Tarin Kerrey & Nick Magee – Sanguine – Uber Rock Interview Exclusive
Written by Matt Phelps
Saturday, 13 February 2016 03:00
Exeter-based Alt. Metallers Sanguine have a new album out, ‘Black Sheep’. Recorded at Jesper Strömblad’s In Flames studio in Gothenburg ‘Black Sheep’ is an album packed with quality and diversity. It’s also an album that the band hopes will help put female fronted U.K. Metal on the world stage and have them standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Nightwish, Lacuna Coil, and Paramore. I dropped into Exeter for a quick drink and swift chat with vocalist Tarin Kerrey and guitarist Nick Magee to get the lowdown on all things ‘Black Sheep’.
Uber Rock: So Tarin, Nick, how’s life treating the band at the minute?
Tarin: Awesome. It’s been really cool. We’ve had a wonderful response from the press and stuff. Everyone has been giving us amazing reviews. We’re just absolutely blown away by it. We were just hoping that people would understand it so we’re blown away that people don’t just like it, they really like it. That’s fantastic.
I was going to say that I’ve seen nothing but positivity in the reviews that have been coming out for the new album. How do you feel seeing those reactions?
Nick: It’s just nice for us because when you’re in the studio and the writing process you don’t know what you’re doing is any good. It could just be a load of crap, you know? So when you first put it out there you’re like, are people gonna get this, are they not? Then when you start getting the feedback like we’ve had it’s just brilliant. Really positive.
Tarin: Yeah. I suppose it’s like anything, any art. You always want to get better at it. You paint a picture and then you want to paint a better picture. This album we definitely put together more as an “album”. It’s more of a complete piece of work.
If we just go back to the beginning for a minute, give us a brief history of Sanguine. You’re from here in Exeter, so how did you get together and how long have you been doing this?
Tarin: We formed in 2004 but we started as a very different project. I put some adverts up in Exeter University and recruited Matt (Feld) through the Rock Soc, the Rock Society, he’s our drummer. Then I asked Nick to join us on guitars because I needed a second guitarist at the time. The other guitarist then peeled away and we realised we weren’t the band we were trying to be. We were trying to be a Prog Rock band to begin with and we were nothing like a Prog Rock band (laughs). It was like we were trying to be a female Tool or something. We realised pretty quickly that we couldn’t do that. We were just really, really heavy. That’s how we found our sound. It took us a few years to really find who we were as Sanguine. We have a very unique sound we’re very happy with that. At least we were pushing the boundaries somewhere.
So having been doing this for well over a decade how does that make you feel when you sit back and think about it in that sense?
Tarin: We do it out of love. I don’t think we’d be complete unless we were doing music. If we go for a week without practicing or playing we start getting depressed.
Nick: Literally, we’ll be phoning each other. Ross was in London last week and he had to skip Wednesday practice and you could hear him, there was a bit of a shake in his voice, he was like, we gotta do it Saturday! We were supposed to be going to this mate’s party but we’ve got to do the practice first. It’s got to happen. It’s good for our mental health. I haven’t even noticed the time myself. It’s a lifestyle, man.
I don’t suppose you looked at it in the long term when you started out but did you ever think you’d still be doing it after all this time?
Tarin: I think we knew. Me and Nick knew we always wanted to do music. We’ve always wanted to be songwriters, that’s been our thing. I think that’s why Sanguine is so varied in soul because we love writing in different styles. So we knew we wanted to be songwriters. I think we pictured ourselves retiring and still writing tunes in the back bedroom.
Nick: Like a thousand years old and still doing music. I don’t see myself ever quitting. When you see those old people in the corners of pubs playing, that’ll be me. I’d fucking love it. It would feel strange not to do it.
So, this new album ‘Black Sheep’. I’ll be honest, I was worried it was going to be a bit one dimensional. I’m an old school metalhead so my comfort zone is with my Iron Maiden and my Saxon so I usually approach “Alt. Metal” quite warily. But I have to say I’m very impressed. I put it on, played through the first track, OK I liked that. Second track I liked even better. Third track even more. At the end I was genuinely blown away by the diversity of it.
Nick: Thank you. That was exactly what we wanted.
