Conan Interview with Jon Davis: This Beast of Wrath
Any discussion of 2014 highlights is incomplete without Conan‘s Blood Eagle. Their second full-length and Napalm Records debut (review here), it cemented the UK trio’s place among the planet’s heaviest bands and solidified the songwriting that their 2012 debut, Monnos (review here) and preceding 2010 Horseback Battle Hammer (review here) and 2007 Battle in the Swamp EPs first announced to an audience who’ve been only too willing to be crushed by it since. Cuts like “Crown of Talons,” “Gravity Chasm” and the galloping “Foehammer” once again demonstrate that there’s more to Conan than ungodly tones, abyss-born shouts and chest-shaking thud — they’re also a growing, progressing band.
This year, part of that progression has led to bassist/vocalist Phil Coumbe leaving the band and being replaced by Chris Fielding, also the producer who’s helmed Conan‘s recordings for the last four years. Fielding, now transplanted from Foel Studios to Conan guitarist/vocalist Jon Davis‘ own Skyhammer Studio, is a natural fit, and European touring, as well as stops at Roadburn (review here) and Hellfest have brought to bear the reality that Conan — Davis, Fielding and drummer Paul O’Neil — haven’t missed a step and that their lumbering riffs are as cleaving as ever. They move forward with unmatched pummel, and the sheer force of their material has rightfully won them acclaim worldwide from riff-worshiping masses humbled by their hoods-up assault.
We spoke just before their appearance at Hellfest in France, and Davis — who in addition to owning Skyhammer also founded the label Black Bow Records in 2013 — had much to say about running his own imprint and studio in addition to the band. In the interview that follows, he talks about upcoming releases, his itch to start writing again for Conan, the founding steps being taken for a side-project called Overthrone, how he prefers to write without bassists present, long tour drives, the prospect of going to Australia for the first time (they’re booked for a tour in September), reissuing material on Black Bow and more.
Even as I put this interview together, they’ve announced being confirmed for Amplifest in Portugal this October, as well as supporting High on Fire for some of their upcoming European shows, so much continues to take shape for Conan in the wake of Blood Eagle. No surprise. When an object as massive as Conan‘s sound builds up any amount of momentum, there’s rarely hope of slowing it down.
The complete, 5,200-word Q&A is after the jump. Please enjoy:
So now that however many months have passed since you were making the album – or has it been a year at this point?
Yeah, well, we recorded it – it was all finished towards the end of October. Just over six, seven months.
How do you feel about that process now?
I feel ready to record another one (laughs), but it’s too soon. (Clears throat) I’m starting to get itchy feet now. I really want to start getting some stuff written and getting into the practice room again, but obviously we can’t do everything. We can’t tour as much as we are at the moment and also still have the – I don’t know – the mental strength to get in the studio and focus on writing as well. Maybe some bands can, but I don’t think we’re able yet to do that. But, I’m in the mood for writing stuff. We’ve got Hellfest next weekend, and then we’ve really got [badass top secret other shows coming up], but I was planning on using parts of July and August when it was quiet to get in the studio and do some writing, but it’s looking like that’s going to be a busy period as well. We’ve got Australia in September, then we’re going on tour again in October. I think we’ll probably start maybe putting a few ideas together between now and the end of the year.
In the five minutes when you’re not already doing something?
Yeah. I really enjoy writing, so it seems like a need to be working on something all the time. I’ve just got one of those sorts of minds, and obviously because I’ve got this record label and the studio and that, it feels like I really just want to stay busy. Because I don’t work in an office now during the day, so I feel like I need to be productive in other ways. Looking back on it in hindsight, it went really well. It does seem like fuckin’ ages ago, and of course it was, really, in terms of the music business. But yeah, the recordings went cool. The reception’s been really good for it, and that’s shown in the live shows we’ve done. Basically our live set has been the album. We haven’t just put in a couple of the new songs in amongst everything else. We thought, no, we’ll play the whole thing live. It just seemed to make sense, because for the first time, we’ve got an album where probably the whole thing works as a set, in our opinion. It’s got an opening track that works as the first song in a set, and the end, the last song on the album works well as the last song in our set. So it’s like, okay, why wouldn’t we play the whole thing live? When we have a longer set to 
play with, we normally put a couple extra songs in.
