Conan Share Earth-Shaking Set at The Live Room in Belfast (plus Interview!)
Doomed & Stoned is proud to partner with Conan and The Live Room Belfast to share this striking live studio performance of the band, which includes a performance of “Total Conquest,” “Satsumo,” and “Gravity Chasm.” This comes just weeks ahead of Conan’s new album, ‘Existential Void Guardian’ (2018), releasing September 14th on Napalm Records.
Start Together Studio recently launched The Live Room Belfast to invite touring bands in for special recordings, usually between 3-5 songs, as a way to capture the intimacy of a live studio performance. This set was recorded, mixed, and edited by Niall Doran with assistance from Assistant Audio Engineers and filmed by Ciara McMullan. The team did a fantastic job of capturing the massive weight of the Liverpool trio’s legendary riffs and especially the fearsome caveman vocals of frontman Jon Davis. Afterwards, Jon sat down with Jake Wallace from the band Elder Druid (who organized our recent 'Doomed & Stoned in Ireland Compilation’) for an in-depth interview.
And now, it’s time for Jon David (guitar/vox), Chris Fielding (bass), and Johnny King (drums) do their thing! Enjoy…
17.08.18 IR - Cork / Cyprus Avenue
30.09.18 UK - Sheffield / O2 Academy
02.10.18 NL - Eindhoven / Effenaar
03.10.18 DE - Bochum / Rockpalast
04.10.18 DE - Hamburg / Logo
05.10.18 DE - Berlin / Musik & Frieden
06.10.18 PL - Wroclaw / Firlej
07.10.18 PL - Warsaw / Poglos
09.10.18 LT - Vinius / Rock River Club
10.10.18 LV - Jelgava / Melno Cepuriso Balerija
11.10.18 EE - Tallinn / Sveta
13.10.18 FI - Helsinki / Blow Up 4 Festival
15.10.18 SE - Stockholm / Kraken
16.10.18 TBA
17.10.18 SE - Malmo / Plan B
19.10.18 DK - Copenhagen / Stengade
20.10.18 NL - Leeuwarden / Into The Void Festival
23.11.18 UK - Nottingham / The Loft
24.11.18 UK - Leeds / Temple Of Boom
26.11.18 UK - Glasgow / Audio
27.11.18 UK - Manchester / Rebellion
28.11.18 UK - Coventry / The Arches
Interview Jon Davis of Conan ~By Jake Wallace (Elder Druid)~
Recorded May 16, 2018 in The Live Room Belfast
Do you enjoy being on the road so much?
Yeah we do, we have always tried to tour as much as possible, ever since the very beginning. I remember the first time we played outside of Liverpool with Charger in late 2010, and that was a really big thing, something we were pushing for to try and breakout of Liverpool gigs. We almost immediately started getting opportunities to tour and play, and for a year or so it was just weekends here and there, I really loved that. Then we got the opportunity to go touring around Europe - course that brought its own problem then, because we had to get a van, so we invested a bit of money in an old Ford Transit. And I remember spending nearly £600 on installing a cool sound system in there, so that we could listen to Iron Maiden on the road full blast. Like with speakers right by our heads in the bulkhead.
There’s something about being on the road, and everyday just looking forward to playing the music that you’ve written, and the law of seeing the reaction of people who are listening to your music, that you’ve written sometimes easily, sometimes songs have come together when they’ve been difficult to write. I’ve always found it really rewarding to play music, whether I’m on my own, or whether in the practice room with the lads, or whether onstage. And I remember when I was 16, promising myself I would do this, telling myself that I’m gonna play music cause I saw playing music as a long term thing that I would be in charge of. I never really wanted to work for anyone else, I always wanted to do music, and I remember as a shy and less than confident teenager, thinking this is a path that I can grow, and I really enjoy, something I could do for the rest of my life hopefully. When I get too old to lug cabs then I’ll just pick up an acoustic, and do something with that. So, getting on the road has been something we’ve loved from day one, and now were touring all over the world. This year already, we’ve had a US of 5 weeks, we’ve been to Japan for a week, and we’ve got more far-flung shows lined up for the end of the year, not announced yet. Plus European tours, another UK Tour, and we’ve got an album out soon, I mean it’s just, we love it. I couldn’t do anything else now, if I had to have an office job, I’d probably commit suicide, seriously. (laughs)
What make Monolord the perfect match for this tour, and will you be back in Ireland anytime soon?
