When we last caught up with Raven bassist/frontman John Gallagher, the band was celebrating 40 years of their landmark sophomore album, Wiped Out. Having since completed this tour, as well as a run of euro dates celebrating 40 years of All for One, Raven looks to their future with their latest collection of high speed, high energy, face melting English metal, All Hell’s Breaking Loose. We sat down with Gallagher to discuss how the current lineup of Raven has progressed since Metal City, the return of Milwaukee Metal Fest, and Godzilla!
Greetings John and welcome back to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
John Gallagher: I’m doing great mate! Good to be here.
Well it’s great to have you back considering just this past weekend, Raven played a ripping set at Milwaukee Metal Fest. I should know as I went between headbanging against the barrier and thrashing it up in the pit! How was that experience for you?
JG: It was great! Of course, you’re looking at the lineup and it’s mainly death metal bands. We were like, “Okay, this is gonna be interesting!” We ran into a similar thing earlier in the year. Actually, it was the tail end of last year. We played a festival in Atlanta and it was nothing but death metal bands. We went down a storm, so we said, “Hopefully it’s gonna be like that.” We went on and from the get go, it was just an excellent audience. It was a great setup. It was very professionally run, great sound crew. We were able to do what we do *laughs*!
It definitely went off with a bang! The room was packed and the crowd loved it. What hit me the hardest though was being in the pit and seeing these kids, maybe 15 or 16 years old, singing along to the songs and slamming into each other. It was incredible.
JG: You’ve literally got 3 generations of people there. You’ve got the original diehards from back in the early 80s, their kids, and now you’re getting their kids. It’s crazy. Like you said, a lot of these young kids, they look at what’s going on today with a lot of the music and they go, “There’s gotta be something more than this.” And they started digging and they find the motherlode. They get into the good stuff. It’s great.
The best part is not only do they have the classic Raven albums to take from, but they’ve got new music as well. We’re roughly a month away from the release of the new album, All Hell’s Breaking Loose. How soon after Metal City did things start coming together for this one?
JG: A couple of weeks. That’s the way it is. You’re all tied up with art and it’s kind of like, “Ah, that’s done. Great…what are we gonna do next? Hmmm. We’re gonna have to write a lot of songs.” *laughs* We get into it. We wrote a lot of songs for Metal City and rather than look at what was leftover and go, “Let’s regurgitate this.”…there were a few ideas that weren’t fully formed for the stuff that was written for Metal City that we relooked at and changed a lot, but we wrote a lot of new stuff as well.
At the end of the day, we recorded 18 songs. 2 of them were covers for other projects. As for the others, we wanted a 10 song album, a couple songs for the Japanese or Outer Mongolia extra track thing. If we’ve got anything leftover, we’ll look at that later for an EP or something. These were all great songs. That was the thing. They all had to be great songs. They all had to kick ass. From that, we asked, “What would be the best opener? What would follow that?” And you kind of build a flow and put it together and play it.
In the past where maybe we’d play the beginning and the end to just see how it sounds, no. Play the whole thing through. Sit and do the work. Listen and go, “That doesn’t work. That would be so much better here.” Or, “Take that song out. Put this one in instead.” We did that. Between the 3 of us doing that, we nearly had it the first time around. We just changed a couple of songs, flipped them, and boom. Got it. That was the mandate: 10 songs, 35-40 minutes, don’t overstay your welcome, hit hard, all killer, no filler. None of this 79 minute, 400 song, no, none of that. That’s not what appeals to us.
I’m a great prog fan. I love all that and the concept albums. That’s fine if you’re doing that. If you’re doing this intense heavy metal, whatever you wanna call it, you don’t help your cause by playing for 2 and 3 hours. It’s an intense burst of energy and then you come away from it and listen to it again. That was us as kids. Van Halen, Montrose, those kinds of things. Boom boom! Yeah, a lot of that was the restrictions of the format. That’s what you had on vinyl, maybe 23-25 minutes a side, but it works. There’s a reason for that, especially these days when people have the attention span of a fentanyl crazed rabbit. You’re not doing yourself favors with that. “Let’s fill up the CD to the max!” Endless 10 minute jams? No.