That’s true, I guess Monnos with the shorter songs up front and the slow, super-doom songs at the end had a different structure than would work for a set.
Yeah. Definitely. It feels great to play this album live, because we really like the songs and we like playing them and listening to them, so it works really well to do that. The thing about Monnos is, we don’t play many of those songs in our set now, and that’s not because we don’t like them for the set. If Phil was still in the band, we would definitely play “Grim Tormentor,” “Battle in the Swamp.” They would be either in the set or as an encore or something like that, but obviously Phil isn’t here now. With Chris joining, we could only teach him a certain amount before we went on tour. We thought, well this is the set, let’s just learn the whole album. Of course, it was the most recent thing he’d recorded with us, so it was fresh in his mind as well as ours. We’ve added “Satsumo” and “Hawk as Weapon” to that set now, and that was cool. We plan on getting Chris up to speed with a few more of the songs so we can mix it up when we play and when we go on tour. We went away on tour in April and we played the whole set, the same set at every show – 18 shows, I think it was – which for us was quite a long tour, and we would’ve liked to have been able to mix it up maybe and put a couple different ones in here, but maybe in our downtime now between touring we can add a couple more. Certainly “Grim Tormentor” and I think “Krull” or “Sea Lord,” they’ll be the next two focused on.
I saw you guys are going to do a CD reissue for Horseback Battle Hammer.
Yeah, I’m gonna do that on Black Bow Records. I found some cool old demos, one of which I thought I’d lost – actually it’s quite a clear recording although it is obviously a practice room demo. I recorded it on a MiniDisc player, but it’s of “Satsumo” from… might be November? 2006. It’s just me and Richie [Grundy, former drummer] playing. And it’s dead slow! And it’s nine minutes long (laughs). Now in our set it’s not even five minutes long and it’s the fastest song in the set normally. So that’s cool. And we also found an old demo that Paul and I did when we first got back together in 2009, when we were planning on recording Horseback Battle Hammer, and we’ve got a practice room recording of just me and Paul. I remember setting up all the mics for this. It’s not a good quality recording, but it is better than an iPhone recording. I remember trying to set up a few microphones in the practice room. Didn’t do a very good job, but it’s a fairly nice-sounding demo of just the pair of us, and again, that’s from April or March, I think, 2009, and that’s again “Satsumo,” “Krull” and “Battle in the Swamp.” And all three tracks have got totally different structures to what ended up on the record. I don’t remember playing them that way, which is weird. I listen to them now and they’re totally different, but I thought that’ll be really good. If you’re gonna re-release it, you may as well put something interesting on there, and we thought that’ll be the coolest thing to put on there. Some people are saying why don’t you release the old demos? Fine, I’ll release them, but I don’t think they’re
good enough to put them on a vinyl and ask people to pay 20 quid or whatever. I thought, throw them on a CD, and if anyone wants them, fine. But yeah, I’m gonna put that out on my own label. I will sell it online, but the main aim for that is just to sell it at shows.
I’m sure it’ll be gone before you play again.
Hopefully. The whole thing for my label was I wasn’t gonna
release anything if it wasn’t on vinyl or tape. We get people asking us all the time, when you gonna put this out on CD again? I wondered if I could get a label interested in putting it out on CD, and then I thought, why would we do that? It’s not gonna help our profile any to get someone to put out a CD of our first album. It’s not necessary for us to go to a label and say, do you want to put out this? Because they’ll just print up 500 copies and give us 100, and I may as well just pay for 500 myself and the band gets more money out of it, which’ll help us on tour and all that stuff. So it seemed like the right thing to do. But we’ve got other reissues in the pipeline. As I’m talking to you, I’m getting pinged emails between Jurgen [van den Brand] at Roadburn and Tony Roberts and we’re just chatting now about getting the artwork redone to put the split out again with Slomatics. That’s coming out on vinyl again with Burning World and Black Bow Records, sort of a co-op. The reissue of Horseback Battle Hammer on vinyl is sold out now. Totally gone. I don’t think they did too many copies of them, to be honest. Maybe 500, and we put up 100 of them and sold them at shows. And Blood Eagle, I don’t know how many copies they did, but they’ve run out of everything apart from these silver vinyls, red vinyls that they did. They’ve got limited numbers of them, but that’s done really well in terms of sales. Yeah. It’s the year of the reissue for us. I was just thinking before about what could be our next release, and I thought, rather than doing the “next album,” we could do three individual releases, all based upon one – well, initially I was thinking one – awesome weapon. Just have a track shaped or influenced by that. But obviously a bit more sophisticated than that. That’s like schoolboy stuff. Maybe make it cool and have the imagery about a certain scene, or I don’t know. Early days. Maybe have a run of three, just one track but with the other side of the vinyl etched or something like that. And have that as a 12” single.
