EMQ’s With The Spectre Beneath
EMQ’s With The Spectre Beneath
Hi everyone! Welcome to another EMQs interview, this time with UK Progressive/ Power Metal band, The Spectre Beneath. Huge thanks to their guitarist, Pete Worrall, for taking part.
What is your name, what do you play and can you tell us a little bit about the history of the band?
Pete Worrall and I play guitar.
Back in January 2019, I’d just finished an album with my other project, Plague and the Decay, in which our drummer Consta plays. When I started writing the follow up, the music seemed to be more melodic and a little less thrashy but with just the same amount of turbo charged riffs. It was a slight shift in tone and I thought it would be a good idea to add a female vocal to bring out the melodic side even more. Consta was onboard and then long-time collaborator, Katy, helped write and add nuance to the vocal melodies so they would suit a female voice. I then found L Lockser from an online demo she’d posted and we managed to put out our debut album, “The Downfall of Judith King”, in September of that year. Then lockdown happened and we used the time to record the follow up album, “The New Identity of Sidney Stone”, which was released in 2020 but was picked up by Wormhole Death Records who re-released in 2021. Sadly, later in 2021, L Lockser became sick and was unable to carry on with the vocals and stepped down. It took a long time to find someone to fill L Lockser’s shoes but Stevie manages to do this and then some. We have our new release, “The Ashen Child”, coming out in July 2023.
How did you come up with your band name?
It’s not a very exciting tale, it just happened one day. I am a big Bond fan and have a hat with the Spectre logo on it, which I wear every time I take my dog out. I thought the word was strong but it needed something else as there are other bands called Spectre. It was the film What Lies Beneath which sealed the deal as it was on television at the time so I put the two together and voila! Something just clicked.
What Country / Region are you from and what is the Metal / Rock scene like there?
We are from the North-West of England, not too far from Manchester. From where we’re based, the rock scene is pretty much dead, however, in Manchester, it’s very healthy. There are so many venues and Manchester seems to be on most band’s radar when they tour so, personally, I go to many gigs. In fact, I’ve just booked tickets for KK Downing’s Priest, Tailgunner, Serpentyne, Evile, Aephanemer, Sacred Reich, Municipal Waste, Lost Society, Aephanemer with Fellowship to come once their tickets have become available.
What is your latest release?
Our latest release is “The Ashen Child” which is out on July 14th 2023. It’s a mini album. Well, it’s a mini album in our eyes even though at 36 minutes it’s longer than many other band’s albums. It has 6 tracks of which 2 have been released as singles already, ‘Forsaken… We All Fall’ and ‘Time Dilation’ respectively. It feels good to get new music out after such a long layoff.
Who have been your greatest influences?
Initially, it was Iron Maiden. I loved the epic sound, the fact the songs weren’t just three minutes, the lyrical content was always interesting and the theatrics were wonderful. At the time, I used to love AC/DC and Van Halen as well because that’s what my friends and I all listened to, but, from a musical inspiration stand point, I was more influenced by Iron Maiden, that was until I heard Megadeth and then things took another turn. In hindsight, I think Iron Maiden inspired me to write songs whereas Megadeth inspired me to write riffs.
What first got you into music?
I come from a musical family and I had piano lessons from the age of seven until thirteen. I was playing classical music until I heard Iron Maiden. In fact, it was the song ‘Invaders’ from “The Number of the Beast” which changed my life. Things were never the same after I heard that track. I loved the Smith and Murray combination and wanted to mimic that rather than continue to tinkle waltzes on the ivories. So, much to my parent’s chagrin because they hated metal, I ditched the Piano and picked up the guitar. My Nan had given me £100 a few months earlier so I decided to use that and purchase a guitar as I knew my parents would never buy me one. My first guitar cost £95 and that included a distortion pedal, a chorus pedal and a book of chords, oh yeah, and a plectrum.
If you could collaborate with a current band or musician who would it be?
I’d like to say Anna Murphy from Cellar Darling as she’s such a special talent, but, for sheer emotional investment spanning two decades, I’m going with Jon Oliva for similar reasons to Anna Murphy. Jon is a brilliant songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and has a knack for melody, flare and drama. He can write something as beautiful as Believe or One Child and then something as nasty as the Doctor Butcher album. His scope is impressive and I’ve always admired him as a person as well as his body of work.
If you could play any festival in the world, which would you choose and why?
Probably Bloodstock because I started going when it was indoors and then the first outdoor festival when there were only about 900 people there. I love how it’s grown and, even though I’ve not had a chance to go in recent years, I would still like to play there. It’s a nostalgia thing at the end of the day.
What’s the weirdest gift you have ever received from a fan?
A lift home. We’re not really showered with gifts.
If you had one message for your fans, what would it be?
Thank you for your patience after a couple of years of inactivity, but we’re busy writing more music and I’d say 70% of a new album is written. More music is coming.
If you could bring one rock star back from the dead, who would it be?
Because I’m heavily biased, I will say Ronnie James Dio. One of the genre’s greatest vocalists, a great role model, he was in some of the genre’s biggest bands and he continues to make waves in the reaction genre of youtube as people start to retrospectively discover his talents. He was a force for good in Heavy Metal.
What do you enjoy the most about being a musician? And what do you hate?
