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Napalm Death.
 To tide them over between albums, British grindcore outfit Napalm Death put together a release called 'Leaders Not Followers: Part 2' last year. According to very talkative guitarist Mitch Harris, this release came together in a reasonably quick, uncomplicated fashion, the band spending a mere three weeks rehearsing the material on it, and doing the recording in a local studio. So pleased were they with the way that this no-frills approach worked that they also adopted it for 'The Code Is Red... Long Live The Code', for which they enlisted the talents of three guest vocalists: Jeff Walker from Carcass, Hatebreed's Jamey Jasta, and the famed Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys.
"We've been in contact with Jeff from Carcass as he's been a good friend of ours since the mid-80s," Harris explains. "We said it'd be cool if he came up and did some vocals on the album; it'd be good for Carcass fans as well because that band's not going any more. As for Jamey, he's worked with the band in the past; he was working for a booking agency in America which put together some of our underground tours and stuff. Hatebreed happened to be in England on tour when we were recording the album, so he was totally well-up for doing some vocals for it."
As for Biafra, "we had him make his contribution to the album when we were in San Francisco while on a tour with Cannibal Corpse. I mean, it'd be pretty ridiculous to spend thousands of pounds flying him over to England, only to have him sing for a minute. So he sang on a song called The Great And The Good and it turned out really well. It was actually quite hilarious to see him, and hear all his different vocal takes because he wasn't quite sure what we wanted. We pretty much used the first take that he did, and then he did some experimenting, some comical stuff. It was really funny; we were cracking up."
The track on which Biafra sang was to end up getting an early release due to the recent tsunami disaster, something that Harris tells me happened while the band was still working on the new album. The tragedy hit particularly close to home for them, as it claimed the life of a good friend: Mieszko Talarczyk, guitarist/vocalist of Swedish grindcore outfit Nasum.
"We donated some money to the Red Cross," Harris informs me, "but it seemed like there must have been something more that we could do as a band, with the name Napalm Death. I suggested that we do some kind of tsunami relief song, so we decided to pre-release the song with Jello Biafra. We then thought, 'OK, well that's only one song, and we need to sell as many of these as we can, so why don't we involve some other Century Media bands like The Haunted and Heaven Shall Burn?' The label agreed straightaway and worked really hard to make it happen in such a short space of time. They waived their percentage, which is rare for a record company to do. In the end, more than £10,000 was generated for the Red Cross through that."
Our conversation moves on to all the touring Napalm Death has done over the years; I soon get the impression that there are few places left on the globe that the band hasn't visited. One particularly memorable place the group played in was Macedonia, which they visited during the early '90s while all the hostilities in the Balkans were still in full swing.
"That was crazy," he recalls. "It took about seven hours for us to get through the border because of the war; you're watching your passport sitting on a desk with flies all over it while the official's reading a book, showing no interest in you whatsoever. It was weird to see the hatred between everyone there. At one point, some people even wrote some horrible message in the dirt on our bus for the next city we were going to; we got stopped by the police because of that message, and we didn't even know it was there."
Colombia also holds some very interesting memories for the band. "We played in cities like Bogota and Medellin, interesting places where there was complete chaos. There were riots and problems with promoters. The government closed down a show because there were elections going on, and there was a show that 5000 people couldn't get into; they threatened to kill the promoter's daughter because of that..."
James Brazel
 | 'The Code is Red... Long Live the Code' is out now on Century Media/Shock. |
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