Cirith Ungol interview (Robert Garven and Tim Baker)

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How are you doing? Have you gotten here today?

[Robert Garven] Yes, we played Switzerland last night in Basel and we drove through the Alps. It was beautiful!

Tomorrow you’ll be playing here at the Metalitalia Festival, a show that many people waited for a very long time. Is it bittersweet to finally play in Italy for the first time only for your farewell tour?

[Tim Baker] Yeah, it has been [bittersweet] for a while, I mean, we’re playing all these places for the first time, like he said we played Switzerland yesterday and we hadn’t played there before either so yeah, it’s bittersweet but it’s pretty awesome.

[RG] We’ve been booked here three or four times before but all the shows fell through.

I was planning to come see you in 2022 but the show, and eventually the tour, was cancelled.

[TB] That pesky COVID probably yeah, I remember that.

[RG] Look, I gotta get something out of the way right here: when we called this the final tour we were having some serious kind of issues in the band, but those issues have all gone away now. And so, even though this was planned as our final tour I want you to know that personally, I can’t speak for no one else, I’m not done yet and my goal is to keep the band together and playing. So, I want you to know that this is my…

[TB] It’s his goal.

[RG] I want you to understand where I’m coming from. It’s like, if you get diagnosed with cancer and you sell all your stuff and you’re getting ready to die and the doctor goes, “Well, you know what, you have five more years to live”…. It changes your whole perspective. Like I said, we had some major issues in the band and they pretty much went away and so now we’re playing better than we ever did before. He’s singing better, and all our fans are going “Don’t quit, don’t quit!”.
But we’ve already promised everyone this is the last time we’re playing here and there and so this is what we can say: we actually had a bunch of shows booked this year that have been put off the next year, so my goal is to make Cirith Ungol final tour be like Kiss’s final tour and last for five years [laughs].

[TB] At least one year.

[RG] Yeah, because it can still be the final tour, but if it never ends… [laughs]

Last year a lot happened in Cirith Ungol: you released “Dark Parade”, the second album since you came back, but also you parted ways with Jimmy Barraza and, as we said, you announced your farewell tour. When you announced that Jimmy was leaving you said that the band wouldn’t split up and you’d go on to support the new album, but only a couple of weeks later you announced that 2024 would be your last year performing live. Technically the two statements are not contradictory, you said you’d keep on playing to support “Dark Parade” and that what you did throughout 2024, but still I think some of your fans were confused by the timing of those statements, what happened there?

[TB] Yeah, that’s basically what the change of plan was, yeah.

[RG] We don’t want to talk too much about personal issues because they get kind of thorny, but we will say: Jimmy had some health issues, and so he stepped back from the band. Armand, who is in Night Demon also, recorded our last three albums – “Forever Black”, “Half Past Human”, “Dark Parade” and our new upcoming live album at the Roxy – so, he’s been our friend for the last ten years and he said he would step in to just play one or two shows and it kind of mirrors what our whole band did. When we came back, we said we’d play maybe Keep It True, Up the Hammers, you know, just for our fans but then things started picking up speed rolling downhill like a snowball. So, that’s what happened with Armand, he was gonna play one or two shows and he started enjoying it, he’s having fun, and we’re playing, I think, better than we ever did, ever. Even when all the other people were in the band originally, so I mean, that’s kind of where we’re at, to be honest.

Do you think that, whatever happens live with this farewell tour, whether it lasts a few months or years, you will keep working in the studio on new music?

[TB] Well, it’s the same story as the lives, I mean, we’re just kind of playing by ear right now, see how it goes. I mean, we don’t know what the future is gonna hold. We have to wait and see, really. We’re not promising anything.

[RG] But we’re not ruling nothing out because, listen, at our age we don’t have time to jerk around. You know what I mean? We can’t we can’t take another 20 years off and get back together again, we’ll be a hundred years old, right? So, I think what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do this final tour, we’re gonna go home and…

[TB] Regroup and see what happens.

[RG] Yeah, then we’re gonna leave on our South American tour which is still part of our final tour and then we’re playing in Mexico, and Colorado, and New York, which was still supposed to be this year and it’s next year.

[TB] That’s all good.

[RG] I’m still, like I said, I’m still hoping for something like a Kiss’ five-year final tour.