A 12” single. Of course.
I’ve got a 12” single of one of the tracks off Ride the Lightning. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” or something like that. My friend gave me it. I thought it would be cool to do three. Minimalist artwork, and just have one track on each one, and you put them together and it works as a package. It’s something I’m toying with. I was just toying with it in my mind. I’ll wake up tomorrow and probably think it’s a bad idea, but right now I’m thinking it might be cool. Just for today. I’ll wake up tomorrow and think of some other stupid idea. But Chris, Paul and I – well, Chris is in Ireland this week – we had a band booked in the studio this week but they canceled, so he booked a flight to go see his girlfriend in Ireland, which is fair enough. I think he’s coming back this weekend, so we’re gonna jam for a couple days, and maybe get the ball rolling, like I was saying before about maybe writing some stuff. I’m quite keen to get started with that again. I’ve got another band on the horizon as well.
Recording or that you’re playing with?
It’s early days yet, but we’re having our first sort of meeting. If you check out a band from down south called Torpor…
They’re playing The Underworld with you guys. I just saw. In October.
Yes. Are they playing that show?
Yeah, I just got invited to the show on Facebook, which is lovely. Wish I could attend. But yeah, they’re playing.
Alright, they’ve been confirmed. Well yeah, they’ve got a female vocalist called Nats [Spada]. Check out some of the videos online of her vocals. So she’ll be doing vocals. I’m just gonna do guitar. On drums, we’ve got a girl called Jody Wyatt, and she is the drummer right now for a band called Limb – they played at Desertfest this year. On bass, we’ll get Chris Fielding. But my initial thoughts are just to do something which is a mixture of Thorr’s Hammer and early Moss, but make it 10 times heavier. Obviously we’ll tune down a lot more than Moss ever were, and yeah. That’s basically the aim. Not gonna get too excited about it, but that’s where we’re aiming for at the moment. We’re meeting up towards the end of this month, gonna have a couple of days in the studio. Just the three of us, Chris won’t join at that point. I like to do the writing, the musical writing if you like, on my own. I’m a bit of a control freak like that. And the songs might end up being not quite as sophisticated as they could be, you know, if I had someone more talented than I writing with me, but for the sort of vibe that we have, I prefer to do the musical side of it, more or less just me. Ideally, me and Paul, because we really balance off each other really well, musically speaking, in the practice room. I don’t like writing when there’s a bass player there and I never have. If I come up with a riff, Paul just gets it straight away, and plays along. If I change tempo or I change notes or whatever, Paul just fits in with all that. The worst thing that can possibly happen at that point is a bass player hits a bum note, or stops, or looks at you funny, then you gotta stop and show him what you’re playing. For me, that just really pisses me off. I don’t mean pisses me off. It doesn’t ruin my day, but it just…
It pulls away that momentum?
