
then what happens is Napalm Death start listening to death metal. They're seen as traitors by a lot of people in the grindcore scene. And death metal bands start incorporating the blast beats of grindcore. And at this point, the distinction between the genres just starts to diminish. But then what you have is where the map becomes the territory, and this happens a lot in heavy metal, where as soon as a genre is defined, so thrash is a really good example, as soon as you define what thrash is, you get bands who go, let's be a thrash band. And they copy the template, and they fit within the kind of borders of that genre. And that happened with grindcore and death metal. So then you get people using this portmanteau, death grind, to describe what carcass is doing. Carcass got a lot more melodic, because again, the bands that originate genres are often really restless. And they very often will, that's why members leave and they get dissolution, because they've originated a genre, like, oh, we've done that, let's move on to something else, you know, because also metalheads are like taxonomists. So retrospectively, people start to coin these portmanteau terms to find a more precise taxonomy of what these genres are. I mean, there's a band called Cattle Decapitation, which they talk about, this link between environmental led, ethical, veganism. So that band, you know, Cattle Decapitation, a lot of their lyrics are about basically reimagining what we do to animals as doing to humans, you know, as doing to humans. So that's all the kind of gore and everything that goes along with that, which is very easy to, as a non-metal person, it's very easy to sort of misunderstand and all find funny or find, you know, a bit baffling, it's got quite a serious intent. It's an interesting link, isn't it? Because that is a very, very commonly the case, like, you know, any of my sort of metalhead friends are very often the sweetest, most gentle vegans that I know, you know, and I think people find that a bit unusual sometimes. But I think there's a reason for that. And it's, you know, I got any anger I had, any residual anger I had in my system, I got out at the Cavalera gig on Saturday. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Bloodstock, which is probably my favourite festival in the UK. If you compare, there's no aggro at Bloodstock. Yeah, believe it or not, I've actually played Bloodstock with a five piece jazz band, playing metal covers. But that's a whole other story. Yeah, we do sort of get out of system. And the sense of humour again is underrated. Napalm Death, no, that's a silly name. Napalm Death have actually just put out a t-shirt that's got a unicorn and a rainbow and the Napalm Death font in that, I think it's Cooper, like the Garfield font. They know what they're doing, you know. Yeah, thanks. That's an amazing summary. If I've got time, every episode I try and do a very, with many apologies to the people who actually make this music, I try and do a kind of bastardized demo of what my understanding of that music is. Yeah, so I just sent you the track. Well, what's your reaction,
first of all? I think it's great. I think you've done a really, really good job. I think the bass is slightly too funky. But then, yeah, I generally don't listen to bass. The drums are really good. Drums are really spot on. Yeah, and an awful lot of grind bands will use a drum machine. Right, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the wonderful thing about metal. It's so broad and people's different approaches to... And it constantly gets reinvented. So, I mean, most, like an awful lot of technical death metal bands now will program their drums, but they'll program them so they sound like real drums. What they're copying... Sorry to interrupt, but just to say, when you say program their drums, what that means is rather than using a live drummer, they'll program in the computer, right? But they'll use real drum recordings, so real drum sounds of each drum, but then they'll program in the computer because often, I guess because very few drummers can play that fast or that intensely. Well, it's not to do with speed, it's to do with accuracy. And when you're building a recording, it's just much easier for them to... you get it accurate on the grid, so when you've got your program that you're making music on, it's got a grid on it and you just literally put the drum in where you want it. But then what you have to do is you have to make it sound like a real drummer, you have to knock those slightly off the grid, have that kind of push and pull. What the drums are doing sounds really, really good. And there's that funny thing where in a lot of extreme music, you kind of want to make it sound less professional in order to make it sound more authentic or raw or heavy. I mean, the second wave of black metal was a reaction against the popularity and what they saw as the commercialism of death metal. So we've got the drums and again, coming back to what that is described as, that style of drumming with the double kick drum and pedal, so all that stuff and the snare playing like that as well. That's called blast beats, right? And that's a big feature of this. Yeah, absolutely. But the other thing, the other interesting thing is a lot of these bands live will use drum triggers. So instead of just miking up the drums and hearing the sound of the drum being hit, the drum has a sensor on it and that will trigger a sample of a recorded drum beat. And that particularly, I mean, it's something I hate the sound of, trigger drums live, because it sounds inorganic. But that's the sound that people are after, that really, really consistent, like double bass and pedal. Yeah, it's this weird thing of like make it sound authentic and natural and then make it sound really perfect and then make it sound a bit imperfect and then live you make it sort of sound too perfect. So we've got the drums there and then the bass you're saying is too funky. I think it's too funky. Yeah, too funky. This can't resist the funk. And then and there's a bit of guitar later on.