Nothing bothers me more than when the labels say, “You have to fill the CD.” It’s a phrase we’ve heard so many times over the years, and it goes back to the early 90s, when the format picked up steam. All these labels were going to these vinyl era acts and saying, “Now we’ve got 70-80 minutes and you need to fill them!” You started having classic bands putting out albums that didn’t have the ebb and flow of that early material.
JG: Yeah, and that is a problem in itself. If you’re looking for the quick download and all that, you frontload your album with your 3 or 4 great songs and then whatever for the rest. No, that’s never been our way of looking at it. You’re making a statement. It’s a full album. You want an ebb and flow. You want a narrative of sorts. You want to make it so it’s an experience all the way through. Yeah, you can listen to individual songs, but it works as a whole thing.
You and me are like that. We get an album and we want to look at the art, read who did what, look at the lyrics, pause through the different factors of what’s going on. It’s not this nameless, “*click* Listen to this.” I don’t know who that is. I don’t know who’s playing on it. I don’t know if it’s a machine or a dog. I have no clue. That doesn’t appeal to me. Heavy metal fans, thank God, want the physical product. They want the real thing and it’s, “No, stop the world. I want to check this out.” That’s what we do!
Right on, and a lot of headbangers are gonna be checking this one out. Just like Metal City, I’m under the impression that Mike Heller’s drumming has, against all odds, pushed the speed and extremity of Raven yet again. How pivotal was he to the writing and arrangement of this latest album?
JG: A lot more. We had written all the songs for Metal City before Mike joined. With this one, he was in at the ground floor. He contributed ideas and riffs. We all pushed back against each other with the arrangements and we all put our 10 cents in. It just made things better. It really did. We took what we learned from the last 2, but especially Metal City, and we just knuckled down. We wrote a lot of songs. We tore them apart. We’d say, “Why is that part there? Why play that one 8 times when you can play it 4 times? Is that the best we can do here? Is that the best beat? Could you change the bass here? What about putting a guitar fill in here?” All these kinds of things.
It’s very structured, but at the same time, when we do stuff, no matter whether it’s the drums, guitars, bass, or vocals, there’s always that 25%-30% of, “Go for it! See what happens!” That’s what makes the difference between our band and a lot of other bands. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not scripted, that’s go for it, no net, improvise, see what happens. We were doing this song “The Far Side” and it’s got some really crazy bass fills. They were like, “More!” “Really?” “Yeah! More! Go nuts!” “No, no, I gotta play it. If I’m gonna do it, I gotta play it.” It’s gotta be real! We did that and it worked. It was fun!
It shows on this record and it shows in the live shows as well. It seems that you and Mark (Gallagher) and Mike are having the times of your lives.
JG: We really are! When we were initially touring, the setlist was maybe about 5 minutes longer and we were like, “Okay, it’s just gonna be boom, boom, boom, boom.” *laughs* “How are you doing? Great! Next song!” *laughs* That’s fun we can do that, but we really, really enjoy doing what we do and we can’t wait to play some of this stuff live. We’ve screwed around. We were touring in Europe and just put a few in the soundcheck just to mess around. Yeah, it’s instant. It’s gonna work really cool.
How many of these new songs can the fans expect to hear live?
JG: You don’t wanna overload it. That’s another thing that can get annoying. “We’re gonna play side 9 of our latest album!” I think maybe 3? At the very least 2. The other thing is we might change up the Metal City stuff and do another song from that. Then look at the old stuff and pull one out from leftfield because we’ve done that. A couple of years ago, it was like, “Let’s do “Tyrant of the Airwaves”. Let’s do “Extract the Action” off Stay Hard. It’s a random song, lots of fun to play. Why not?” We like doing that. We like changing it up a bit. But yeah, these songs are great. They deserve to be heard. I think maybe 3 would be great.