As we mentioned earlier, Cirith Ungol came back recently, that was at the Frost and Fire Festival in 2016 and at that time you hadn’t been active for pretty much 25 years. I wasn’t around in ‘91, but I believe that overtime you gained a fairly large cult following, I know for a fact that in recent years there was a lot of interest in the band in certain music circles. How aware were you of the interest that surrounded the band in those years?

[TB] Yeah, yeah, it’s all because of the internet, really. The proliferation of the music festivals focused on this genre that are happening today all over the world, you know, they’re smaller, kind of underground festival. We’re at one right now that’s not really that small, but it’s not a huge, huge festival. There’s a lot of bands that the mainstream music fans might not know. So, I mean it’s a combination of that and the internet. That’s really what helped us out,

[RG] Plus also Metal Blade Records, our long-time record company, they kept all of our albums in print, you know, not always all at the same time but they’d re-release some, make them available to the public and a lot of magazines here in Europe, Deaf Forever, Sweden Rocks, Metal Hammer, a lot of the magazines would do articles on us from time to time like retrospectives about this old band that was so great or what have you. We’ll never be a big band but the people that love us love us because we never gave up on our original vision. You know a lot of bands over the years would change, change styles, or change their outlook on life and stuff. All I’ve ever wanted to do is play the heaviest metal that we could and I think the difference between a lot of other bands and us is that if you listen to our last album, “Dark Parade”, I think this is our best album. Now “King of the Dead” is one of the albums that everyone loves and it’s fantastic, but that was in 1984. I’m trying to say I think this [album] has an energy and a power and the heaviness that we had back then 40 years later.

But I meant, were you aware of all that or did it catch you by surprise once you got back on the stages?

[TB] No, we are on the internet, if you are on Facebook and all the other social media things, oh, yeah, we saw that stuff and people are reaching out all the time.

[RG] People are writing us letters and when those magazine articles would come out, we knew that people were thinking about us. Matter of fact, one of the magazine articles I looked at recently was an Italian magazine, it was like 15 pages colour pages with all the albums. So, we figured that…

[TB] Somebody must like us!

[RG] We know we’re just a regular band, but I think like I said our hardcore followers think, “Hey, here’s a band that never gave up on its original vision” and we’re still on that same path today.

Cirith Ungol, together with bands like Manilla Road, Manowar, Warlord and others are considered among the fathers and best representatives of Epic Metal. While all these bands are American, nowadays it seems like you all are more popular in Europe than in your home country.

[TB] Oh, yeah.

How can you explain that?

[TB] Well, because usually the European Metal audiences seem to be smarter. No, I don’t want to say it because they like us or the other bands you just mentioned, but they seem to have much more of a diverse taste in what they like. I mean, over in America everybody just kind of follows along with what’s popular and just jump on that bandwagon and stuff. And I know Manilla Road feels the same way, they did a lot more stuff over here, more touring than they ever did over in the States.

[RG] We play in the United States and the average person in the crowd is over 50. We play in Europe and the average person seems to be under 30. So, we also think it’s like Heavy metal is kind of…

[TB] Resurging.

[RG] Yeah, and it’s not only resurging, but it’s been kind of popular over here all along.

[TB] Yeah, in America, it goes up and down really badly, I mean, you wouldn’t even know that there’s even a Metal scene in America unless you’re IN the scene. Back in the 80s that’s all you saw, like on MTV or anywhere, it was the big thing and then it kind of went away. Over here it never really went anywhere. I mean, it’s always been right there, popular. Underground but still kind of a big thing.

[RG] We just played like around ten shows in the US this last year, you know, and there’s people up people coming out to the shows, you know, it’s a good audience, but it doesn’t have the intensity of here in Europe.

Yeah, if you go to Keep It True, where you played a few years back and will play next month, people are gonna know every single lyric from every single band.

[TB] I know, isn’t that amazing? It’s crazy, even bands that you never heard of you go there and go, “Oh these guys know every song, man!”. Our friend, the drummer of Night Demon, Brian, he’s a vinyl guy and he’s like this. You know, he’s the king of obscure stuff, you ask him about any Metal band from back in the day and he’ll know about. I mean, he’s probably right now over in the merch over here like looking through all the vinyl.

[RG] I’ll tell you a funny story about the last time we played there. One of our hero bands, Lucifer’s Friends, from Germany, played and we headlined one night, they headlined the other…

[TB] That was Hammer of Doom, wasn’t it?