Exactly. You’re playing, for example, going back to the album, we were writing, trying to find the ending for “Altar of Grief,” and we had a couple of different alternate endings, which sounded alright at the time, but it was really coming to the crunch, like the week before we were going into the studio, and Paul and I were in there 
every day, just going over the songs and making sure we were happy with how they were set up. One thing we couldn’t quite get was the ending of “Altar of Grief.” I remember thinking, shit, we’ve gotta sort this out. It was our last practice really before we went into the studio, so we just stopped, and said, look we need to change the end, because it’s the last track on the album, and we need to make it a bit more interesting than what it was. And then we’re just standing there. Closed my eyes, and just started playing that riff. And Paul joined in, and we were recording it at the time on the iPhone, and it just came out perfect. In our eyes. The version of the ending that was in that practice room, that was exactly how we did it in the studio when we recorded it. So it’s just like, I don’t think that spontaneity would’ve been possible if there was a bass player there, stopping us, saying, what are you doing there, or not playing it quite right. Because that might’ve threw Paul and he might not have played drums quite the same way. Yeah. Might seem like a weird thing to say. I don’t know whether some bands are like that, because I know some bands will write where it’s just two guitarists who get together, or just the guitarist and the vocalist will get together. For me, I prefer writing songs when there’s a drumbeat there. So for this new thing, which I’m gonna call Overthrone – it’s like a play on words sort of thing – that’s what I’m gonna do. I don’t want to take any folks off Conan, obviously. It’d be a shame if it took any of the momentum away, so I’ll just fit that in, and it’ll be mainly a studio project. That’s my vision for it, is record a couple of songs, maybe release them as, I don’t know, somehow on vinyl, maybe release them on Black Bow, and then see what comes of it, see if any other labels want to pick it up. I wouldn’t want to just do that as a Black Bow Records project, and the other guys in the band probably want it to be more than that as well.
You said Chris was going to Ireland, so while he’s gone, you and Paul will write?
No, Chris is back this weekend, so Chris, Paul and I will be going into the studio next week to work on some new stuff, notwithstanding the fact that I prefer to record. I’ll have to break that to Chris when we go in there. But him being our producer, I think it’ll be good for him to be there while we’re writing stuff, and you never know. It might help, it might not. But certainly for the Overthrone stuff, it’ll just be me and the drummer, and that’s just in the initial stages.
How has it been bringing Chris into the band?
Very easy, actually. We know Chris really well. We know him. There’s no ice to break or anything like that. We’ve been friends for quite a while. Since 2009. And that’s quite a long time to be in contact and to see someone often. Obviously he has been working here since August, and so the decision to bring him in was an easy one, and since he’s joined, it’s just been absolutely fine. Obviously he’s a slightly different type of player to Phil. Different style of vocals. Which is fine, because it still fits, and that’s the most important thing. We didn’t say to him, you’ve gotta sing exactly like Phil does, you’ve gotta play exactly like Phil does. We basically said come in and make the songs yours. Even playing certain things now live, he’ll change the way he does certain things here and there, for the better, from the recording. It’s been seamless, really. Not any problems. His diary is similar to mine, since if he’s not recording, he’s available to go on tour, which is similar to me, really – although I don’t have the restriction of having to record anyone because I don’t work in the studio as such. So yeah, it’s been great. He’s enjoying it as well. He played in bands for a little while a few years ago. He was in a band called Agent of the Morai on guitar. He’s been asked to play bass with a few other bands who are of decent reputation, which he has not done yet, he might in the future. He got an endorsement with Fender like in an hour. I think he knew someone there, so he got something. And when people say an “endorsement,” it sounds like a bigger deal than it actually is.
If it’s a discount, that’s a big deal.
Yeah, if it’s a discount, that’s ace. But everyone has these visions of like, I don’t know, Dave Lombardo with a brand new kit and all that, free of charge. A new kit every show or something like that. He just throws it into the crowd, doesn’t need it. Whereas we’re still waiting on ours that we spent 1,800 pounds on. Our kit. But anyway, Chris got himself a Fender Jazz Bass through an endorsement or whatever you call it. So it’s been cool. Been really good. He’s not done any of the driving yet on tour. I’ll have to pick him up on. 
Have to fix that quick.
You guys were just out, last week. How was that?
