As K! celebrate all things BABYMETAL and METAL FORTH, we catch up with Jordan Fish to find out what it was like working with the band on from me to u, as well as 2020’s colossal Kingslayer…
METAL FORTH is finally here, and as we recently found out, it’s an album that hears BABYMETAL branching out like never before. As well as collabs with the likes of Bloodywood, Tom Morello and Polyphia, they’ve also teamed up with Jordan Fish for the second time – here, we ask the producing titan all about working with them…
When did you first meet BABYMETAL?
“It would have been probably around 2013, 2014. It was really early on after I joined Bring Me The Horizon. I think we were playing shows with them at festivals. We got to meet them around that time and we saw them play a couple of times, and they came to see us as well. But at that point, they didn’t speak much English at all, as far as I remember. It was, as you would imagine, a cross-cultural meeting when people don’t speak the same language, and you can’t get too deep into it. But it was nice. We said hello and took some pictures. And then, after that, we ran into them a few times over the years. Then we collaborated with them in 2020 [on the track Kingslayer from POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR]. That was the first time we worked with them in some capacity, and then the chance came up to work with them again while I was working with Poppy, and we were really excited to do it.”
How did that process begin, and where did you slot into it?
“They approached us about doing a song, and we actually made the demo for them, effectively. We really wrote the music, and to be honest, me and Poppy wrote the song, and then we sent it to them, and they loved it, and then they came back with some notes. It was really just a back and forth. Poppy was excited to do it, because she was very BABYMETAL influenced – especially at the beginning. It was a full-circle moment for her. She was really into them when she first started, she told me, so it really worked in that sense.
“In the end, there were a couple of bits I kind of helped them with, because they sang quite a lot in English on this song, which they don’t do that often. Their team still is very Japanese. In terms of how to sing in English, there were a couple of bits where I felt like they could pronounce it better or deliver it better. So I was WhatsApping with KOBAMETAL, and I would sing him a line and be like, ‘Maybe this should be sung a bit more like this.’ We had a little bit of back and forth in that way. Then the girls sent the vocals through and it was sick. We removed a little bit of screaming. It was quite scream-heavy, originally. They wanted to change some bits up, so we made a few little changes. But yeah, it was pretty easy and they loved what we’d done.”
What are they like as collaborators?
“They’re very detailed. They come back with specific words – ‘We could do this.’ When we did Kingslayer, they came back with a chart of the lyrics, and they translated it all to English for us. It was surprisingly organised, because I’m super-disorganised. When they send things, they’re just like, ‘Here’s an MP3.’ I’m not the most organised person, but they’ve got their shit together!”
How did the process of making Kingslayer compare to from me to u?
“Honestly, it was really similar. I sent Kingslayer to them with me singing in a kind of girly voice as a guide. I was like, ‘Sorry for this, but I just have to try to imagine it.’ And then they sent back their vocals and that was it. They wrote the second verse on that song, so it was a very similar process.”
How did you make the BABYMETAL style work with yours?
“Kingslayer had a kind of Prodigy-ish energy anyway, and anything that gives you that kind of futuristic, high-energy feel, to me, automatically feels kind of Japanese, or it’s a lot more leaning that way. So I felt like there was a common ground in that song. I mean, the collaboration wouldn’t have come about on Kingslayer if we hadn’t thought of them anyway – they came to mind when we were writing it. So the song kind
of threw them up, if you know what I mean. I guess the song informed me. This one, we kind of wrote the song for them, whereas with Kingslayer, we had the song, and it was like, ‘Hey, BABYMETAL would sound good on this.’ I think that’s the main difference.”
What was it that made it clear you had an artistic connection, even across barriers of culture and language?
“We were playing a lot of heavy rock and metal festivals, and they were getting put on a lot of metal festivals, early on, when it was a bit of a ‘What the hell is this?’-type thing for a lot of people who were watching them. I don’t think that’s really a thing anymore, because people are aware of what they do. I think when Bring Me The Horizon played these heavy metal festivals with a lot of old-school metal acts, we kind of sometimes felt a little bit like outsiders in those situations. I felt like maybe we have that in common – or we did have that in common at the beginning. I can see how BABYMETAL were also outsiders, in that sense, at a lot of those heavy music festivals. I think we connected over that, really. They were really sweet to us, and they were very young girls when they first came on the scene. With people like that, you naturally want to make sure they’re cool, because they were very young girls in a scene that was really dominated by bearded old men. I think that’s why there was a natural friendship between BABYMETAL and Bring Me The Horizon.”
This interview originally appeared in the special-edition Kerrang! Presents BABYMETAL magazine.
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