I love writing songs and getting a seed of an idea and building it up into a killer track. It’s like a puzzle that needs to be solved. I enjoy it so much, I can see myself still doing it when I’m eighty and in sheltered accommodation – that’s if arthritis hasn’t set in by then.
What I don’t like about being a musician is organising other musicians if I can count that. Many times I’ve turned up to rehearsal for no one else to be there and then showered with lame excuses as to why people didn’t turn up. This has led to one of my mottos which is ‘don’t work with anyone who doesn’t turn up’, and this is not just musicians either, it’s mixers, editors, producers etc… Don’t be afraid to move on if something or someone is not working.
If you could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?
Whining about streaming is fairly low hanging fruit, however, one subject I tend to crow about, and it’s not just myself, several of my friends have the same gripe as well, and that’s modern production. With the advancements in technology, you can get a great sound without spending a lot of money, which is great, but, for me, some of the character, rawness and energy is being lost. Albums being overproduced is becoming a bug bear for me as they sound too good, too clean and thus sound a little sterile. This is metal where instruments are overdriven, why would you want it as clean as possible? From a production standpoint, many bands sound alike because they use the same production techniques and plugins and, as a consequence, lose part of their identity. Even though their music sounds great, there’s nothing to set it apart from other bands in their genre. There’s also something I coin as the ‘Disturbed Syndrome’ which is when bands have exactly the same production album after album to the point where you can hear a song but it could be off any one of their albums because they are all sonically very similar. I first noticed this with Disturbed but, more recently Sabaton, Coheed and Cambria and definitely Powerwolf. When a band uses this technique, the fan ultimately loses out because the fan is getting the same experience over and over and this quickly leads to fatigue. As well as that, the layers of keyboards some bands adopt don’t, in my opinion, add anything at all, in fact, they simply drown out the guitars, but that could be me because I love guitar riffs.
Name one of your all-time favourite albums?
There are many but Iron Maiden’s “Somewhere in Time”. I just love the vibe of that album. No other album sounds like it, there’s not a weak moment, I like the variety in the music, it’s not just one style of song repeated eight times, it is Iron Maiden on top of their game and it, arguably, has the greatest cover art in all of musical history. I’ve heard Adrian Smith sat in the mixing of that album which is probably why it sounds killer.
What’s best? Vinyl, Cassettes, CD’s or Downloads?
Definitely not cassettes, although I did have spooling a cassette to the end with a pencil to save on battery power down to a fine art. I’m an album guy and I love getting a physical copy, going over the notes and lyrics etc… Downloads don’t have this. While I’m nostalgic about vinyl, my rose tinted glasses tend to make me forget how cumbersome they are so, by a process of elimination, I will say CDs. Although, some CD digipacks are terrible (cough cough Devin Townsend’s “Empath” which I had to tear to actually get the CD out of the packaging, which is a shame as I hated it and couldn’t sell it on because I’d ruined the packaging).
If you weren’t a musician, what else would you be doing?
I like to write books and stories, horror, thrillers and whodunits mainly. I released my 5th full length novel last year and I’m about a quarter of the way through writing another whodunit. I did go to Ealing studios to study script writing and screenplays and learned a lot but I also realised writing film scripts is too formulaic and not for me, it was too restrictive. I’m happy writing novels and short stories. So, if I wasn’t doing music, I’d love to spend more time writing books.
Which five people would you invite to a dinner party?
Adrian Smith. My Idol growing up. I wanted to be Adrian Smith, what a great player and huge influence on me.
Jon Oliva. I know he’s planning a final Savatage album so I’d probably spend the evening trying to worm my way into the band somehow.
Anna Murphy. What a talent and I’d hope we could have a songwriting session after the coffee and mints.
Ronnie James Dio. He’s such an icon and so well mannered and articulate.
Agatha Christie. It’s a bit off topic but it ties in with my writing, I’d love to unpick how she plans and plots a book.
What’s next for the band?
As mentioned, we have a mini-LP out later this year with 6 songs on it. We have the next album planned out and we would say 70% of it is written. After releasing the mini-LP hopefully around July/August time, we’d like to finish writing the new full-length and get it recorded before Easter 2024. We’d like to squeeze some live shows in at some point but we’re short on a bass player hence why I’m playing it on the new release, so completing a line up would be next as well.
What Social Media / Website links do you use to get your music out to people?
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/TheSpectreBeneath
Bandcamp – https://thespectrebeneath.bandcamp.com
Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/@thespectrebeneath3812
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/thespectrebeneath/
Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/artist/5cIAETngzd6JmnTxG3EtAi
Time for a very British question now. As an alternative to the humble sandwich, is the correct name for a round piece of bread common in the UK either a Bap, a Barm (or Barm Cake), a Batch, a Bun, a Cob, a Muffin, a Roll or a Tea Cake?
A barm. In fact, you’ve missed out Bread Cake which is what they were called when I lived briefly in Sheffield. I spent hours telling the locals how wrong they were. As an aside, I did write a song about Morrisons Crusty Cobs. More precisely, a friend of mine wrote some lyrics about them because he loved them and I put them to music. Of course, other makes of crusty cobs are available. In case you don’t believe me:
Thank you for your time. Is there anything else that you would like to add?
Stay happy, safe and healthy.
Disclaimer: This interview is solely the property of Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