It was great. And Chris wasn’t with us. Dave Perry was the bass player. It was 10 days, including travel. We went to Vienna and Brussels and Geneva, Paris, Winterthur, which is a town in northern Switzerland, and we went to another town in Belgium called Diksmuide, and Stuttgart as well. It was really cool. We had a driver, which was one of Dave’s friends. I ended up doing most of the driving by the end of it, but in terms of the shows it was really cool. David Perry, who was the bass player who played with us when we did the split with Slomatics. He moved to Copenhagen, which is why he left the band, but I still stayed in contact with him all that time, so when we got the tour on the cards, I was like, I’ll fly you over, have a little practice with us for a couple days, and we’ll go and do a run of shows. And it was great. Dave’s a bass great bass player. That’s his main instrument, it always has been. He’s really good on vocals as well. It went brilliant. Went really well. Had some great times. A big long drive home. Drove home from Munich, which is 1,100 kilometers to Calais, then the Channel tunnel over, then another 420 kilometers home. It was quite a long way, but I did all of that on my own. We set off at 5AM after two hours’ sleep, maybe three hours’ sleep, and we got to my house about 22 hours later. Yeah. It didn’t seem that bad, but then the last like two hours of the journey, it starts to feel like I was losing my mind.
It does after a while. I find on really long drives, you hit a point where after four or five hours, you just glaze over. And you can go for however long, but sure enough, 90 minutes before you get to where you’re going, you get that frazzled anticipation. I’ve had a few of those drives.
Paul came and sat in the front with me. I kept looking at the GPS, the satnav, and they said, oh, you’ve got 36 kilometers to the next turn, and your total journey left is like 65 kilometers. I must’ve been glancing at it every five seconds. Obviously it wasn’t moving much in that time. In my mind, I kept screaming, thinking, ah fucking hell, we’ve got so long to go! Why won’t it go down? What am I doing? I was starting to go a bit mad. But then Paul started chatting to me and fortunately that passed. I needed it. But the tour was good. We would’ve done those shows in amongst our April tour, but it just seemed like a bit too long to be away from home.
It was 18 shows, the April tour?
Yeah. 17 or 18.
So to tack another 10 days, you’re pretty much on the road for a month.
Yeah. It would’ve been a bit too much, being away from the kids and stuff and the Mrs. I didn’t really think it would be fair to do that. Plus, for us, as well, it’s nice to come home after a few weeks and look forward to another tour, which we were able to do. So that was cool.
How long are you guys going to be in Australia for?
I think it’s about 10 or 11 days, including travel. We’re doing some shows, in Melbourne we play two shows in one day, and we do the same in Sydney, which is gonna be interesting. But we’re getting driven around by somebody else. We’re borrowing a backline off the bands, so it’ll be fine. I’m really looking forward to that. I’m not particularly excited about flying, because I’m not that good in planes to be honest, but I’m sure it’ll be cool. And when we touch down, I’ll be really good.
I’ve got a sister-in-law who lives in Sydney, so we can say hello to them. I’ve not seen them for two years.
Have you been to Australia before?
No, they moved to Australia from the UK and we’ve not seen them for quite a while. It’s a shame.
Any chance you guys are going to come to the States before you do another record?
We would love to. We’ve not had any offers.
Really?
Well, nothing serious. Every now and again, we’ll get someone who says, if you come over, you need to come and play at my bar, or you need to come do this show or that show. No one with an ability to put on a tour for us has approached us. We nearly came over that time with the Scion thing with Roadburn, but that didn’t work out and I think Enslaved came over instead, which you can’t really argue about. But yeah, we’d love to. Nothing at our end which is stopping us. We’re willing and able. I guess someone’s got to see us, take some interest in it and invite us over. Our label hasn’t offered to do that so far, but I don’t think many labels will, because it costs at least a few grand just for the visas and flights. So it’s a tricky one, and yeah, I don’t really know what – seems like it’s more difficult than most places to get to. Sorry. Like Australia, we spoke to the guy, the promoter. It’s his first time putting on an international band in Australia, so we’re a bit of an experiment for him. I’m sure it’ll go well. I hope so, anyway (laughs). We don’t know anyone [in the US]. We’re just biding our time. Maybe Maryland Death Fest would see fit to ask us over sometime. I think that would be the catalyst, to be honest. If they would ask us over and help with the flights, we’d probably arrange a few shows around it. I think that’s probably the most likely thing for us to do. Obviously we’ve not been asked by them. I’ve seen bands from all over the world go there, similar type of music to us, who’ve been over, so maybe they’ve got us in their sights for next year or the year after or something. I don’t know. But we’d love to. We’ve got lots of people in America who ask, specifically say, you really need to come and play my town. We just have to wait for the right offer. I’m sure it will happen. Sure it will.