Tarin: That’s great, that means you understood it. We’ve found that the people that have been giving us great reviews haven’t just been picking out one or two songs but picking out most of the album which is such a compliment. And honestly we have been so blown away by all of the compliments so many people have given us. I’m so glad people are getting it, because there aren’t many bands from the U.K. who have even touched upon the female-fronted metal. No one’s really done this from the U.K. yet.
It’s nice that it’s just ten tracks. I think bands sometimes get carried away with quantity and end up with sixteen songs where about fourteen of them are filler. How difficult was it for you getting down to just those ten?
Tarin: It was very difficult. We started as soon as we finished the first album, we were already writing and already had songs in the bag. So we’d written God knows how many songs before we got to the point for this record, it must have been about forty tracks. We went into the studio and recorded about fifteen but straight away some of them weren’t working so we threw them out and came back with about twelve or thirteen complete songs and then we sat down and said, you know what, to make this a kick ass album let’s just be brutally honest about this, no filler (laughs).
You did some writing for this album with Jesper Strömblad from In Flames. How did that come about?
Nick: Oh Christ, that was insane. My manager just phoned one day. He was like, you’ve heard of In Flames, right? Yeah. Jesper Strömblad the guitarist? Yeah. Well he’s heard your demos and he loves it, he wants to work with you. I was like, fuck off (laughs). Really? So I told Tarin and the band and they were like, fuck off! That was everyone’s response (laughs). So I spoke to Jesper through emails and stuff and he invited us out to Gothenburg.
Tarin: We went over and exchanged ideas, just to see if it would work and we hit it off straight away basically. We stepped off the plane, went straight into Gothenburg where he met us in the city centre, bless him. Then we spent all day just traipsing around Gothenburg and going to his place and exchanging ideas. We showed him our songs that we had that we were waiting to put on an album. He showed us a bag of riffs and stuff that he hadn’t worked on. Then we picked out one we liked of each others. That was ‘Empty’, his riff. And ‘Breathe Out’, our chorus and verse. So we had those songs and we went away that night and we didn’t sleep in our hotel. We were up all night thinking how can we make this awesome track?
Nick: I was just walking around Gothenburg thinking of ideas. I thought I’m only here for a week or something so sleep is not an option (laughs). It was just write, write, write!
Tarin: Then we went back to the studio the next day, this bloody amazing studio. He’s got three control rooms, it’s massive. It’s in an old warehouse, a beautiful place really.
Nick: All the Jesterheads from the In Flames tours are up on the walls. It’s crazy.
Tarin: We turned up and Daniel Flores was there. That’s where we met him, he’s our producer. We then just started laying down our ideas, the demos for ‘Empty’ and ‘Breathe Out’. It worked so well. We definitely wanted to go back and record the rest of the album there with Daniel and use Jesper’s feedback. So yeah, the partnership was born.
That’s got to be good for your…um… “ego”, for want of a better word. To have people like that actually coming to you and wanting to work with Sanguine.
Nick: Yeah, that’s something that we’ve discussed a few times. It is, really good.
Tarin: Like we said it’s taken us ten years to get this far. We’ve been together that long but we don’t know anyone (laughs). We had no links to the music industry at all. We were scratching our heads for a while, It wasn’t until we got our management that these opportunities came along, like working with Adrian Smith and Mikee Goodman, they came to us.
Nick: Funny story, it was Mikee who was the first professional to reach out to us from the music industry. SikTh were massive at the time, ‘Death Of A Dead Day’ had just been released and they were on fire. I got this email from a guy saying he was Mikee and I looked at it and just thought it was bollocks. I told the guys some clown had been pretending to be Mikee but literally six months later we were at a festival and I bumped into him, I got introduced to him backstage. He was like, I sent you an email, I really wanted to work with your band and I heard nothing back. I was like, shit mate I’m so sorry (laughs).
Tarin: Luckily we’ve become really good friends. He gives me such good vocal advice and to take vocal advice from someone like Mikee Goodman who has got so many varied styles in his voice is just amazing. I think that’s why we’ve always carried on going because of people coming to you like that. That’s what keeps you going. I’m not forcing myself forward to be famous or to do this for other reasons. I don’t want the fame, it’s just is what I’m doing any good. It’s the validation.
Nick: I suppose it happened the same with the gigs. When we first started out we got offered our first gig, I can’t remember how it came about we just did it. It was years and years ago in Plymouth, I think. There was a guy there who booked us for a show so we played that show and another guy was there who booked us too and that happened about ten times so we were like, oh, we’ve played ten shows now, people must like it. It’s been really organic, everything has. We just do what we do and keep on doing it.
