The Stone Gods : Temple of Rock

Richie – When it happened it was a case of either pull the whole tour or try to get someone else in and luckily we found Robin (Robin Goodridge, ex-Bush/Spear of Destiny) who’s been awesome and really helped us out by agreeing to do the tour with us.  The tour was really important to us and we really didn’t want to cancel it by thankfully Robin here helped save the day.

MM – How did you come to find Robin?
Richie – He was hanging around.  No actually it was Dan’s guitar tech Adi Vines who used to know Robin from his old band Bush and he suggested him, he (Robin) was up on the train in a flash.

Robin – It was strange though because on the Monday I’d not heard a note of their music, then on the Friday I was playing Donnington with them!

Richie – It was quite a big order really, but the order was filled and the rock was delivered on time and tasted wonderful.

MM – Well that actually leads nicely into my next question, how did Download go?
Toby – It tasted really nice.  We had 10,000 metal maniacs screaming at us!

Richie – It was really good because it’s well known as a mecca for the rock world.  It was nice to kick off the ‘album campaign’ and a good way to kick off the new tour as well.

Dan – Yeh it was great being there but it was all thanks to Robin really, because if he hadn’t agreed to help us out then we wouldn’t have been able to have been there.

MM – How’s the tour going this time around as opposed to your tour earlier in the year?  Is the word starting to spread out there about the band?
Dan – Yes there’s been a steady increase in ticket sales and there’s more people singing along.  It’s strange though because at one of the gigs we played there were more people turned up this time, but there wasn’t anyone in the crowd we recognised from the last time around.  It was like a whole new lot of rock fans had come along to check us out.  Maybe the others had all come along to see us at Download?

Richie – To be honest we haven’t really done ourselves any favours by going out on tour at this time of the year because June’s notorious for being a pretty rubbish time for tours really.  You have all the festivals going on, you’ve got the exams so the students are busy studying and the rest have already gone home by now.  You’ve also got the footy tournament on at the moment, so us going out on tour now is pretty much going out on a limb.

Robin – We’ve been having some great fun though and it’s getting better and better as the tour goes on.  We’re really starting to kick some arse.

Richie – It’s really important for us to go out and establish ourselves as a live band.  It wasn’t really an option for us to cancel this tour when we found out Ed couldn’t do it, because really we’re a live band and we need to get out there and be playing, so that people can see that we’re really at home on the live stage.  We need to be able to really take it on from there, one step at a time and build it up from the grass roots level up.  It’s great that we’re seeing people leaving our shows with a smile on their faces.

MM – Your debut album ‘Silver Spoons & Broken Bones’ is due out soon, what can you tell us about that?
Toby – Yes it’s due out the 7th July.
MM – Is that in all formats?
Dan – Yes everything.

Richie – Yes that’s CD, vinyl, download, cassette, 8 track, VHS, Beta-max, lazer disc, dart board and medical implant.

Robin – Yes and I will gladly volunteer for the insertion of that.
MM – What to have it inserted into you or to do the insertion?
Robin – No, I’ll gladly volunteer to do the inserting. (This comment is met which much laughter around the room and some polite coughing at the thought of Robin doing his insertions.  Now that’s what I call dedication to the cause.  Ladies if you don’t mind let’s have an orderly queue).

Ritchie – Yes, that’s due to be inserted on the 7th July.

MM – What about the songs on the album?
Toby – They’re great!

Richie – It’s a collection of 13 tracks of varying levels of rock n’ roll from the heavy to the more ballady end of the genre.

Robin – I have to say it’s quite a diverse collection.

Richie – It’s really been like a journey making this album (Richie desperately tries not to sound like a spaced out hippy with that comment by countering it with a genuine explanation of how the band bonded and progressed together while making the album).  There’s a lot of different styles in there and we’re all really proud to put it out.  Someone else mentioned to us that there’s something on the new album for every rock fan and basically whichever genre of rock appeals to you, there will be something on the new album that will appeal to you.

I like diverse albums myself, I like albums that have a little bit of something else on them rather than this is what we do and we’re going to do it for 50 minutes.

Dan – I think it’s quite an ambitious album for our first album but I think we’ve managed to pull it off.

MM – How did the writing process go for the songs on the new album, did you all chip in?
Toby – We all sat around round a table with a glass of port.

Dan – There was a lot of wine drunk during the making of it.

Toby – It started out around 7 pm, then moved to 6 pm and then in no time it had moved back to just before 4 pm.  Basically the four of us sat down around a table with a pen and paper and wrote down some ideas and by the time it came to actually record the album, we were up to about 30 songs titles so we then had to whittled it down.

