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Despite being around for a fair few years now, this is only the first time that England's masters of doomy daliance have played Ireland. Quite shocking, really. Fitted Kitchens took tea with Lee Dorian (vocals and flares) before their Belfast gig, to chastise them for all the delays, chat about the new album, Lee's musical history, and the perils and pitfalls of that ol'devil, rock n'roll...
ABOUT BLOODY TIME...
Well Lee, yer here in Ireland at last, what the fuck kept you?
"Well, we were supposed to come over early '94, and we were very disappointed when we couldn't make it. What happened then was that we were out on tour with Black Sabbath, and we had some people guesting with us, Victor and Joey from Pentagram, on second guitar and drums, cos we'd just lost ours at that time, and half way through the tour it became apparent that working with Victor wasn't going to last very long unfortunately, and both him and Joey went back to the States. We ended up with no drummer and no second guitar player and so we couldn't come over. Which was a real bummer because I think Ireland's the last place out of everywhere that we've always wanted to play. I mean, its pretty ironic that you can go and play in Australia, the other side of the world and go to Japan five or six times, but you still can't get twenty miles over the water to come and play in Ireland"
 "But well, we're here at last, you know, its taken us a long time, but we're very happy to be here and we're very much looking forward to these two shows. I mean, its much like a personal thing for us, especially for me and Gaz being in the band for so long, for years to come over and play"
You're currently touring to promote your new album, 'Caravan Beyond Redemption'. It seems that every time Cathedral release a new album the media find yet another tag to hang around your neck. To date, we've had 'doom', 'disco doom', and now there's 'stoner rock'. What do you make of all this categorisation?
"To me, the stoner thing is just another thing for the media to try and understand something that's quite hard for them to comprehend, putting a category on it just to make it accessible to the readers, when really its just good old traditional heavy rock, heavy Metal, played with like a bit of enthusiasm and energy. To me, real Metal is about riffs and playing with conviction and having a bit of soul in what you do, and I think all the kind of industrial and dance/techno stuff which has taken over and infiltrated it has destroyed what Metal really is"
I don't know that that's entirely true, there's been some really great crossover stuff. Like for me, Fear Factory's 'Demanufacture' is one of the best albums of the 90's.
"Well, its like Korn and shit like that, to me that has nothing to do with Metal. OK, maybe I might be too old school, but I just don't think there's any real conviction or passion in that kind of music. I just like to see a gig where there's heavy riffs, people getting into what they're doing, and a bit of fucking attitude and aggression in what they do. And I think that's what we're trying to put across in our music. We like to express ourselves in our music how we feel as individuals, even though the subject matter might be strange to some people. Our whole persona comes through our music, you know, it can't come across any other way for us. I think at the end of the day, if you want to call it disco doom, which is totally fucking ridiculous, stoner doom, stoner rock, it doesn't really matter, its just heavy metal heavy rock music. Even that's a bit of a generalisation really, because I think there are a lot of other influences in our music that aren't very obvious."
The man's on a roll here...
"I come from a punk background anyway, I don't come from a more Metal background. I mean, I got into Metal through Trouble and bands like that, rather than through Maiden or something. Obviously, the first Metal bands I ever got into were early Metallica and early Slayer, and then I started getting into the underground death Metal bands, and then into Trouble, just because I thought they were the heaviest band I'd ever heard, those first two albums. After that, I got into Sabbath and from then onwards I changed my way of thinking about what Metal was. Bands like Trouble, St Vitus, Sabbath, Pentagram, Witchfinder General, that's the kind of stuff that I consider to be Metal"
You mentioned projecting your personality through your music, but how exactly do you mean? Is it in terms of presentation? Or simply by having a bit of a laugh with the audience in the live setting, refusing to take yourselves too seriously? Come on, my man, explain yourself.