[RG] Yeah, but Hammer of Doom kind of morphed into Keep It True Rising. Seeing a band, once again, that’s a band that we grew up with, you know, we were in a band and that was a band that we were like looking up to over here, and being able to play with bands like that has really been incredible. We recently played in Ireland with Brian Downey from Thin Lizzy and that was another special one. But, you know, we’re losing that whole generation. We’re losing them quickly. So, you know, that’s why we’re trying to like…

[TB] Get out there and do it.

[RG] Yeah, keep the flame alive.

Now, moving to “Dark Parade”, as we said this is your second album after your comeback, how were the processes of songwriting and recording compared to “Forever Black”, have things become smoother after some years back together, or is all the same?

[RG] I think we’ve done it the same all along, you know. I always tell people if we gave out our secret recipe, it wouldn’t be a secret recipe anymore. Anyway, everyone can write song lyrics, but Tim writes most of the lyrics. But the one thing that we have done is we’ve kind of morphed, we’ve always been kind of like a fantasy-based band, but we’ve had doom… One of the first songs that we ever wrote on “Metal Massacre 1” was “Death of the Sun” about the end of the Earth and the sun, so we’ve had that all along. Our latest several albums have been morphing slowly into what “Dark Parade” is which is like the ultimate doom Metal experience. I don’t know what he’s got to say.

[TB] Well, not musically, but certainly lyrically.

[RG] But this album’s heavy, man. We’re gonna play some songs tomorrow night, but when I listen to the album I’m just like, “Wow!”, that’s what we were shooting for. It’s what I wanted, something that I am really proud of.

You mentioned the lyrics, could it be considered a sort of concept album?

[TB] Well, a lot of it is just a basic commentary on what’s going on in the world, which is always near the end, isn’t it? You know what I mean? It’s like one step away from that, like the Doomsday Clock is one minute to midnight, I guess somebody once said. That’s pretty much what I’m talking about.

[RG] It’s the earth’s final tour too.

[TB] Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, so that’s what that’s about.

Going out with a bang.

[RG] Well, let’s hope we don’t go out with a bang [laughs].

[TB] Well, yeah, we’re getting close.

Because of the timing of things, you wrote this last album during the pandemic. Do you feel like it has influenced it in any way, either musically or lyrically?

[TB] Not any more than anything else would. All the catastrophes, all the crap that goes on in the world is like, that was just one thing piled on top of it that made it even more insufferable for the planet. It was what it was.
It’s a weird thing as people look at it now, that went on for almost three freaking years, man, but there has been this erasure from everybody’s memory like a missing… It’s like getting abducted from aliens and you come back and you’re sitting in your bedroom and you think, “Where have I been for three days?” but the truth is, “Oh shit. Where did those three years go, man?”

[RG] Definitely when our previous album, “Forever Black”, came out, it was on something like March 20th, and it was like the first day of the actual pandemic. I remember walking around my neighbourhood, it was like in a science fiction movie: no one around, no pets, no birds, no cars.

[TB] So we had nothing else to do than going down that big doomy rabbit hole that we did on “Dark Parade”.

Something that I find really impressive about “Dark Parade” and “Forever Black” is how they sound 100% Cirith Ungol while sounding fresh and without copying yourselves, how they sound modern yet very old school. Is it hard to find this balance, is it the result of a very delicate process of crafting your songs, or is it just the natural way they come out?

[RG] I read on “Forever Black” and on this album people saying that they sound like it’s from the 80s, but that’s kind of when our heyday was and so it’d be kind of like if The Beatles were still all alive and they got together and put on an album, no one would question like, “Hey, wow, they sound like the Beatles”. I think we just picked up where we left off.

[TB] Well, plus it sounds way better, I think that these albums are just better musically. I mean, we were younger back then, I wouldn’t say we didn’t know what we were doing but, you know, we were just going for it, doing our 80s Metal kind of stuff. But modern technology and being able to be in the studio and do what we’ve wanted to do because, like I said, Armand recorded all this stuff in the studio which is in the same building as where we have our practice place, so we just walk over there and record. It was a match made in heaven and I think it really helped out. Instead of having to go somewhere, have limited recording time and go in and do all that kind of suffering through, which we’ve done on the older albums. With these we had a lot more leeway, a lot more time to do stuff and make it sound right and be the way that we wanted it to be. To me they still could have been a lot, lot, lot better, but I mean they are pretty good. I mean they sound good and the songs are great. So, it’s still something we can be satisfied with. Modern technology and being able to get in here and have the time to do what we want to do is what I think makes it better, it makes it different and the same as back in the day.

