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Damnation Festival 2010 Preview interview with October File

For the uninitiated, how would you describe October File's music? A lot of noise in the right places! Other then that I cant really explain, music is 100% personal opinion I think. So all I can say is, come check us out if you like something different from the usual “we sing about bats, graves and celestial moon wolfs”. We play what ever comes out when we get together, refine it, get happy with it and then polish it up. If you had to use (or make up) one genre to describe your music, what would it be ? I think Metal is pretty much accurate, we don’t want to go down the route of making up any crazy genre like most bands ‘death angular speed thrash metal’ etc. Some people that see us liken us to Killing Joke and some say we are Punk. So it goes back to my first point that its always interesting to see what different people think.

Who were your biggest influences?

Matt (guitar) and Steve (bass) share some common ground music wise. Bands like Killing Joke, Big Black, Gang of four and the stranglers. John likes more mainstream metal, but being a drummer he’s also into a range of other more technical bands like Meshuggah. Personally I like bands like Clutch, Skindred, QOTSA, Will Haven, I killed the prom Queen and a fairly broad mixture. Lamb of God definitely being my favourite, Randy has a voice like no other.

You guys are clearly making the music you love, proper anti-pop. What is your take on the present 'instant celebrity' nature of the music industry?

If that’s what you want then crack on, I think I can speak for all the band when I say we aren’t interested in making this a career, we just want to play music at our own pace, write some records and play some shows. Our music isn’t deliberately anti-pop, but its not hard to write a song about that type of industry lets face it. So if it makes you happy to have your face on the cover of Smash Hits every month then good luck to you. When I walk past the music section in a newsagent I usually have a nose at who is on the front cover, who is in favour this week.

Many of your songs have an overtly political theme. Making a personal statement or do you think music can make a difference?

Music can make a difference, I think people like Lennon proved that. When we write we tend to let the music lead the lyrics, the pace and aggression of the guitars and base line tend to almost write the lyrics for you. Lets face it, the world is in fact a pretty shitty place filled with greedy, callous people. There is no deliberate decision to write about these subjects, it just happens. We do want to write something that is thought provoking, we don’t want to write about girlfriends, love and on the flip side (like the types of metal bands I HATE) skulls, bats, woodland elves. I mean seriously??! People like that need to put down their War Hammer figures and get out and socialise.

Are you looking forward to playing the Damnation Festival?

100% YES. We have had a few mishaps over the summer, I ripped my abdominal wall at Sonisphere which meant I had three weeks off to get it fixed. That meant we missed Bloodstock which we were gutted about. We are looking forward to playing and coming back up to Leeds, its been a while!

Which other bands on the bill are you looking forward to checking out?

Earthtone9 for me, grew up listening to this band and respect them a lot, especially for reforming! There are a few other bands that I’m sure will be good but we’ll see what happens when we get there.

How will Damnation compare in terms of scale to gigs you have played before?

On par probably, we tend to be quite selective, if we are going to play we want to make sure we play something we all want to. This isn’t a career for us so playing a million 2 man venues isn’t going to happen. Damnation has a great buzz and we are all really looking forward to playing.

What can we expect from October File live?

A wall of noise. We hope the sound is good and the crowd are hammered!! We will give it 100% as we always do, come check us out 5:40pm RockSound Stage.

What does the future hold for the band?

We hope many more gigs, we are aiming to do all the summer festivals next year, record a new album at some point and continue to promote ourselves

Big thanks to Candelight, Alan Day, Dave hale, Darren Toms for all their support this year and a personal apology to those that had tickets for the City of Fire Tour that got pulled. We will make it up to you so see you there!!