So if you talk us through some of the tracks then. You’ve spoken about ‘Empty’ and ‘Breathe Out’ so let’s take a look at ‘Social Decay’. That was the lead video for the new album so tell us a bit about the story behind that one.
Tarin: Well, Nick was the leader on this one really.
Nick: Yeah. The song’s about social control, that kind of narrative that the Government puts out and has always put out. That’s the kind of core for the song. The video came about because I was going through old propaganda videos because I was thinking about propaganda and about how what was once said we now know to be bollocks. Anyway I found this old film called ‘Reefer Madness’ from 1936 that was about an hour and forty five minutes of being told that if you smoked just one joint you were going to murder, rape, and kill. It was so extreme, it just escalated. It starts off kinda histrionic and just gets worse (laughs). By the end practically everyone was dead and it was all because of pot. I was watching it and I was fairly absorbed in it and I was thinking wow, people believed this was what the Government honestly thought was true. That it was educational. I was looking at the skirting board in one of the scenes and then I glanced down at one of the skirting boards in my house and it was near enough the same skirting board. It’s the same era house. Then I thought we could put the band in the house to look like this old film. It worked quite well actually. I think we’re all aware of the expectations for the usual kind of videos bands make, you know, band in slow motion, sweaty sort of vibe. It feels a bit clichéd and I don’t like playing to those kind of things. If someone’s expecting that I don’t want to do it. It feels like what’s the point, some other guy will do it next week and another the week after. There’s enough of that out there already. So we got a shitty camera and spent a couple of days making our video.
Tarin: It was one of the funniest days I have ever spent filming. Obviously in the video we had to spend all that time grinning, doing fake smiles. By the end of the day because we’d done it for so long our cheeks were just aching and none of us could stop smiling (laughs). There’s always an undertone in Sanguine and although ‘Social Decay’ is quite a political song we still do it tongue in cheek. We can’t bring ourselves to be deadly serious, we ain’t no Rage Against The Machine but we do like to comment on political things. We’ll just do it in a fun way.
The title track of the new album, ‘Black Sheep’, is in a film, ‘EAT’, by Carl Shanahan. How did you get involved with that and how does ‘Black Sheep’ fit in?
Tarin: We’ve been working with Carl for years. We do our videos with him, not all of them were with him but most of them were, he’s always done our videos for us. That’s how we got into creating videos ourselves, through learning off Carl. He’s just a fantastic local film and video maker. We’ve got a great long relationship with him and again like everyone we’ve met we try and stick with people and build proper relationships. So artistically he helps us and we help him.
Nick: He’s actually one of the few people I’ll take advice from. I mean there’s not many people I’d listen to artistically but if Carl has an idea I’ll listen to it because it’s probably going to be really good. In that sense we trust him a lot artistically. Carl was one of the first people I showed this new album too because he’s quite brutal. I said just be brutal you, what’s wrong with it? So he ran it through his speakers and he liked it but he really liked the track ‘Black Sheep’. He had this script that fits that song so well it’s got to happen. So that was it. We actually helped him with the making of it as well. Tarin was the art director. I did getting the locations sorted and stuff like that.
Tarin: We absolutely loved the experience and just creating stuff. You’ll find that with Sanguine, we’re always working on projects, there’s always some artistic undertone. There’s always a swapping of skills with other people. We keep ourselves busy.
Nick: It’s just been nominated at the London Short Film Festival as well which is really exciting. We didn’t expect that but it’s a real added bonus. It was screened last Saturday, it sold out and they had to move Star Wars down to screen three. I was like YES!! Only in one cinema but it only has to start with one (laughs).
Video-wise there’s a new one for ‘Pretty Girl’…
Tarin: Yeah, we shot that one in Las Vegas. It was just such an awesome experience. We flew out to L.A. and then we drove to Vegas. We thought shall we get a flight? No, let’s drive! Let’s do a bit of the Route 66. So we hired a Mustang Convertible and headed to Vegas. When we got there it was Friday evening, it was all banging, people getting arrested everywhere and we were driving through it going thinking oh my God, what the Hell…
Nick: We were in this block of seven lanes, the place was just gridlocked and the Police were just pulling people out of cars randomly to search them and we were like, shit, what is going on?