Every song on here is an anthem and a half. What led to the band settling on All Hell’s Breaking Loose as the title of this one?
JG: It just seemed to fit. We were talking about that the other day. It’s not the most original title in the world. I’m sure there’s 1,000 songs called that, but it certainly fit. Instantly, there was a cover idea of us surrounded by ridiculousness and craziness. Dinosaurs with chainsaws and spiders with laser beams *laughs*. That’s fun because the cover pops out, but then you look and there’s this detail and crazy stuff in it, which is kind of the way the songs are. The hooks, they grab you in, and then the more you listen you go, “Oh! They’re doing that then? I didn’t expect this!” and all that kind of stuff. It just fit. It’s always good to have a good title to hang a whole concept around. That certainly seemed to make much sense.
Metal City saw Raven depicted on the album cover as heavy metal comic book heroes. We discussed yours and Mark’s favorite comic books growing up. On All Hell’s Breaking Loose, as you mentioned, Raven is surrounded by a plethora of old school monsters. What are some of your favorite monster/sci-fi movies?
JG: Oh it’s gotta be Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, King Ghidorah, all that stuff. When my son was growing up, he happened to see that on TV and he went nuts for it. The first time we went to Japan, I was buying all this crap *laughs*. That stuff’s awesome, absolutely.
We’ve spoken before about the bands who influenced you and Mark as young aspiring musicians in the 70s. Which bassists most inspired you and helped you find your style?
JG: There’s so many. There were so many genius bass players back then. Andy Fraser from Free: He bent strings. He wouldn’t play; he would leave holes. To play that smart and that intelligently…when he did “All Right Now”, he was 17. It’s just mind blowing. John Wetton, who was in King Crimson, Family, Uriah Heep, Gary Thain from Uriah Heep, John Entwistle, obviously Geddy Lee, Jeff Berlin on the jazz side of things, Jaco Pastorius, so many players that had unique voices. That kind of got washed away when the music got heavier. You’d see people say, “I’m just gonna go duh-duh-duh-duh.” That has its place, but also you can contribute.
A lot of the stuff that I do is like the second half that makes the riff. I’m not playing what he’s playing. He’s not playing what I’m playing, and I’m not just going “duh-duh-duh” under what he’s doing. I’ll play a riff that compliments his and all of a sudden, it’s like orchestration. It’s bigger. People who did that stuff always appealed to me. Ronnie Lane from the Faces, what a great player. These guys that play stuff up the neck, that was so powerful. Jimmy Lea from Slade was a huge, huge influence. Loads of distortion, feedback, bending, all that kind of stuff. When I grew up as a kid, I said, “Well, I’m gonna do all this stuff these other people aren’t doing. I wanna bend strings. I wanna get feedback. I wanna get some crazy guy to put a whammy bar on my bass. Play it with a violin bow. I’ll do anything.” That was my mandate: Make it interesting. Do something different.
To this day, I think you’re the only bassist I’ve seen with a whammy bar. When did that come about?
JG: That came about in late 1981. That bass is on the front cover of Rock Until You Drop with a regular bridge and regular pickup. A new repair guy came into our local music store and I asked straight up, “Can you make a whammy bar for a bass?” “Yeah! Why not? I’ll take a strap lock and make the plates.” He was a metal worker who could build this, this, and this. He made it and it worked, but the bars kept breaking. He goes, “I’ll fix it!” And he got a chrome vanadium screwdriver and made that into the whammy bar, which is the one that’s still on there today.
Then, I wanted a bridge pickup on the bass in the back for a little more bass. He put a pickup in and accidentally put a guitar pickup in. It was an EMG thing and we were playing through a little Vox AC30 combo amp. We here, “Womp womp!” “This sounds funny!” Then I turned it up loud with the distortion and it went, “Weeeee!” I was like, “Yeah, I’m leaving it! That’ll do!” That’s been another thing. I usually have a very high powered pickup on the back for all the crazy. And then 8 strings, 12 strings. Once those were available, I was straight into that. I’ve always played an 8 string. During the pandemic, I converted a couple of basses into 8 strings, which are awesome. They came out really well.