Dan – What we tried to do was write the tunes and we’d write one or even two songs a day.  Then in the evening we’d switch into demo mode where we’d basically go in with artificial instruments to help us get a feel for how things would sound together and did the demo’s.  I like working like that and moving through things quite quickly because generally if you have to ponder too long over something too long then it’s obviously because it’s just shit.

Toby – It’s better to keep moving on and the good point is that if you’ve moving on through the songs that quickly, you suddenly find yourselves sitting at the end of the night listening to something you only wrote that morning and you can say ‘wow that sounds great!’ and you can then leave it and then look at it from afar.

MM – How long did it actually take to put the album together?
Ritchie – I think we started writing at the end of 2006 and we recorded through till June 2007.

Dan – We were told that June 3rd was our absolute deadline but we kind of moved it through to July and we got it right.  That was about 6 months up to that point.  From the actual start to finish I’d say about 8 months, but that’s also including the making up of the band and everything else that was going on with the band.  I think that’s a pretty good achievement to put together a band and then write and record an album and be ready to go out on the road within the space of 8 months.

Ritchie – It is really when you think about it like that, that’s pretty good going for anyone.  I’d never really thought about it like that before.

Toby – These days for some people to spend 6 months making an album is not really an option.

Dan – Luckily enough I have my own studio and we were funding it ourselves.  I know some people tend to knock albums out really quickly these days but I think the really big rock albums sometimes take a little longer to do.

MM – The music listening public have already been introduced to the new heavier sound you have developed with the release of your EP ‘Burn The Witch’, which you released earlier this year.  What reactions did you receive from that release?
Toby – It was all good. The idea of that EP was really just to get something out there.  We’d already got a small fan-base going who had set up the bands fan websites for us.  We really just needed to get something out there.  It was never intended to be a big ‘Ta-Da!’, it was a strictly limited number release.  The thing is you are still able to download it.

Dan – I don’t think the pirates expected us to sell out as quickly as we did and it’s still selling well by download.  I thought you’d only be able to download it for a certain length of time after it had been released, but you can still get it now.

Richie – It was really awesome.  It was great that the actual physical release were all gone in the first day of release.  I’ve kept 6 back for the old pension like. (laughs).

Toby – They’re still going for proper money those things, I’ve seen them selling for £30 on EBay!  That’s crazy! They were only about £3 or £4 to buy in the first place!

MM – How does this differ from the songs you’ve done in your musical past and do you feel more comfortable with this new direction?
Dan – Well it’s not really a new direction as this is a new band and the line-up is completely different.  We’re just doing what’s natural to this collection of people who are in the band, it’s not like we’re thinking about how we should sound now.  There’s a whole load of songs we wrote that sound just like Creedeance.  Who knows we might end up going in that direction for the next record.  We’re all just doing exactly what we want to do, hence that’s why I think the new album is so diverse, because we all like a diverse amount of music.  We don’t want to be pigeon holed to one exact sound because our tastes are a lot broader than that.

MM – How did you first come across Toby and decide to ask him to be in the band?
Toby – Well I suppose I could probably best describe that myself.  We’d been mates for the best part of a decade anyway and I was working with Graham Coxon at the time when I got a call from Dan saying … “give us a call, I’ve got something I want to talk to you about”.  This generally means in my experience, do you want to start a band and it did.  I went off and had a listen to 6 or 7 of the demo’s and then said yeh go on then, I’ll have some of this.

Ritchie – Actually you’d put down the bass for something like 12 songs, some of them he wasn’t even aloud to listen to them first and we just alright, go!

Toby – Yeh, they just pressed record and told me to get on with it! (laughs).

Ritchie – Toby is the master of winging it, just call him “Winger”.

(At this point the guys break off into singing some Kip Winger songs and then progress on to a rather bizarre conversation on the legal age limit to have sex around the world, followed by which decade of music had the most sex and what gets shoved through letter boxes … like I said bizarre and totally unprintable!).

MM – Stone Gods, what if anything does that name represent to you?
Toby – Probably the lack of a better name! (laughs).  It’s difficult because we ended up with pages and pages of names and then when we went and googled it they’d all been taken.

Dan – The most difficult part is to try and get 4 people to agree on one name.  Then you google it and find out someone else has already taken it.

Toby – We were this close to becoming named ‘H M S Battlecat’ at one point.  There was a definite Masters of the Universe theme going on at one point.

Dan – ‘The Whispering Weed’ was one of mine.

Ritchie – ‘Our Woman’ was another one and ‘Power Monkey’.

Dan – I’ve actually kept one of the names we considered as the name for a post-prog-folk off-shoot project I’m going to start soon called ‘Druid’s Egg’.  (Ladies and gentlemen, remember where you heard that news first, Druid’s Egg, a band to watch out for!).