"Well, there's a bit of everything, I mean as day to day individuals. When we first started, the music of Cathedral was a lot more extreme than it is now, a lot more morose and depressing, because that's how we felt at the time. We'd all come out of the Death Metal scene, or the grindcore scene or whatever, and I was just as much into the slower stuff as I was into the faster stuff. I just wanted to do something a bit different, so we took all our influences like Vitus and Pentagram and the Obsessed and stuff and decided to take that kind of music one step further, bring it into the 90's, make it more extreme, more heavy and downtuned than any of those bands had done before. That was our first and foremost ambition, and I think we probably achieved that when we did our first album. After that, we didn't want to feel restricted. I mean, if we'd have carried on just repeating the formula of our first album over and over again, I think we'd have lost the point of what the band was about, because the whole reason for forming Cathedral was to feel free in what we did, we didn't want to have the restrictions of the bands we'd been in previously. We made a conscious effort to try and make our music more challenging to us with each release"
JUST A RHYME WITHOUT A REASON?
Cathedral's song content is famously 'eccentric'. When you write your lyrics, it seems to me that it's a magpie approach
"Magpie approach?"
Yeah, I mean, there's references to TV, sci-fi, drugs, Hammer Horror flicks, bit of this, bit of that, whatever shiny nuggets catch your imagination It seems fairly whimsical, and I'm wondering if you've ever suffered for that. I mean, you'd hardly be chuffed to be known as the doom Lawnmower Deth, would you?
"I think the smaller things in the band become the most obvious to some people. It's like, say on the song 'Utopian Blaster', there's this line in there that goes 'Huggy Bear, oh yeah!' People seem to pick up on these smaller things rather than the overall message that the song is trying to say. I like the band to reflect the kind of things that I relate to as a person, I don't think it should be one hundred percent negativity all the time if I don't feel that way myself. I think music should really reflect how you are as a person, so if part of my life involves trash culture that I might like, like shitty old B movies that have a lot of relevance to me in another way, I always try and include it. Even when I'm writing about an old movie, I try and put some social relevance into it and make it a story unto itself. I mean, a lot of the songs on the new album, say 'Satanikus Robotikus' for instance, you could look at that and think its based on some obscure B-movie from the 1950's but its not at all, its based on organised religion in America, about these evangelists that are imposing this end-time apocalyptic vision on people, making them afraid of their day to day life, making them repent to these people who just want their money basically, and instilling fear into them. I mean, they're supposed to be there for the glory of god or something, but really they're doing the devil's work"
OK, so explain the high-brow motives behind 'Captain Clegg' then! This question seems to catch Lee out, given what he's just said
"That's just the story of the film (Hammer Horror flick with Peter Cushing- Ed). In the same way that we wrote 'Hopkins (Witchfinder General)', it was almost like a follow up to that really. That's just like good time, disposable dark kind of humour song really, for the sake of it, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I don't think a band should be 100% political all the time, or even be political at all, because music is first and foremost about entertainment and I think music in itself is a very strong force for communication even if there is no political angle involved in it. The fact that it brings people together, even if its just based around pure entertainment, is a good thing in itself."
So do you think that people just want to analyse something that isn't actually there, just for the sake of it, reading too much into what, as you've just said, is entertainment?
"Well maybe sometimes it might seem that we go out of our way to confuse people, but we don't. I wouldn't say that we were self-indulgent, but we don't really think about our audience when we're writing music. We really just think about what we want to hear and what we want to put across, and if we were really concerned about people analysing it then we obviously wouldn't do the kind of music we do. We just do the music we do because we love it, that's all that matters to us"
You've got five albums under your belt now, but pundits were laying bets that you about to become a cropper on the basis of your last album, which I know came in for a lot of flak. What do you see as the main difference between the two?