[RG] What we didn’t do is, there’s no triggered drums, there’s no weird auto-tune vocals or any of that kind of stuff. I read recently on Youtube some guy who, talking about “Velocity”, he said, “I guess the singer didn’t know he was singing in a different key than the guitar” or something. But we just write songs…

[TB] I don’t even know what he’s talking about! [Laughs]

[RG] Yeah, you know, we’re just trying to play the heaviest music, we don’t try to overanalyse it, but we’re also trying to come at it the same way we did. Even though some of the technology is new, we were on tape and now it’s digital, we didn’t do that much different than we did originally. It just the equipment’s a little bit more modern.

[TB] Oh, it’s just so much easier to record nowadays!

You mentioned The Beatles and, going way, way back, you first started to play together as Titanic and I know that when you started out you were playing The Beatles music. While some point of contact can be found in songs like “Helter Skelter” or “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, which is basically an ancestor to Doom Metal, of course the music of Cirith Ungol is very different from theirs.

[RG] Well, you know what, we grew up at that time but to be honest it was one of the guys, and he’s passed away, Pat Galligan, he was in the Angry Samoans after he left our band, he did some Punk stuff, but The Beatles was his thing. We kind of we played along with it, and Tim wasn’t even in the band then.

[TB] I have nothing to say about that, nobody can blame me for that [laughs].

[RG] Yeah, but listen, I love The Beatles, but at the time though…

[TB] It was like a gateway drug to other things, you know, I mean, so that’s really what it was. And then we start listening to other stuff like The Doors, then you move on to Mountain.

[RG] Yeah, Blue Cheer.

[TB] And then Black Sabbath comes along, you know, at that point you think, uh, the Beatles? Okay. [Laughs]

[RG] And we were there on the front row. I remember being over at the record store across from our school and Black Sabbath’s first album was there. One of the guys in the band standing next to me and goes, “Hey man, do you think these guys are any good?”. So, it’s like we counter on the ground floor of all that and we were in a band at the same time, so we had a chance to at least kind of being around through almost a whole history of…

[TB] …of Metal. Oh, yeah, of course.

[RG] But even at the time of The Beatles, you know, it’s like Jimi Hendrix, and Cream and so on. There’s a lot of bands swirling around that same era that were just a little bit heavier, and I think that’s the stuff that we lean towards.
I can tell you like The Beatles and like I said, some of that stuff is classic if you listen to any of that, but I think we’re probably more like the Helter Skelter part of The Beatles, you know.

My final question was going to be if you thought you might back together in the future to play again, like you did the last time after a 25 years break, but you already answered me…

[TB] There you go, this is the future for us. Like Rob said, even if we tried to take a break and things like that, we’re not getting any younger and like he said a lot of the bands you’re seeing around, even some of the bands that are playing at this festival, we all came up at the same time. Everybody’s kind of looking at the end of their run here, you know, so it’s a matter of wait and see, but don’t wait too long to see what happens.

[RG] This is the truth from my perspective: I’m not ready to quit yet. And I will do anything in my power, I’m gonna try to keep the band moving forward one way or another.
And we will leave it up to you to watch our show tomorrow night and let us know whether…

[TB] … That’s a good idea.

[RG] And if you think that we have anything left to offer the world.
I think this is going to be a killer show tomorrow night. Our set covers pretty much our whole career and you know, we tried to put… that’s another weird thing: as we keep putting albums out and write really good material, this last year me and Tim wanted to play every song on this album, because back in the day like when Black Sabbath came out, when I saw them at the time of Vol. 4, they’d come out on stage and basically play their whole new album and maybe something like Paranoid or War Pigs or something, right?
But look, we understand that a lot of our fans who have never seen us before they would like to see a mix of the stuff. So, there’s a little bit off of every album.

Or you can just do a three hour show and play everything.

[TB] Oh, well [fake coughs then laughs].

[RG] Well, we have played with a lot of big bands and for the bands that do the three hours show there’s actually like one hour music and like around two hours of other stuff.

[TB] Yeah, them doing the crowd work. Yeah, we’re not doing that [laughs] we try to get through as much stuff as we can.

Source:

https://www.truemetal.it/heavy-metal-news/cirith-ungol-interview-robert-garven-and-tim-baker-1169246

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