MM – Do you think it was perhaps a case of too much too soon before with the Darkness’s sudden rise to fame, although I am aware that as a band you (Dan) had been going at it for quite a long time before it suddenly took off and exploded onto the scene.
Dan -  For certain members I’d say yes, most of the members other than me.  It was a hell of a ride and a lot of fun and a sharp learning curve.  I’d already spent a good 10 years desperately trying to get into that kind of situation, whereas the other guys hadn’t and I think it just really took them by surprise.  I’d been working in the industry and had a bit more experience and so I was more than ready for it, hence the reason I didn’t change that much when it actually happened.  But that’s just the way it goes you know.

I think until you’re actually in that situation then it’s very difficult to judge what it is to have to deal with all that.  I know people say … “well what’s the problem, you’ve got everything you need!” … but it’s not that simple really, if it’s not exactly what you asked for and then you’re thrown into that situation without really knowing if that’s what you want to be doing, it can really fuck you up and I think that’s what happened.

Robin – It’s interesting really to be careful what you wish for, because your perception of what it is, when you actually get into it you might go … “fucking hell, am I going to be able to deal with this?” … and the answer might be that actually you can’t.  But then it’s too late because by then you’ve got it.

So many people get into a position that they don’t want something the way it is, but then trying to get back out of it can fuck them up in so many different ways.  Some people might choose to make records that won’t do too well because they deliberately don’t want to get into all that again.  It happens to everyone to a certain degree but you just have to work out how you’re going to deal with it.

Dan – Yes, that’s what I think happened to us.  It can create a feeling of being trapped for some people.

Robin – Yeh, suddenly you realise you’ve created this big monster and you have to decide whether you’re bigger than it and whether you actually like this monster you’ve created, or is it actually your enemy.

Dan – Well I’m not afraid of the monster, I’m still hungry and so they can fuckin’ bring it on.

MM – What was the biggest plus that came out of that experience?
Dan – The biggest plus that came out of that experience is that I can still sit here and talk to you.  I guess also meeting Ritchie along the way, that was one of the major things that’s continued on through from that experience.

MM – Do you have any one main regret from what happened during that time?
Dan – Do you know what, I don’t have any fucking regrets about that time.  I guess there were things you learn as a result of going through those experiences.  One of those is I now know how to behave in a relationship now.   But musically you know what, if I had to do it all over again, then no I’d probably do everything exactly the same way again.  I tried my absolute best to keep the thing going and OK so that nearly cost me a couple of things, but I don’t regret anything.

It’s stressful but unless you’re running a really high profile business, then people just don’t realise how stressful it can be.  It’s difficult to try and keep everything together and keep the family together when you’re out on the road.  It is quite stressful at times but I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever.  It’s an awesome start to my career, I’m just about to release my third album and I’m only 28 years old.

MM – Well you did actually achieve a hell of a lot regardless of it all ended when you think about it.
Dan – I actually got an Ivor Norvello award for songwriter of the year with my name on it.

Richie – That’s like an Oscar for the best album ever made.

Dan – Yes, it’s like winning an Oscar.  You know back in the day I used to work for a publisher and I was like a runner and once a week I had to go and dust all the Ivor Norvello awards that the publisher had for all these amazing song writers and now I dust my own! (laughs).

MM – Ok now I have to ask you a really important question now, who got the big white tiger and the huge pair of boobs?
Dan – Well they both went up on EBay and neither of them sold for hardly anything!

Richie – I have a feeling some zoo were interested in having the white tiger.

Dan – I can’t remember what happened to it in the end.  I wanted to turn the huge pair of tits into a hot tub.  They were massive.  A lot of that stuff was sold off as The Darkness as a company wound down.

Richie – I loved that tiger, it was really soft to touch and very well made.  It was fantastic.  When it first came in it was just white and didn’t have any stripes on it.

Dan – I was surprised that Justin didn’t want to buy it actually. (Justin’s quite well known amongst the fans for having a soft spot for felines and tigers in particular).

MM – How did that experience affect your relationship with Justin or is it true that blood is thicker than water?
Dan – The blood is thickening so to speak.  Yes we fell out for quite a while but we’re on brighter terms now and he’s quite supportive of this band.  We were chatting the other day and he’s got a new band that’s coming out soon and we’re fully aware people are going to try and play us off against each other.  We’ve already had a couple of mis-quotes.  When he heard about the band he was straight on the phone and asked if there was anything he could do to help and gave us some good comments so it’s all very amicable now.

Richie – Sometimes you might make a jokey comment in an interview and then it’s mis-quoted when it’s printed.  That really upsets me when that happens, because you think shit, if such and such reads that they’re going to think I was having a go and I wasn’t.

When we were doing the ‘Ticket to Hell’ album I was Justin’s interview partner for a lot of the interviews he did and I saw time and time again journalists feed him questions to try and get him to bite.  I’ve seen them print things that he was supposed to have said and I swear I was there and he definitely did not say those things.  He was one of those people that interviewers used to really try to bait during interviews.