Tarin: We finally made it to our hotel, got sorted and said right, let’s do it, just go out and film. We wanted ‘Pretty Girl’ to be a fun video and we were originally going to do it in Ibiza but it didn’t have enough lights. We wanted more lights!
Nick: We ended up shooting for ‘Breathe Out’ in Ibiza instead with a completely different vibe. We thought we’d go to Ibiza, party vibe, full-on loads of people, throwing up everywhere and just make it really wild. But it wasn’t just quite as wild as Vegas. Ibiza was wild but we wanted ‘Pretty Girl’ to be full-on neon, off its tits! So we went to Vegas instead.
Tarin: So we did this amazing trip and just spent a couple of nights just shooting on the strip and having a laugh with people. Though we didn’t get very much filming done because you’ll be filming and then someone will just walk right in front of you and be “ARGHHH!” right into the camera. People were just coming and trying to pick me up as I’m acting but it was fun. It was really good.
That’s not bad is it, a band from Devon getting out around the world? Your time in Los Angeles I think resulted in you picking up a contract out there for your distribution in Japan?
Nick: Yeah, that was the first time we went to L.A. We had a call from Seven Webster who is Skindred’s manager, he said he had a showcase coming up which was going to be happening in L.A. and would we like to play it. He was aware of our situation so to speak and we were just looking for the right platform from which to launch. We had the album already recorded so we were shopping for people who may be interested. So he said come out to L.A. and there’ll be a room of record execs there and the some of them might be interested. It was going to be quite expensive to get the band there, we had to think will this be worth it but we just wanted to play Hollywood Boulevard so we didn’t care (laughs). We said let’s just go and play Hollywood so that became the mission, we didn’t care if just one person turned up.
Tarin: We managed to meet up with our sponsors, Alpinestars, over there and we met the manager of Incubus, Steve Rennie. We went to his house and did a podcast with him.
Nick: We ended up in his Beverly Hills mansion and at one point he was setting fire to money. Literally. He was trying to illustrate a point and he was like a fired-up Jack Nicholson. He got this hundred dollar bill and was like, look, there it goes, if you don’t like watching money burn then you’re in the wrong industry. We thought, fuck, this guy’s nuts (laughs).
Tarin: I think at that point we were spinning out too but at the Hollywood Boulevard show we picked up our deal, the guy fell in love with the album and we worked on a deal to get it out in Japan.
Nick: What you find with the industry is people hover around you and then when one goes then everyone just goes, right let’s do it! Suddenly at that point the doors really opened, I think we turned down three publishing deals in the last six months or so. It’s been quite full-on just trying to choose who to go with, what’s the best way to get this out. It’s not a bad situation to be in in this day and age, to have that much interest in a smaller band.
Tarin: That’s why we concentrated on getting this album right. It was about a good year we were working on this album, from meeting Jesper to finally having the final recording in our hands. We started in Gothenburg then we came back to the U.K. and worked on ideas. Then we went back over to Stockholm to finish recording. I think it was the fact that we didn’t rush the process. Most bands have to go in and they have to lay a record from concept to finish within two weeks. Are you really doing the best for your songs? That’s why you’re ending up with only a couple of singles instead of a great album. We wanted to make albums like you did in the nineties where you’d actually listen to the whole album.
Nick: We’d rather spend a couple of weeks just on one song, getting it right. But it is a good situation to be in. After we made the record, we’d been concentrating so much on the music, we realised we’ve got to make the videos, we’ve got to get the platforms like getting labels involved, getting publishers involved…
Tarin: We’re very DIY like that. We’re not signed into a conventional record deal, we’ve done a lot of this work ourselves.
Nick: We started to put together business plans and reaching out to private investors. We went down every road you could think of to get the best people around us. It’s been quite a long process, getting the right team. But the team is awesome now. It feels like it’s going to be a long term one and that everyone is involved for the right reasons.
Let’s look at the cover, then. The sheep’s skull. In an era where people say cover art is going it’s good to have something that someone has put a lot of effort into and is very original. Tell us about that.
Tarin: I think we went through three different album covers before we settled on this one.