But yeah, it's just trying to get that that sound right. We were talking earlier, would you be up for putting some vocals on there? I'll definitely. Because that's obviously what is missing. Because, you know, I will try to do a few different types of vocal over it. So I'll do the guttural death growl and I'll do because so there's the high, the high scream and then also the guttural. But that's that's that's that kind of guttural thing is the is the stylistic thing that I associate with is having listened to it this week. That seems to be really like where it is. Yeah, where is that? But then the little accents of the high bit in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Accented screams. But also it's that thing isn't it? Like, you know, like the shorthand for death metal and black metal is death metal is low vocals and black metal is high vocals. But then there's at the gates who have very high vocals. Death metal band. Is that because the most metal thing of all is doing the opposite of what you're supposed to do? I would act. I'd probably argue the most metal thing of all is sticking rigidly to it. Okay. But yeah, what you want with guitars, you want what's called tremolo picking, which is similar to the blast beat. So to do it on my acoustic. So it sort of. That sort of thing. Whereas with Thrash Metal, like Metallica, the originators, and Slayer, it's downstrokes. So you think Master of Puppets. My downstrokes aren't very fast at the moment. But that... Power chords, so it's a fifth chord. And a little bit of black metal. That's what you're after. Great, all right. Well, lovely. Well, thanks. I'm glad that I wasn't miles off. It's always a bit- I think you got really close. Yeah, it's always a bit... You know, what I always say about this stuff is I always try not to claim any sort of authenticity, but just as an outsider to... It was the same with Ember Langer last week, where it's like, obviously, I am not from this culture, but just as an outsider trying to get into something, it's quite a good route in to discover the different aspects of it. It's a great way to explore what defines a genre, is try and make it, absolutely. It's, you know, in that just, you gain... Sir Hendrix is the artistic love of my life, and as I'm becoming a better guitarist, I'm becoming closer to being able to play his stuff. And I'm just enjoying it so much more because you inhabit the music, and it's like we were talking about right at the beginning of music, you know, music is about, kind of, playing it and enjoying it and, you know, like, not just being the audience. I think something that this show and everything that I try and do in this world, like the live show and stuff, it comes from, and this is probably from too many years of working with scientists and stuff,
but there's a brilliant quote from the physicist Richard Feynman, which I'm going to get wrong, but it's along the lines of what an artist says to him, I can appreciate a flower more than you can as a physicist because I can draw it and I can see its beauty and stuff. Feynman says, when I as a physicist or a scientist, I can look at it and I can see that it's beautiful and I can appreciate that. But then I also, what I find beautiful is the photosynthesis. I can understand that the microorganisms that live in that are really beautiful in their own way. So basically by deepening your understanding of a thing, it gives you a route into understanding a bigger proportion of what that is, the totality of its beauty, rather than just a particular aspect, rather than the kind of, you know, from a distance, you drill down into it. And I think the same is true for music. The more I've learned about stuff over the years, the more love I've had for it. I think that's absolutely right. So I think the music emerges completely naturally and inextricably from the human brain. And then music theory is all, you know, for a long time, just trying to catch up with what that is. And that's what you're doing here. You're kind of going, what is it? What are they doing? And I'm always really fascinated by the socio-economic background to why genres emerge. And the reason the reason Grindcore happened is because of the venues that are available in Birmingham. There were some great venues. The Mermaid, I think, was the big one. There are venues that let people put bands on for really, really, really cheap. Last episode, I was talking about pub gigs and about how important these grassroots venues are to music scenes all over the world. But taking this country, these small venues where bands, as you say, that whole genres can develop because there are venues to play that aren't charging through the nose and aren't big, massive, commercialised sponsored venues like the O2 or whatever. They're small grassroots things that create a scene and that goes on then to create, if you're talking about the commercial side of it, that goes on to create huge commercial success for those people and more importantly, evolve genres and evolves culture. I think it's so important that the grassroots venues are protected and supported as much as possible. 100%. Small gigs are an essential part of our cultural life. And there's that thing, isn't there? The argument that people put forward, like you've said, is, you know, well, the big bands come from there, but most of the bands I listen to don't get big. Exactly. So I'm always very careful to say, well, there is a commercial argument for it, but also that's sort of missing the point. There is a commercial argument to say, well, where else is Ed Sheeran going to come from if he doesn't have a chance to develop his career in small venues, which is definitely true. But more importantly, small venues are like the lifeblood of communities across the country, across the world. So yeah, anyway, that's just another little plug for small venues. But thanks so much.