I mean, we wanted a band as physically attractive as us, and we’ve finally done it with Monolord. Seriously though, they are a really cool band, they are really good people to tour with, they’re professional, friendly, really interesting people, and they come from a different culture to ours, and we enjoy being on the road with them. We’re not sharing a van with them, although we have done, we shared a night liner with them in October last year. And we didn’t know what to expect then, as we didn’t know them very well on that tour, but we got along really well. They’re from a different culture but very similar people, at the same time, at the core of what we all are in a love for music, and they put their money where their mouth is, in terms of that. They also like to tour a lot, they release really great music, and they’re a really good live act. So when you are choosing a band to tour with, our booking agent puts forward bands and it was really natural, that us and Monolord tour together, and it’s cool that we get to this joint headliner, switch headliners every night. Yeah they’re just great. I mean, I don’t think we’ve ever toured with a band that we didn’t really like, some more than others, obviously, but they are cool as fuck.
I suppose it’s an interesting parallel, between both bands having three members, you get to see how another band performs as a three piece as well every night. Tell us about the origin of the band name, and how you guys have created a genre known as 'Cave-Man Battle Doom.’
Well, Conan could have been called anything really, from 80s-70s science fiction movies, you know Krull was one idea that I had for a band name, very briefly I thought about that, we could have been called, we were called Elf-Beater for a time in our practice room, that’s obviously an awful name so we were never going to use that one long term. Conan just came to me one day, you know, I was going through some personal stuff and I’d had to move into my parent’s for a little while, and I started this band up with an old friend of mine who was a bass player, but he played drums a little bit, so we started and we actually wrote and recorded 'Satsuma’. We had these songs, and we didn’t really have a settled name - we were going to call ourselves Pazuzu for a little while, or Demon-Demaro, as like a Bebo page, in that name, there’s some really old demos if you can search for that. Initially, I wanted it to be a little bit occult-ish type of stuff, and then quickly I realised the lyrics weren’t really going in that direction, and we were more about Sword and Sorcery, and Science Fiction, and Mythology. Then I remember sitting there one day just kind of thinking, 'What do I for a band name?’ and then it just came to me. And it stuck, there wasn’t really any other bands, well there was an Argentina metal band called Conan, but I think they had expired in the 80s, so there was nothing, no current bands within our scene, with that name, or anything close to it, so we grabbed it with both hands.
How did the name 'Cave-Man Battle Doom’ come about?
The very first show that Conan did, in Liverpool, was with friends of ours - John McNulty, and Gemma McNulty, they weren’t married then but they are now, and they’re really close of mine, and the band, they recorded at our studio. But they put us on our first ever show, when it was just me and Paul O'Neil, a two piece, and on the poster for that show, I think it said 'primitive battle doom’, 'cave man battle doom’ or 'cave man doom’. The label we were on, fast forward a couple of months, we recorded 'Horseback Battle Hammer’ and we released stuff on cd, with Aurora-Borealis Records, they used that phrase as part of their sales pitch, on the website, taking it from that first ever poster, and then we thought we’ll put that on a t-shirt cause it looks cool and it sounds cool, and those t-shirts just sold like hot cakes. So we thought, that’s a cool name to make a joke about, obviously we haven’t created our own genre, it would be awesome if we did cause we’d obviously make loads of money then, but it’s just a bit of fun.
I know yourself are involved in Black Bow Records, and Chris is involved in Skyhammer, how did both of those projects come around- was it through the band that this became something you were interested in, or what was the path towards a label and a studio?
When I moved into a large house in a rural location, not far from Liverpool/Chester, there was a couple of extra buildings, one of them was a large coach-house, and I actually wanted to turn that into a rehearsal studio initially. But it needed a lot of building work, which would have cost a lot of money, so I thought I wonder if I could somehow turn this into something that would repay some of that investment, so I’ll do a practice room and then I may be able to rent the practice room out to bands, and I thought nah I don’t think that will make generate enough money to make it worthwhile, unless we have people in there all the time - and if we did that, it could just be people in there 2-3 hours at a time and it would be a bit of a nightmare to manage, with it being a home. I then thought of, well I could turn it into a recording studio, so I got a couple of quotations for layout and stuff like that, it became obvious that it was going to be really expensive to do. So I thought, I’ll do that and see if I can maybe learn the ropes, I might work in there myself as a recording engineer, for an extremely short-lived time I recorded bands in their practice rooms, I had one band ask for a refund, so then I thought maybe I need to practice a little bit more. So I was going to set up the studio, and decided not to in the end, when Chris got in touch - me and Chris had been friends and I’d been asking him what microphones to get, and what stuff do I need really to set up a studio, and we got chatting then one day out of the blue, and he wrote to me saying he had a really crazy idea and could he ring me. So I said okay, he gave me a call, and Chris’s idea was that he would come and work in the studio, and take over and run it, and I waited a little bit and spoke to my wife then. Then in the morning, we chatted again and it became obvious that yeah, it was going to be a great idea. Chris and I started working in the studio from August 2013, the build started in May the same year, we had a company called Studio People do it and they were brilliant.