Not only does this year happen to mark the 40th anniversary of All for One, but it’s also the 35th anniversary of Nothing Exceeds Like Excess. Looking back, what are your thoughts on this album? Do any memories of this era standout to you and do you have any favorite songs?
JG: Yeah, we had to make a statement. Rob (Hunter) had left the band and it was just me and Mark. We were writing like crazy and we got this like-minded lunatic Joe Hasselvander in on drums. It was done on a shoestring budget in a little studio up in Utica, New York. We had great songs. There’s some great playing on there. Songs like “Die for Allah”, “Lay Down the Law”, “Into the Jaws of Death”, that’s a killer. “Thunderlord”, it holds up. Production-wise, like I say, the money thing was eh. I’d love to have the opportunity to remix it, but those tapes disappeared a long time ago. We still have it. It still stands up as a great album. It was us against the world at that point too. It was, “Screw you! This is what we do. This is what we like.” That’s an album that we need to revisit and pull a song or 2 out of that as well.
Something that sticks out to me about that record and Architect of Fear is that they’re great examples of a band of your era, now in the midst of the thrash/death scene, still capable of making a statement. Not many of your peers were able to weather that storm.
JG: No, like you said, there was a lot of stuff going on. The music was getting harder and heavier. What we do, there’s a balance between order and chaos and commerciality and lunacy and whatever. Occasionally, it slipped too far one side. You could say The Pack is Back is way too commercial. Maybe Architect of Fear is too heavy. I don’t know. That was definitely pushing that end a little bit, but when the balance is right, everything flies correctly as it were. You try stuff. That’s why you’ve got 2 albums relatively close together that are really different, but it’s the same band. You can tell it’s the same band, so that’s cool.
When I was a kid, I’d listen to Sad Wings of Destiny by Judas Priest and then they’d come out with Sin After Sin. It was like, this is the same band, but really different. And then they’d bring out Stained Class, and it was the same band, but really different again! That was so cool. You never knew what was gonna happen next. I love AC/DC to death, but you know what you’re gonna get. It’s nice to surprise people occasionally.
One thing I’ve always found interesting about Raven’s early output is how many classic songs ended up as B-sides or EP tracks, among these being “Wiped Out”, “Inquisitor”, and so forth. Were there reasons these types of songs didn’t make full length releases, or were they recorded specifically for their respective singles and EPs?
JG: One or two of them were specifically recorded for those things, but when we did the first single, which was “Don’t Need Your Money”, and we did it with “Wiped Out” as the B-side, we’d also done a song in the same session called “Let It Rip”. It was like, “Oh, they’ve got an opening on a compilation album here, so we’ll put “Let It Rip” on that.” We did do “Inquisitor”, but when we were doing the album, it was like, “We’ve got these new songs.”
It took a long time to do the Rock Until You Drop album. At the end, we went in and we did the Sweet songs, “Hellraiser” and “Action”, the medley, and “For the Future”. I wanted to put them on. We had just done them. “Inquisitor”, it was like, “There’s another compilation? Put it on there.” It was just what fit at the time. “Crazy World”, we were gonna put a single out…was it “Hard Ride”?
Yep.
JG: Yeah, we were at the end and we needed a B-side, so we went in and recorded “Crazy World”. Then, when we did Wiped Out, we recorded a million songs in 6 days. We did the whole thing and it was like, “You can only get so many songs on a record. 25 minutes a side. They’re all cool, but this one is kind of catchy and fun. “Crash Bang Wallop”? Let’s do an EP.” We did “Rock Hard” and we had “Run Them Down”. Cool songs. Then we said, “Let’s take another song off the album just to round out the EP.”, which was “Firepower”.
