The Über Rock Interview: Chris White (Desert Storm)

Written by Rich Hobson
Friday, 16 March 2018 04:40

2018 just might be the year that the UK stoner scene truly comes into its own, crawling out of the shadow of its better-known American counterpart and taking strides towards establishing its own sonic identity. At the core of this development is a series of bold new releases by bands both new and (slightly) older, with Boss Keloid, Black Moth, AWOOGA and Desert Storm all doing their part to break loose with a whole new take on mud-spattered riffs. Ahead of the release today (Friday 16 March) of their new record ‘Sentinels’, I caught up with Desert Storm guitarist Chris White on their European tour as they readied for a show in Berlin, to chat the stoner scene, the new record and where things are headed now…

Hey Chris, how’s it going?

Not bad, just readying for our show in Berlin tonight. We’re currently out in Europe as the main support to Midnight Ghost Train – we were originally going to headline our own show, but found out that they had a show the same night just five minutes down the road. The promoters put their heads together and figured they’d make a fun gig out of it rather than having people go to one or the other.

Makes perfect sense, really. How is the Euro tour treating you thus far?

Pretty good. We started out in London on the Thursday night and then we did Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Antwerp and Douai in France, with Berlin tonight. It’s going really well so far; we’ve managed to pull some pretty decent crowds and sold a lot of merch. It’s great to get out here – for us it’s as much a holiday as it is a job.

Is it weird touring the month before your record drops?

Yeah; well originally it had an earlier release date but ended up getting delayed, as these things tend to. We’ve at least got copies to sell while we’re out here, in a pre-sale type thing. After all, the last thing you want is to be out promoting a record on tour without actually being able to sell it. It is a bit strange, but we’ll have the full launch in March.

How are the crowds reacting to the new material?

It’s going down pretty well with people right now. A lot of our current set is based on the new album and because stylistically the new album is a little more uniform than our previous releases, it’s made our sets a little bit tighter and so they flow better.

Would you say that ‘Sentinels’ marks a pretty big shift in sound for you guys?

With all of our previous releases, we sort of had a spread of different styles being represented on them, so we could have the heavier progressive side of things, but also classic rock and blues on other tracks. So you could have albums that have songs that sound wildly different to each other, all we’ve done different now is taking our heavy progressive sound and developing it – not dropping the bluesy, classic rock stuff, but merging it into a more uniform style. Sometimes it can work, sometimes it can sound disjointed, so we wanted to make a streamlined sound which is representative of us. It’s a step up from our old stuff for sure, it draws on our previous work but as we’re a little bit older and a little bit wiser (I hope!) we can continue to improve as we go on.

What influences did you have going in to make the record?

We’ve got quite a wide spread, really. On the heavy end of things we’ve got Mastodon for example, The Sword have also been a really big influence on that part of our sound. I started enjoying a lot of other modern progressive acts – bands like Tesseract for example. There’s a lot of that goes into it, but we still try to keep our classic rock influences in the mix – bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. We still want to keep those classic influences and blend them with more modern bands that are around today.

And how about lyrical influences?

Chris: That’s a difficult question for me to answer really, because Matt writes the lyrics. I’ll hand you over!

Matt Ryan (Vocals): It’s an array – lots and lots of positivity, but also negativity and fantasy. We’ve got a track about drinking yourself to death, another about introverts and extroverts, there’s a couple of out and out fantasy tracks – a big cavern where mythical beings dwell, some about sun-kissed balmy open rugged terrain. A lot of things, really. I tend to write from experience as much as I can, but some things just sound great – mostly the mythical. A few of the tracks on this album are throwbacks to our earlier stuff; one is a throwback to a quadrilogy of songs we’ve been working on – ‘Outlander’ which was on the last record was part one of this chapter, and part two is called ‘Gearhead’ and is a Mad Max type thing about gears and pistons.

To be honest, it’s been the same kind of process since album number one. I go into a room, listen to the music and start to scribble down a page of things that come to mind, alliterative phrases and stuff that can go into my head and let me work on the stuff. Its crazy how much you remember from English classes in school – rules of three and all that stuff. It starts with just jargon but gets tweaked until I’ve got something that sounds great.

‘Too Far Gone’ is about the perils of alcohol – that’s pretty far from the “music to drink to” description of your early days – do you think that’s representative of a changing mindset in the band as you get older?

Chris: Things haven’t changed that much for us as a band personally. We’re in a situation where we have a work/life balance that sees us work the band around day jobs and other responsibilities, but nothing’s changed too much…

So what do you do outside the band?

Elliot (Cole, drums) and Ryan (Cole, guitar) are chefs, and somehow they manage to spend all their time eating kebabs – I’m not sure how that works really! Matt works in the computer game industry, doing visual effects and Chris (Benoit, bass) has got his graphic design as well. There’s quite a spread! Trying to organise five people is always a bit tricky, so we just do our tours as a bit of a holiday – usually it takes a few months for these things to get booked as well so we can work in advance. We just do what we can to make sure we get the time off – beg, steal and borrow, but we always make it work in the end.

What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned in the past 11 years?

I think the biggest one has been to enjoy what you do. When you spend a lot of time gigging on the road – all the time, you’ll have things that go wrong and there are other pressures as well – but its about not letting pressures like that get in the way of going out and doing what you want to do. We’ve learned to enjoy it as much as possible, because you don’t know when you’ll no longer have the opportunity to do it again. It lets people get on a lot better and probably contributed to how we’ve stayed together for so long. Maybe in another 11 years’ time we’ll still be doing it.

How do you feel about the UK stoner scene right now?

It’s incredible to see it still growing. Especially looking at events like Desertfest that have sprouted up in cities around the world (Antwerp, Berlin, Athens) – just taking that one event as a starting point you can see how it’s grown rapidly. There are no signs of it stopping either, seeing support for shows as well. Midnight Ghost Train said they always see the same crowd at their shows as they will at shows they play with other bands, so it shows there’s always going to be a loyal fanbase that will support the genre when bands pass through town. It’s a nice sense of community, in terms of bands and fans. It’s the best thing about what we have.

‘Sentinels’ is released today (Friday 16 March) via APF Records. You can get your copy HERE.

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