They're the biggest Irish band you've probably never heard of. RONAN MCGREEVYtalks to Nemtheanga, the turbo-charged conversationalist and vocalist of Primordial
IF YOU believe, as many do, that the Irish music scene has wimped out and is populated by exorable talent-show fodder, self-obsessed singer-songwriters, wittering female vocalists and inconsequential bands with nothing to say about the moral and economic collapse of this country, there is an alternative.
They are called Primordial. They are the biggest Irish heavy metal band. They are also the biggest Irish band most Irish people have never heard of. Revered by their fans for their uncompromising nature and epic sound, Primordial scored an international hit with their newest (and seventh) album Redemption at the Puritan's Handearlier this year.
In Germany, the biggest music market in Europe, the album debuted at No 31 in the album charts – a remarkable achievement for a non-mainstream metal band. The album has also charted in Finland, where it reached No 4 in hard-copy sales, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Norway and Greece.
Primordial have been nominated for album of the year by Norway's biggest newspaper and were similarly nominated in Denmark for metal band of the year, in the company of Metallica and Slipknot. In the UK this year they won the Metal Hammerunderground band of the year, which is chosen by the magazine's readers.
Outside the introverted Irish metal scene, Primordial are largely unknown legends in a country where heavy metal is invariably the subject of uninformed scorn. For lead singer A A Nemtheanga (Alan Averill) there is a sense of resignation, mixed with a sense of puzzlement – a view they share with many Irish metal bands about the home scene.
“I don’t get it. When did rock become so deeply uncool in this country?” he asks in advance of their only Irish concert this year. A turbo-charged conversationalist with a fine line in invective, Nemtheanga (“evil tongue” in old Irish) is contemptuous of an Irish music scene which seeks to exclude a whole genre of music.
“It is kind of an agenda being set, one half by the indie music set who write about bands who won’t even fill Whelan’s and tell us that we should like them, and then you have the pop music set,” he said. “To me indie music represents the most base average of every single emotional outlay in music. It is never dark enough, it is never violent enough. It is never anything enough for somebody who is quite attached to extreme music as I am.”
He dismisses the phalanx of guitar-wielding Irish singer-songwriters as “bullshit and rubbish bedsit music”, Villagers as “bland and pathetic, I’d rather listen to Lady GaGa”, but reserves special scorn for Bell XI. “Grind out all the edges. Take a bit of Television, a bit of Talking Heads, a bit of Blondie and make it bland and boring to fill a stadium full of people who don’t know anything about music.”
At heart, Nemtheanga is a musical romantic. At 36 he is young enough to keep the fire of indignation and rage burning – as evidenced by his remarkable vocal performance on the new album – but old enough to remember a time when musical identity meant something. “When I started out in first and second year, there were metal heads, Cure heads, Smiths heads, straight-edge people, psychobilly, rockabilly, everybody had some form of identity or something they identified with.
“There was a certain communality of being alternative. When I left school in 1994, it had kind of died. The sort of individuality that existed in the 1980s and 1990s, of being part of a sub-culture, does not exist anymore.”
Primordial traces its roots to bass player and guitar player Pól MacAmlaigh and Ciarán MacUiliam forming a band in 1987, taking their interest from the burgeoning thrash and death metal scene. Nemtheanga joined as vocalist in 1991. It is an eternity in musical terms. In any other genre, the band would have given up, but in heavy metal, paying your dues has its own rewards.
Primordial released their first album, Imrama, in 1994. The first song Fuil Arsa(ancient blood) is entirely in Irish – a declaration of intent as an Irish identity is central to the music in everything from their Irish names to the 6/8 timings in much of their music.
In 1998 they released the follow-up, Journey's End. It was well received, but the band's combustible internal relationship meant there was no tour.
“In the beginning we didn’t have a work ethic. We weren’t friends at the time. There was nothing to be disappointed about. It was never our intention to be a big band,” Nemtheanga says. “For years we fought. In 1998 the bass player stabbed me in the chin with a knife. We used to kick the shit out of each other backstage, but we’ve kind of grown up now.”
The new millennium brought a change of fortunes and a new impetus. In 2004 they joined Metal Blade Records, the biggest independent metal label in the world with a stable of artists including Slayer and previously the Goo Goo Dolls.
Their first album on the new label, The Gathering Storm,was a big success critically and spawned, perhaps, their best-known song, The Coffin Ships, which clocks in at nearly 10 minutes. Its follow-up, T o The Nameless Dead, released in 2007, proved to be the band's commercial breakthrough, selling 30,000-40,000 copies.
“The last one was the surprise,” says Nemtheanga, referring to the success of the new album. In this latest album they have added some real songwriting craft to their epic sound.
Nemtheanga has one of the most powerful and expressive voices in a musical genre where there is no shortage of same, he is also one of the most literate songwriters in metal. He namechecks the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Latvian poet Vizma Belsevica in Redemption.
He also makes references to Padraig Pearse's poem T he Risen Peoplein the final song on the album, Death of the Gods, which also alludes to James Connolly, Michael Collins and Charles Stewart Parnell. The song imagines the reaction of the "patriot dead" to the state of modern Ireland with its broken dreams.
There’s a savage indignation to the song that is absent from so much contemporary Irish music. The wonder is not that he wrote the song, but that so few other Irish songwriters have addressed the unfolding disaster in this country. “There is no grit, no darkness,” he says. “It all became so complacent and middle-class and friendly.”
Primordial play the Academy, Dublin on Saturday, September 24