"Like I say, with each album we do, we like to try something a bit different just to make it interesting for us. That's the thing that was missing on the last LP, we just didn't have time to explore it, we just had to come up with twelve, thirteen songs in the space of ten days and then go into the studio and record them. We didn't have time to pre-plan and work on atmospheres and moods on the last album. As it goes, it didn't really come in for much flak, but we didn't really feel happy about it ourselves. We mixed the whole album in twenty four hours straight so we didn't have much chance to actually balance things out and get much contrast in there. It was pretty much full-on all the way through, but on this album we had a lot more time to think about it, I mean the time gap between this album and the one before it is over two years, so we had a lot of time to contemplate what we'd done with our previous four albums and where we thought we should be going from then on. So I think with this album we just had a lot more time to prepare it, its probably the first time that we've all worked together as a band, as a unit, as opposed to myself and Gaz just writing everything. Everyone else had involvement this time in the song writing and ideas for melodies, song structures or whatever, everyone had some kind of input. When that happens you feel a lot more positive about what you do when everyone else is encouraging you to do something different and look at it another way. You go into the studio a lot more prepared and a lot more confident. I mean, most of the time we've gone into the studio very much under-prepared, maybe about 40% prepared and the rest of it came together in the studio. This time, it was pretty much 99% prepared before we went in".
SABBATH... BLOODY SABBATH
When it comes to Cathedral, every interview I read always stresses the Sabbath-Sabbath-Sabbath thing. I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I've got this pet hate, and that's people who are so anal about their musical opinions that they subscribe to strict dictats about what's ok and what's not ok for them to like. For instance, with Sabbath, that it can only be Ozzy, and that everyone else was crap. Or that its only OK to like AC/DC before Bon Scott forgot to wake up while puking... What's your opinion on this?
"I've never really given a fuck about purity. I mean, what is purity? There's no such thing in human nature, purity's a complete fantasy. Whatever music I listen to, whatever catches my ear, it could be folk it could be jazz it could be funk it could be soul, if I like it then I'm not afraid to admit it. I'm not going to live behind some kind of shroud that says I have to be 100% into the so-called purist bands in the scene. We've never been afraid to express ourselves how we want to, and I think that we might have lost some of our hardcore, narrow-minded people who were into our music in the first place on the first album. But at the same time if they are that narrow-minded, then they're probably not the right audience for us anyway, as there's more to us than that"
Yeah, they're wilfully ignoring other stuff, doing themselves a disservice
"Well, that's up to them. There's too much good stuff out there to restrict yourself to one kind of form. The more you expand on something, the more original it becomes and if you're going to stay shallow and narrow-minded to one cause, that just undermines your own progression in life. And to me, that's not just about the music you listen to... its about your whole personality. You're afraid to change in a natural way as people do. I mean, I'm not the same person as I was when I was 17, so obviously the music I'm playing now isn't going to be 100% the same as when I was 17. You shouldn't be afraid of natural progression in your own life"
Lee's clearly had his fill of that nay-sayers and detractors who have attacked over the years...
"I look back, and I'm very proud of the fact that I haven't been afraid to do something off the wall and do something a bit different. I mean, if you look at it from early Napalm onwards until now I think I've done some pretty diverse and challenging things. And, in years to come, if people say 'what would you like to be remembered for?' I'd say, for doing something a bit more diverse with a bit of risk. Not so much to be seen as some sort of pure icon figure who had 100 % integrity, because the idea of 'integrity' that people have is very restrictive. My idea of integrity is following your own instincts and being true to yourself. Pretending to be true to some kind of scene, pretending to be into it when you really might be into something else, just to be 'cool', trying to be 100% something that you're not, I think that's the exact opposite of personal integrity; that's living a lie".
ANGRY YOUNG MEN
Which leads excellently onto the next question. How have your particular tastes changed over time?