We do stuff like that. That’s great because I always love artists that record a lot of stuff. It can be artists from Tori Amos to the Smashing Pumpkins. They write a lot of songs and they put them out. That’s cool because there’s hidden gems here and there. It’s not just like, “This is the album and this is what we’re gonna play and we’re gonna play them the same every night.” That mindset is just horrible.
Back in April, Raven headlined a festival with a rather interesting premise called the No Playback Festival. The premise was that every band on the lineup played 100% live with no backing tracks or lip syncing. Having been around as long as you have, do you find it slightly depressing that live music events even need to clarify that their lineups are indeed playing live? What are your thoughts on the rampant use or misuse of tracks?
JG: We were absolutely onboard with doing that festival. My whole argument with that is people say, “Well, you know. We need to make it sound like the record. We need to fill it out.” There was a little band called Queen from the UK. They finally added a keyboard player to do extra stuff in 1982. From 1973 all the way through then, it was 4 guys playing songs from A Night at the Opera, which if you’ve ever heard, has like 10 billion tracks and it has the most over the top production you’ve heard. They’d play those songs live, 4 guys, and make it sound brilliant. It would sound different, but it would still sound brilliant.
Studio is studio. Live is live. Treat them differently. Use it as an opportunity as opposed to, “Oh man! We don’t have the 90 piece orchestra.” Yeah? Well come up with something. Do something different. Make it work. It’s a copout. There’s bands I’ve seen…for the sake of argument, we’ll call them Sabaton. They’ve got 2 laptops to the side of the stage with “guitars, more guitars, percussion, extra voices”. Why are there people onstage? Why don’t they just sit at a table and have a drink? “We’re gonna play you our latest album and hit a button.” No, I don’t go for it at all and I think it’s a copout.
I couldn’t agree more. It pains me when I see bands of your era, bands who you’ve probably shared the stage and crossed paths with, who I’ve seen in recent years, post-pandemic, where the chorus will hit and the singer is 100 feet away from the mic. Wait a minute. Where’s the vocals coming from? It hurts me, my heart and my wallet!
JG: You’re paying to see magic. You’re paying to see people come onstage, there’s nothing happening, they play their instruments, they create something in the air. It’s magic. Hitting a button is not magic. It’s about creating music. You’ve got that, the lead singer 100 feet away, and then you had Jeff Beck. Who would you rather see? Jeff Beck created magic every time he played. That’s what you aspire to. You aspire to Ritchie Blackmore. You aspire to Steve Howe, Chris Squire. You aspire to Robert Fripp. You try to make magic. You may fall short, but you tried. And every night, even if it’s the same songs, you play them a little differently and you try, depending on what’s coming from the crowd. You’ll get something a little different. That’s the magic of live music.
Speaking of live music, earlier this year, Raven toured Europe and played a special All for One 40th anniversary set. Can the American lunatics expect to see this show as well? If so, when?
JG: That’s a bone of contention because we’re gonna have a new record out. We’re probably gonna cheese out and do some new stuff and do some All for One stuff, and maybe pull in an All for One thing that we haven’t done in the States at all or a long time. It was great doing “Run Silent, Run Deep” for example. That was a lot of fun to do. We can’t please everyone, but we’ll try and figure something out. You got Wiped Out and Europe didn’t *laughs*!
That’s correct! We got Wiped Out last October and what a set that was!
JG: That was a lot of fun. It’s very strange doing those kinds of sets. Your regular set gets clobbered completely, but it’s fun going, “Oh, here’s a song we never, ever played live.” Some of those songs really jump out, like “Battle Zone”. What a fun song to play. It’s great! It happens.
It’s almost like a musical This Is Your Life. It sinks in that you’re playing an album from 40 years ago!
JG: Yeah, you get to inhabit those grooves and bring it into the 21st century. It’s cool.
The new Raven album, All Hell’s Breaking Loose, is available now on Silver Lining Music. For more information on Raven, visit www.ravenlunatics.com.