MM – You know that’s so wrong to do that because after all, the music press is supposed to be here to support the scene not sabotage it.
Dan – I think it happens because people run out of things to write about and so as soon as you become famous the red tops are always on the look out for scandal.

Richie – The true music press like Kerrang, Metal Hammer and Classic Rock didn’t do things like that but the moment you get into the arena of the red tops you’re on to loser, because they’ll build you up as much as you can and claim to have made you what you are, then take absolute delight in chopping you down inch by inch and cause massive problems just because they want to sell newspapers.

Dan – I’ve never had any interest in being a celebrity or anything like that, never even remotely interested in that shit.  When you have your sister and your mother cowering on the floor in their room because you’ve got some shit from the **** (paper’s name removed) banging on the windows and doors because they think they can get a story out of them and shouting and saying they aren’t going to leave until they get their story.  You have to phone your dad and tell him not to kill the guy.  It’s just not good.  If that’s what it takes to be successful or famous or whatever, then I don’t give a shit and I’d rather not do any interviews at all.

MM – Richie, how did your progression from bass player to guitarist and singer come about?
Richie – To be honest the whole bass player thing came about as a bit of a side step.  I was always a guitar player as a youth.  It was actually easier for me to play a guitar than to play a bass.  It was just a different instrument I had to play and so getting back to playing the guitar was like getting back on top of a comfortable pony and smacking it’s ass.  (To which he breaks out into hysterics of laughter).

MM – You joined the band when it was still The Darkness as bass player.
Ritchie – Yes it was in May 2005 I joined The Darkness and shortly as soon as I joined everything went tits up!  That bodes well for this project doesn’t it! (laughs).  I never actually sang for The Darkness though, those were boots too big for me to fill, I’d never have tried that.  It wasn’t until we put together this new band that I agreed to be the singer.

MM – Are the band currently signed or unsigned at the moment?
Dan – We’ve signed a distribution deal.  It’s kind of a cool deal we have with them.  There’s no big advances of anything like that like you’d have with a traditional record deal.  Basically you bring the album to the table that you’ve made yourself and then rather than make 8p a record you make something more like £5 a record, so it’s all a very independent way of going about things.  We’re really happy with it and they were the first ones out of the gate saying they really loved the record.  It just seemed like the right thing to do.

I think even if the right label offered us a wad of cash I’d have been nervous of signing with any major record label in this climate for 4 albums.  The rug has been pulled out from under the music business.  EMI went last week in the UK didn’t it so … it’s constantly happening.  If we’d signed a deal 6 or 7 months ago with people who may or may not have been interested in us, then now those people wouldn’t have been working there any more and we’d have been stuck with a deal and an album that would never have seen the light of day.  You’d have also been stuck with them for the next 3 album releases.

Toby – You could have been stuck with a load of new people who didn’t really know what to do with it and they could have either shelved it, or they might have tried to bring it out but wouldn’t know what to do with it.  Major labels these days are also keen on offering what they call 360 deals, where they get your publishing, they get your touring, they get your merchandise, they get absolutely everything and to be honest it’s just not fucking worth it.  You might as well just form a club and hand your music out on CD’s for free if you’re going to do that.

MM – You’ve started playing smaller venues again and are progressing to medium sized venues, how do you feel to be starting all over again and if it suddenly took off like before, would you deliberately try to slow things down?
Dan – Well it’s great to be back playing smaller venues as it’s just a whole different experience to be honest with you.  It was one I was so pissed off with the first time around and I don’t really remember, but this time around it’s like a whole new exciting world.

I think if it did suddenly take off again then yes I wouldn’t just want to play the bigger venues just because more people want to come to the show.  I’ve kinda been there and done that, so yes I’d try and keep it at a level where it’s still enjoyable.  I’m not saying it’s not enjoyable playing arenas and stuff like that, but I think if we can get to a level where we’re playing places like Brixton Academy and Manchester Apollo I’d be happy to stay at that level.  That’s a little way off at the moment but we’re in no rush.

MM – Finally thanks for taking the time out to chat with us this evening, we really appreciate it.  Is there anything I’ve omitted to ask that you’d like to share with all our readers?
Toby – Thanks.  I think all we’d really like to say to everyone is just come on out and check us out live.  I think we have something there to offer everyone.

Dan – Yes, come and check us out live and the new album is fantastic and you’d be hard pushed to find a band as diverse as us or even in the same ball park.

MM – With that we left Richie to warm up his voice and the rest of the lads to wipe the tears of happiness from their eyes.  Stone Gods are one hell of a cracking live band and their forthcoming album sounds like it’s going to be a corker so be sure to check it out.