"When I was in my teens, before Napalm, I said I'd never listen to Metal at all. I listen now to a lot of Progressive 70's bands that I'd hated at school. All the kids at school who wore their rucksacks with Genesis, Uriah Heep and Yes patches, I hated those fuckers, because they were all intellectual kids who were prefects, they were the brainy kids and I was a working class kid off a council estate who just liked rock music. I hated everything that that progressive art-wank stood for. So if I could have imagined myself from aged 14, 15 to 16 years later listening to some of the music that I do today, I'd have probably shot myself. But, like everything in life, the more you see of life, the more open your mind becomes to a lot more things, and that includes music, it includes art, it includes everything really"
The Metal press often seems to adopt a 'year zero' approach to your musical career, their starting point being the stint with Napalm Death. Give us an idea of what you were up to before this time, how you got involved in the whole thing.
"Before Napalm, I was very much into the anarchist scene. I used to be quite heavily involved in that, used to go on a lot of demonstrations, do a lot of actions, 'Stop the City', stuff like that. For me, music had to relate to that way of political thinking and to the kind of things I was into a social sense. With early Napalm, the lyrics were very socially aware and political. So when I actually joined Napalm, I was like their biggest fan, I must have seen them about 65, 70 times before I actually joined them. I'd never had any intention of actually being in a band, I mean I'd done a fanzine, and I actually got asked to join this band from Cardiff called Icons of Filth, because they'd lost their bass player and because I used to follow them around before Napalm, I've got a tattoo of them from when I was about 16, they just asked me join and I was like 'Fuckin' Hell, I've never even touched a bass in my life, how the fuck am I supposed to join?'. Anyway, I did this job, I used to go around selling pictures, knocking on people's doors, selling them bogus prints and saying they were my exam pieces from college and that I needed the money to get through the next year. I used to make a fucking fortune! They used to cost like a pound, and I used to sell 'em for about 40 quid or something like that, I'd come home at night with £200 in my pocket, just for bullshitting to these middle class people. Just putting on the sob story and the dog-face. So, after two weeks I bought my first bass and I was going to join them, but they broke up. And then there was a band from Birmingham, Doom, they said 'come and join us'. I didn't know what was going on, all these people asking me to join their bands, but anyway, then Napalm say 'join us' and I was like 'alright, I'll give it a go'."
Lee laughs as he recounts the confusion of his first few weeks with the band...
 "The day before we were due in the studio, we had a rehearsal and I didn't know what the fuck was going on, I didn't know when I was supposed to be on cue or anything like that. In the studio, Mick was standing next to me and he'd signal and I'd go like 'wooaarrgghhh' on cue. Six months later, when that LP came out it was fucking everywhere, John Peel was playing it every night, front cover of NME, front cover of Melody maker, a BBC documentary, all over local TV, newspapers and shit"
I've seen that documentary, it was a split with Slayer, yeah? I remember you were all in someone's bedroom, being interviewed, with bizarre shots of the back garden being spliced in for some reason. Coming after Slayer it all seemed a bit, well, crap...
"That was Mick's bedroom. That was embarrassing... a highly embarrassing bit of TV footage, we didn't come across as very intelligent at all! I was very naive about all that and its only when I decided to leave that I realised that a lot of people were making money out of us, and that we'd seen fuck all. It gave me a good exposure to what the whole business was about, and that's initially when I started forming my own label ('Rise Above'- Ed). I'd seen how labels had treated bands and how business had treated a lot of bands and the insight I got from seeing all the bullshit first hand inspired me to start doing something about it."
It was also around this time that Cathedral was spawned. Like all the best stories, it's a tale of random chance and pure luck...
"After leaving Napalm, I had no plans to be in another band. Then I met Gaz, his band (Acid Reign- Ed) was touring with Nuclear Assault. Danny (Lilker, bassist with the 'salties- Ed) introduced me to him, and he said I should meet this guy because he was 'into all the Doom bands'. There wasn't really that many people in England at all into that kind of music, only a handful, so I met him. It's quite funny, cos that night Acid Reign and Nuclear Assault were due to go to Europe, and after Gaz finished the set he fucked off on the train and left the band a note in the dressing room! I didn't hear anything from him for another six months, but our original bass player, Griff, was doing this fanzine totally dedicated to Doom Metal, it was called 'Into the Oak', and I think Gaz bought a copy off him at a Carcass gig. Griff used to do the slideshows for Carcass, and Griff told Gaz that we were thinking of getting a band together, just for fun, just to jam and stuff, not take it seriously or whatever, and he asked Gaz if he wanted to get involved. Gaz phoned me up, said the idea sounded great, doing stuff as slow as Vitus and Winter and stuff, and it went from there really. It wasn't planned in a predetermined way, we just did it. We did a demo and thought everyone else would hate it because it was the exact opposite of what was 'hip' at the time, and from there we ended up here".