That was really fascinating. That was really fascinating. I learned so much about that. And yeah, I'm really excited to hear your vocals this afternoon. Thanks again, Andrew. Thank you for having me. I'll talk to you soon, mate. Take care. Now, Steve in the studio again here. Now, before I play this track out in its entirety, you've heard bits of it already underneath the interview. But before I play the whole thing, I just wanted to say thanks again to Andrew for some incredible vocals. I mean, honestly, how they get their voice to sound like this, I will never know. And more importantly, how they can speak afterwards. But also, the little Easter egg is that the lyrics that Andrew chose to set this piece of death grind to are quite special. They are lyrics by one of the great poets. So while you're listening to this beautiful, soothing, melodic bit of death grind, have a think about which of the great poets you think may be the inspiration for the lyrics, and I will tell you at the end. Okay, I can reveal, exclusively, that the lyrics to that piece of Death Grind were from The Wits and Weddings by Philip Larkin. That's right, pick that up. I think Andrew should really be doing poetry festivals with that sort of style of delivery. So there we are, The Wits and Weddings by Philip Larkin, set to my Death Grind beats. Enjoy. The time has come to pick the genre for next episode. What am I gonna spend the next two weeks listening to? Okay, here we go. Pop the list into the randomlists.com. Press go. Okay, emo pop. Emo pop. That's what I'm gonna be doing next episode. Okay, I'm gonna be doing a deep dive into emo pop for the next two weeks. Wish me luck. And I'm gonna be reporting back and maybe trying to make some sort of emo pop noises on next episode. So tune in for that. Speaking of which, the next episode will be out in two weeks time as normal. So that is Thursday the 30th of November. But meanwhile, if you've enjoyed today's episode and you haven't listened to the others yet, do go back and have a listen to the others. We've covered a lot of fascinating ground, I think. Very varied stuff we've gone through with some brilliant guests. So do go back and check those out. Meanwhile, thanks again for all the support. It would really, really help me out if you could rate and review the show. Nice reviews and ratings really do help at this early stage of a show's life. And the show's an enormous amount of work to produce, but I love doing it and I want as many people as are interested in listening to be able to listen. So please do share far and wide. You know what to do, all the usual places, socials at Steve Pretty. So feel free to drop me a line there. Or better still, I have a mailing list, which is on my website, which is www.stevepretty.com. And you can sign up to the mailing list and there will be all sorts of interesting stuff coming up through that. So that'd be really helpful if you fancy doing that, if you've enjoyed the show. One thing to plug of course is my Wilton show. I'm doing a show at the brilliant Wilton's Music Hall in London on the 20th of January. Things are really hotting up for that. I'm just in talks with an
incredible new addition to the bill that night. It's gonna be a really great night in I think one of the best venues in the UK, if not Europe. So it's called Wilton's Music Hall, 20th of January. Tickets available from the Wilton's website or via my website. So please do head there, pick up some tickets. Honestly, you won't want to miss out. It's gonna be a lot of fun surprises, live podcast recording, live gig. Some of my friends and colleagues from Hackney Colliery Band playing some HGB stuff, some new music from myself and Valeria the Harpist you heard from a couple of weeks ago. It's gonna be a really great night. So please do sign up for that. Meanwhile, it just reminds me to thank once again Abney Park Cemetery for having me for the remembrance gig and letting me record there. And also of course my brilliant guests, Andrew O'Neill and also Nicole Cassandra Smit. The theme is by me and Hackney Colliery Band and the brilliant Angelique Kidjo. Right, thank you very much for listening. Do spread the word, do rate and review. All of that stuff, really, really helpful. Thank you very much and see you next time. One, two, three.