So, you’re doing Sanguivore II. How come?
“You don't see a great deal of sequels in music. We've done three records before this, and each one took an abrupt right turn after we finished it and went into a different thing. We always knew what we were going to do up to the last one, the vampire record, and I think everyone was expecting us to burn it all down and start again, because that's what we've always done. So, the biggest swerve we could do was to do a sequel.
“It’s funny – we got the vibe that people really weren't ready for this era of the band to go away, and for once, we were giving people good news at the end of the show. Not like last time we played KOKO and did our big homage to David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust where they thought it was all over! It was nice to actually hear people happy, and to give people what they want for once, which is not like us.”
It's a hell of an opening throw…
“The funny thing is, it's the fastest song on the record. My tendency is to do ballads. There was one record we were making, I can't remember which one it was, but I’d written, like, 10 ballads. It’s a trap I always fall into. This time around, we thought, ‘Let's challenge ourselves and make it so every song could be a single.’ We've always had fast songs in the past, but we've been trying to not cover the same ground. There’s a big bunch of ideas I wanted to do, and we just combined them together. I wanted to do a Motörhead thing, because we’ve never done that before. I always wanted to have a chorus like We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister, or KISS, ‘I wanna rock’n’roll all niiiight’ where it's a big gang chorus that’s fun to sing.
“I love the idea of having a gospel-sounding singer in the back of it, like on Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones. Tom [Dalgety, producer] had a friend called Chantelle who came in, and I realised that these textured vocals in these choruses sounded like something maybe we haven't heard recently in hard rock. So we started putting that through all the songs. It pops up all over the record.
“There's a second guitarist now as well, and Ian [Miles, guitar] was like, ‘I really want to start doing solos off of each other. We’ve never done that before.’ So we suddenly had all these different components that we've never got to play with before. There’s lots of brilliant guitar work on this record. It's really, really impressive. It's really cool to watch them do it. I mean, it's over my head. I can't play guitar, so I don’t know the first thing about how to do it, but it's great!
What’s it about?
“This record takes place in the 1980s. It's about a vampire rock band on tour, and there’s someone coming to get them. That's who the Mistress Of Death is. The song itself is about sin and the excess and violence of this vampire rock’n’roll band. It introduces these characters really well. It doesn't introduce the Mistress Of Death quite yet, in the Dan Harmon story circle we’re at square one, before things have taken place, showing the world as it is.
“The idea for the video was to show the characters, and say, ‘This is what it looks like when the band plays.’ So we did this huge thing with pyro and all sorts of stuff. It's a really, really big budget rock’n’roll video. That’s what the song’s about as well: it’s the band talking about being in a band. It's kind of the anthem for the record. It starts off on that high point, and it tells you who this these characters are. It gave us a really fun opportunity to have a movie monster chase us around and be a vampire rock band offstage. It's a really good introduction to the record and how outrageously over the top all of it is.”