MONEY FOR NOTHING AND CHICKS FOR FREE...
Let's move onto the tabloidy stuff about your rock apprenticeship; any sordid tales of debauchery, or was it all remarkably sedate? Lee laughs
"I've quietened down to a certain extent. I used to be a fucking animal, I must say. I mean, when I was young, I was really shy around girls and stuff, I mean extremely shy, if a girl showed any indication that she liked me, I used to shit myself, go 'argghh'. And then I'd just torture myself, wishing that I'd had a bit more self-confidence. And the irony of it is, you get into this band like Napalm, you don't expect anything, but you go on tour, you get to know people on a more social level a lot more easily if you're in a band, and you get to meet a lot more girls and your confidence increases. So from no experience with girls, well a very few fumbled experiences, before and actually getting in a band and touring, your whole confidence changes. In the early days, its like 'fuckin' hell', it's a massive playground that's open for you, and I suppose you go round shagging like a fucking demon for the first few years, but after a while the novelty wears off and you realise its all a bit superficial really, its all a bit false"
Hmm... the concept of sexual ennui seems utterly alien to a horned up young stud-muffin like myself who hasn't got his leg over in what seems like several eternities... I wonder if there are such things as zine-groupies out there...
"But it's good doss" he continues. "Before Napalm, I used to have to save up all my ten pences and two pences and save enough money to have a pint in the pub. If you go out on tour, you've got beer there for you all day in the fridge, drink yourself stupid for free, play the music you want to play, people enjoy you playing it, it's like y'know, that's kind of the more 'leisurely' angle to it. There's a lot more deeper stuff involved with touring and being in a band. It's not all one big party, because there's a lot of hard work involved as well".
LORD DORIAN AND THE MAJESTY OF ROCK?
With all the coverage and exposure that Cathedral gets these days, how do you avoid getting seduced by all the hype?
"You can easily lose touch with yourself, its very easy to have your head transcend to a million miles above the sky. When we got signed to Colombia in the states, it was like 'fucking hell, what's going on?' They were flying us over to New York every two weeks, putting us up in five-star hotels, taking us out to five-star restaurants, and we weren't even that bothered, we just wanted to go an eat at a Taco Bell or something, we didn't want five-star fucking meals with all the top heads of Colombia and sitting around a table being totally false and polite to them when you don't even give a shit who they are anyway. We'd just rather have gone to a bar with our mates and had a bit of a laugh. The more this sort of superstar thing I thrown at you, it can go to your head quite easily"
It seems that you've managed very well to avoid the rock-star trap, avoiding the egotism that many people show such a penchant for
"Well, back then, I was living in a real shitty bit of Coventry and I made sure I stayed living there, a real working class area. To go to the States and have people kissing your arse for 3 months and being totally false towards you, to come back to where I was living brought me slam back down to earth, cos you couldn't get much more down to earth than the area I was living, and I still have my friends there, never lost touch with them"
So when do you move into the Deep Purple estate in the country then?
"Not yet, not yet! It's a two up, two down now, so it hasn't expanded that far yet!!"
With this, it's time to end the interview as Lee has to go soundcheck for the night's gig. Think I'll have a few more pints in the meantime. Cheers!
Cathedral are Lee Dorian (vocals), Gaz Jennings (guitar), Leo Smee (bass) and Brian Dixon (drums).
Interview and words by Spandex Oo-er.
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