The first band in there were called Bast, and they came into the studio, they didn’t have a label, I think they had been in talks with Candlelight, but nothing had been agreed at that point, so they recorded this album called Spectres, and I said why don’t I just release it for you, and it was cool to release the first thing we ever recorded at the studio. And that album did quite well, I had to repress it, and then another band came in and I released theirs, as well; then I spoke to Fister and Norska from America, I did a 7-inch split, before you know it I’m releasing music from bands all over, and it’s just snowballed. I didn’t expect it to, and I didn’t really try very hard to be honest, I’m still learning all the time about running the label, make mistakes all the time, but I love it, and it fits in nicely with the band, fits in nicely with the studio. I’m able to really diversify within music now, because obviously everyone has to earn a living somehow – and unless you’re very lucky, you can’t earn a living from just the band, some people can, but I can’t so I have to add other things on to make it possible to have a career in music. So that’s all I do now, thankfully.
You guys feature heavily in the upcoming documentary 'The Doom Doc’ which is due out this summer, how important is a documentary like that in promoting the underground?
I think it’s cool because it engages with people who may not have necessarily have checked out the bands that are being talked about on it, it gives a good overview of what the scene is like, and it’s something that you can take all round the world. We’re friends with Joe Allen, one of the lads who made the documentary, and we played in Japan with him recently and his band Kurokuma. We played a sell-out show in Tokyo in a venue called Earthdom, which hadn’t sold out for ten years or so. And part of the reason why it sold out so well was because the documentary was really popular over there. And it’s really cool cause it’s shone a light on the very grassroots level of heavy music in the UK and beyond, and I don’t think a documentary has done that really for UK heavy music, the very grassroots level, or I’ve never seen one that does it, obviously in America you have 'Such Hawk, Such Hounds.’ It’s good that something like that has been made in England.
Finally, you’ve got the next album 'Existential Void Guardian’ coming out in August, what can you tell us about that?
Well it’s all recorded and mastered now, we’re just waiting on a video getting done for one of the songs, and I’m not going to give any of the songs away. But it’s cool, it’s heavy as fuck, and we’re really proud of it. It’s the first album that we’ve done with Jonny on drums, and it was quite a challenging album to make – because if we’d had anyone else on drums I don’t think we’d have been able to manage it. But fortunately Jonny being as professional as he is, he came in after touring with us for one month, just practicing a riff or two here or there in sound checks, and we sat down in the studio and we kind of wrote the drum parts of the album within a week, or a weekend even, may 3-4 days. So it came together, it wasn’t easy, but the fact that it came together at all was a miracle, because we didn’t allow ourselves the usual amount of time to write an album, so we pushed ourselves to the limit to get it written and get it to a level that were really happy with, because we wouldn’t have released it otherwise. We wrote the drums and the guide guitar in the first few sessions, and then we went back and recorded guitar, and bass, and when we got back from Japan we recorded vocals.
So it came together in a different way to all the other albums, maybe Revengeance was a bit like that, but everything up until then was the product of weekly practices, an hour or two every week. So were kind of getting into this vein now, where were writing music almost like as soon as we sit down, we get together and we can all play, and write music together, it’s really cool. I think a lot of that is to do with Jonny, because he’s got a particular style that really blend in with what me and Chris are doing. It comes out mid-Sept. Tony Roberts is doing the artwork, as many people would expect, the artwork’s cool. And we’ve got a really good video coming out, it’s been done by the same people who shot the Foehammer video, and I gave them this idea of what I’d like them to do with this next video, and it’s insane. It’s everything I would ever want from a Conan video, it’s so sick, it’s amazing.
Follow The Band Get Their Music
titsay
gummygunk
prguitarman
dededos
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
janainaart
