***
I meet Head Like A
Hole vocalist Booga Beazley and fellow band original Nigel Regan in the crowded
car park of a suburban Kapiti Coast shopping mall. It’s a busy Saturday morning
and the mobility scooter crews are out in full force. The sun is also out, so
we all agree to relocate to a quieter outdoor spot for our chat. But Booga is
restless. And he’s thirsty, so first we’re off to Wendy’s for a milkshake.
Things don’t get much more rock n roll than this.
Only they do, and
it’s not long before Beazley and Regan are regaling me with hilarious stories
of death metal festivals in Warsaw, of choreographed showcased corporate metal,
of meeting heroes, and of the delicious irony behind hoardes of stonewashed denim-clad
bogans – “depressed Polish-looking ones” – chasing ex-drummer Mark Hamill’s
autograph.
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| Booga Beazley, Rock God ... photo: Tony Barrett |
But they were with me to talk of none of those things, because Head Like A Hole have a brand new album out. Narcocorrido is officially album number six, a fact that seems rather moot given the sheer volume of EP-length and non-album releases from the band over the years. It’s the second post-reunion album after 2011’s Blood Will Out took the reformed band into unprecedented top ten chart territory.
Narcocorrido has
been self-released on Kickstarter, so I begin by asking Regan about the thinking
behind that.
“Kickstarter was
an absolute necessity. Without it there wouldn’t have been an album. We would
have had to tour and save all of that money and even then I don’t think we
could have done it. Kickstarter paid for it. We got more than we asked for.”
Beazley adds, “we
have a distributor, it’s just that we don’t have a record label saying ‘here’s
eighty grand, go and do a record’. Blood Will Out cost almost thirty grand all
up so we had to do something (with Kickstarter). We asked for ten grand, and we
got just over eleven, and it came in at around nine after they take some money
and other costs out.”
The recording and
production process was not without its issues, but each man seems happy with
the final result, with Regan keen to acknowledge the role of producer Andrew
Buckton.
“The production
was a combination of the band and Andrew. He had quite a bit of input, the
things he came up with were usually pretty spot on. Andrew actually pulled out
the guitar, and played on some of the songs. He had really good ideas that
actually fit.
“We went into
(Buckton’s) Studio 203, did all the guitars and vocals, and mixed it. But then
he shut his studio down in the middle of it, so we ended up doing some tracks
at Roundhead, and some at York Street. Then we did some guitars and vocals with
Jol Mulholland at the Oven.”
Beazley also notes
that working with Buckton made perfect sense, but laments the lack of time
spent together as a band.
“Andrew did Blood
Will Out so that’s why we went back to him. We did say to him that we didn’t
want the album to be a copy of that. But we knew from the songs we’d written
that it would be something different.
“Things have definitely changed, the
song-writing skills have got better. There’s still room for a lot of
improvement, if we could spend more time together as a band. If we can do
Narcocorrido on the bare minimum of time as a band then what would happen if we
threw ourselves at it?
“I had to do all
the vocals in two days. And that bummed me out. I wanted to go back and do
more. But because of time and going back and forth on the internet, all of the
communication needed, it was too hard. It’s so frustrating. There will probably
be a couple of songs on the album where the vocal levels could have been
louder, and where we probably could have revisited that vocal and the mix, but
it just came down to time.”
Regan wonders how
fans will receive it.
“Because we took a
lot more risks musically. I mean, one of the songs on there is called ‘Mexico’,
and I wrote that about 15 years ago. I’ve been trying to get the guys to do it
forever. I’ve recorded it about five times before. Booga had always been a bit
iffy about it, but we thought maybe we could give it a go this time. It’s a bit
slower.”
Both men then
reflect on the perils of cleaning things up too much, and of the importance of
leaving “some dirt in there”. I ask whether all of the band members felt happy
with their contribution to the end result, whether or not they’d all been
equally involved, and Beazley is quick to quip … “nah, I reckon Nigel (Regan)
did most of it.”
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| Nigel and Nigel (Booga) outside the mall, early 2015 |
Regan responds, “I write the songs but I only come up with the skeleton of it in most cases. With this album one of the best songs on it is ‘Rise and Fall of the Sun’ and Andrew Ashton wrote that. He was pissed at one of the practices and started playing this riff, and it was one of those riffs that only happen from band practices. I remember it was funny because it changed each time he showed it to me, but it had this groove and then next minute, bam! … we had this whole song instantly.”
A regular Head
Like A Hole party trick comes in the form of covers, and Beazley confirms that
at some point “we’re going to do a covers album. There’s tracks I’d love to do.
“We talked about
that (for this album) but it was just the thing about time really. We hadn’t
enough time to play as a band, we had just enough time to bash out the ideas
for songs and get them sounding good for recording really.”
Regan adds, “yeah,
unfortunately we don’t usually end up with many more songs than we actually
need. We come up with the album, where a lot of bands will have maybe 15 or 16
songs recorded, and then trim it down for the album.”
The band plan to
tour the album shortly after its April 10 release date, with Beazley confirming
that “May or June” dates are most likely.
“It’s gotta pay.
We’ve gotta break even. Eccles is slapping it together for us. We’ve gone
through a few booking agents, and you know, had a bit of history with other
people, but at the moment we’re using Eccles Entertainment. Dave Munro did a
really great job on the last tour. The band has confidence in him. It can be a
little bit frustrating sometimes when things don’t roll along as fast as you
expect, because everyone has to plan their life around the tour dates, and when
you’ve got family it’s bloody hard just to drop everything and take off on
tour.”
The conversation
inevitably skirts around the periphery of Head Like A Hole’s indelible link
with onetime label mates Shihad, the early years of touring nationally and
across Europe, with Regan ultimately reflecting on the respective paths taken
by each band.
“To a lot of
average punters, when a band is overseas it normally equates to the impression
they’re doing well, but then you watch the Shihad doco, and look at all the
shit they went through at the time and you know, it didn’t actually look like
it was all that much fun.”
Beazley has some
fun with the topic, “we quit in 2000 and came back in 2011, or 2010, and you
know that ten years was a great break and that did great things for us. And it
probably could have done great things for Shihad too (laughs).”
He then notes that
Head Like A Hole has its own movie-length doco in the process of being
finished. A work-in-progress since the band reformed, it could be completed
sometime in the “next six months.”
Beazley is
relatively coy about details but is clearly excited by the prospect.
“It has a lot of
clips of us years ago, and heaps of live stuff, some wicked photographs of people,
interviews, and it’s just a really great story of how we started and what we
went through over the years.”
Near the end of
our chat Beazley comments on how Blood Will Out had hit the ground running,
climbing into the upper echelon of the charts almost immediately. I tease him a
little, expressing my surprise that the charts or radio play are things that
even enter the band’s collective psyche, before leaving it to Regan to have the
final word …
“The thing is,
we’re still the same guys we were when we started the band. If someone had told
me then that I’d be sitting here now (25 years later) talking about our sixth
album I wouldn’t have believed it. So when you hear your song on the radio we
still get that buzz. It’s like, ‘wow, people like our music’. At the end of the
day we do it for ourselves, and if people like it, that’s great.”
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