Will you work with Napalm again for the next record?
Yeah. I think our contract is, they’ve got rights to the next two albums. They’ve got first refusal on them, I should say. I think it’s gone quite well in business-speak. I think they’d be quite happy with how it’s gone in that way, so I think they’ll probably be quite keen on working with us on the next album. We just have to cross that bridge when we come to it. Then again, there may be other labels that are also interested. I don’t know exactly how the contract works with Napalm other than they have first refusal on the next two.
Has starting your own label changed your attitude about working with someone else?
No, not really. I only view my label as being like a small label. If it grows into something more than that, then great. But as it stands right now, my label really is for bands who haven’t released anything yet and just want to get on the first rung of the ladder. So I’ll give them a really good deal. And I don’t tie them down. Don’t say, this music belongs to me now, you need to sign this or that. I just say, I’ll release your first album on vinyl or tape and you can have 20 percent of anything I press free of charge. If you want to buy anything off me, then you can do it at cost-price. Which is more than most first offers are. They usually get like 12 percent or 10 percent. I guess it’s probably helped me in dealing with other labels, because I think they’ll probably see me as someone now who kind of knows the score, if you see what I mean. And I do, to a certain extent. I understand the ins and outs of certain parts of the contract.
I’m no expert on it, so they probably overestimate my ability to read through a record contract, to be honest. I don’t implement one with the bands I’m on. I just release it once. If I want to release it again, if it’s sold out really quick or something, obviously we just discuss that again. But yeah. I don’t think I’d want to release any new Conan stuff on my label. I’m happy just to do re-release or reissues, because the leg work’s already been done. I don’t think re-releasing the Slomatics split or Horseback Battle Hammer’s gonna do anything – I don’t think we’re losing out by putting it out on my own label, rather than seeking out a bigger label. Certainly not, if you’re looking at the financial side of it, I’ll invest like 800 pounds in 500 copies of the CD, and then obviously the band then makes the money back and I’ll take my costs out of it. But if we release it on another label, then they print out 500 copies and give us 100 and everything else is for them. It just seems like a good idea to put it out myself.
And you’ve set yourself up to where you can have the band feed into the studio and the label. It’s all tied together pretty well. It seems like over the last year, year-plus, you seem to have set yourself up.
Yeah, it is set up quite well here at the studio. Things that I’ll put out on vinyl will normally be bands that record here at the studio, because I see vinyl as being a bigger investment. So I’ll use some of the money that they pay into the studio to record, I’ll then reinvest that in the vinyl that they’ve released. Like, Slomatics are coming in the studio, early July, to record their half of a split with Holly Hunt. I’m gonna put out that on the label. I’ve got Headless Cross, from Scotland. They’re coming in soon and I’m gonna release their album on vinyl and tape. Stuff that’s recorded in the studio, I’ll put out on vinyl. I did have an exception to that rule when I put out the split with Fister [and Norska], because obviously they didn’t record in the studio, but I thought that would be a nice thing to release, because I’m a big fan of Fister and I’m friends with Kenny [Snarzyk, vocals/bass] from Fister, and that was like a nice gesture, a gift for myself really, putting out something by Fister. But that’s worked out really well. When we go on tour, I have a merch table now for just the label. So the stuff that that I’m putting out online, I’ll take out with me on the road as well and sell it on the road. The person who does our merch just has a Conan half and a Black Bow Records half to the merch table. It’s worked out well.
That’s good business.
Oh yeah. I have to think in a business sense. 
I try not to let it get in the way of the whole, being on the road and just playing heavy metal. Like, I’ve got to think now, I don’t have a day job, so I’ve got to contribute to the house somehow, so I’ve got to use some of my brain toward that side of things, but once it’s all set up on the first day, I can forget about it and Marie, who does our merch when we’re in Europe, she handles everything without me having to worry about it, which is important.