Nick: Well, we are DIY and that means to the Ninth degree. We do every t-shirt design, every poster, everything. We design every last bit. But this was a separate project I was doing just for fun. At the time I was working with vulnerable adults and some of those people were coming from other countries. I was working with this Maori tribesman guy, he was totally lost in this world (laughs). He’s come from somewhere so vastly different he just couldn’t connect with any of the systems here so I was just helping him getting his benefits sorted and his bills and his electric. All the things you need sorted when you first set up for yourself. He was over here because he wanted his son to have an education. He was just trying to be a supportive father but he didn’t really have a clue what to do, how to navigate here. Basically he wanted to pay me back for my help but I didn’t want to take any money off him. I noticed he was always fiddling with bone and carving stuff so I said, can you teach me how to do that? How to make necklaces or something. So he just took me through the basics of bone carving. So I thought it would be kinda cool to carve a skull or something but I didn’t really know where to get a skull from. I was talking about it for months, I need a skull, where do I get a skull?
Tarin: Yeah, he was going on about skulls constantly so I said go to the abattoir or something, I don’t know (laughs). Then my friend came over and said she was walking on Dartmoor and saw a dead sheep, maybe you could have the skull off that. Low and behold the next weekend where’s Nick? On Dartmoor, trying to find this dead sheep. We only found it as we were going back to the car, we spent the whole day searching for this thing.
Nick: It was horrific. It was so badly decomposed. I was so transfixed on getting it I hadn’t thought how am I going to pick this up, collect it, take it, what state’s it going to be in… So it was still attached to the sheep and the only thing I had in my van was a hammer and chisel because I’d been doing some DIY the week before. I thought it’s pretty grim but it’s the only way it’s going to come off (laughs). So I put it in a bag and took it home. I went to Tarin’s house and I was like, can I borrow a saucepan? So I boiled it for about three days in the garden. I had to pull all of the maggots out with tweezers, it was fucking horrible.
Tarin: I never got my saucepan back. I didn’t want it back after that (laughs).
Nick: Anyway, I got left with the skull and I started carving. I started on the front, then I did the cheeks and the eyes.
Tarin: We were so impressed with it we just took a picture of it. Then were were searching for the right artwork for this album and that was just there.
Nick: It was hiding in plain sight. We were saying, what are we gonna put on the album cover? I this it was Ross who said, why don’t we just put that on the cover for ‘Black Sheep’? It must have been subconscious or something… The little U.K. bit behind it on the cover is us wanting the world to know this is from the U.K. I think the U.K. has lost its reputation a little bit in the sense of we used to provide nothing but the greats, Zeppelin, Queen, Sabbath, it all came from the U.K. Then it feels to some degree that the Americans just popped in and took a huge chunk out of our history so a part of our whole thinking is we want to put the U.K. back on map as a place for good song writers and a place where you’ll get good albums from, all the rest of it.
Tarin: Like I said to you earlier, there’s not been a female-fronted band like us from the U.K. yet. In terms of status like Paramore or Nightwish or Lacuna Coil. There needs to be representation so I want to make sure people know it comes from the U.K.
So finally, live dates? It’ll be good to see a FULL U.K. tour, not a lot of people bother anymore.
Nick: Yeah, we want to hit as many places as possible really. We are very much a live band and we enjoy it. Our shows are full-on and lively and in-your-face. There’s even a possibility of us doing two shows a day on certain days. We’ll do a heavy show in the evening but also do a café show in the afternoon.
Tarin: We have those two options because with Sanguine we can actually play two types of sets. We can play acoustic sets where we’ll do more of our rock and lighter stuff and then we’ve got really heavy sets where we do most of our screaming and fuck you stuff (laughs). So we’re pretty versatile. We just want to reach as many people as we can. We know that there’s going to be songs on this album that some people won’t like because of the screaming and there’ll be other songs people can’t listen to because it’s too light. We’re lucky to have such a broad spectrum of fans. We have fans that listen to Black Metal and don’t listen to anything but Black Metal but for some reason they like us. Then you’ve got people who would never listen to Metal that say, actually I like Sanguine, so they listen. We’re just really lucky that we have such amazing fans supporting us.
Well that sounds like the perfect place to stop this today. Thank you so much for you time and we wish you the best of luck with ‘Black Sheep’.
Since the interview was conducted it has been confirmed that Sanguine will be joining MUSHROOMHEAD and AMERICAN HEAD CHARGE for the American heavyweights’ upcoming 15 date UK tour, which kicks off in Manchester on March 18th.
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