Dear friends, our coverage regarding the upcoming Czech edition of the autobiography "Life...? And Napalm Death" by Shane Embury also reached its third installment, wherein an excerpt from the text is (as usual) in order; this time a double one!
On one hand, we bring you chapter six that takes place in 1986 and it is about how Embury met Napalm Death, and on the other hand, chapter seven, wherein Martin Nesbitt (who helped Digby Pearson with getting the iconic Earache Records off the ground) recalls the early days of the British crust-punk scene and meeting Embury for the first time.
As usual, the whole excerpt is presented as it will appear in the book when printed, with layout and design done by Radek Doleží. Click on individual images to enlarge. The English text can be found further below.
The English original text is as follows:
1986
The first time I ever saw Napalm Death was at the Mermaid pub in Birmingham. It was 22 March 1986, and it’s no exaggeration to say that night changed my life forever.
Mitch had met this guy in Brum a little while before. The guy had seen Mitch’s backpack with a Siege patch on it and come over to talk to him. He said his name was Justin Broadrick and he was the guitarist with a band named Napalm Death. He told Mitch his band were playing at a pub called The Mermaid soon, and he should come to the show.
Napalm Death had already been going since the early 80s. They’d started out as an anarcho-punk band. Two of the original members were Nik Bullen on bass and vocals and Miles Ratledge, who everyone called Rat, on drums. Justin had joined a few years later. There’d been a lot of line-up changes even by that point, and I think they might have split up and got back together a couple of times.
I didn’t know any of that when Justin invited Mitch to the show. I’d never even heard the name Napalm Death before, but it sounded like the kind of thing I’d like, so me and Mitch decided we’d be up for going to see them.
The Mermaid was this Irish pub in Sparkbrook in Birmingham. Downstairs, it was a normal boozer, but it had a room upstairs that had punk gigs on all the time. It was the kind of place where you’d pay £1.50 to see seven bands. Chumbawamba played there years before they had a big pop hit with ‘Tubthumping’. Bands like Swans from New York played – I didn’t see them, but apparently they were so loud that plaster was falling from the ceiling. Reggae bands used to play there too – there was a real mix.
I remember the journey vividly. We got the bus from Ironbridge to Birmingham, then we got the Number 6 to The Mermaid. We’d been to gigs before, but this was a bit different – it was like stepping into another world.
To be honest, I was a bit worried about going to a place like The Mermaid. There had been a lot of tension between the punks and the metalheads back in the late 70s and early 80s. It was a real tribal thing. You’d hear tales of gigs where they’d get into fights with each other, and I didn’t know what was going to happen. All these images flash through your head: “Will I get beaten up?” The first thing I noticed when we stepped through the door was that me and Mitch were the only metalheads in there. There were punks every- where, drinking cider that cost 50 pence a pint, sniffing glue. Some of them had piercings and tattoos – all kinds of wild people. I’d never seen that kind of stuff before.
Rat – Miles Ratledge – was dancing in the pit when Napalm came on, and he was shaking his hands like The Joker, with this mad look on his face. I’d never seen anyone dance like that before. The way the punks were moving to the music was completely different to the kind of air-guitaring and headbanging we did. The Napalm Death show that night was amazing. They instantly became my favourite band. I was a fan of the Swiss trio Celtic Frost, who made this kind of slow, primitive metal noise, and I loved an underground American hardcore punk band called Siege, who played faster than anyone else at that time. With Napalm Death, here was a band who sounded like both – Celtic Frost when they played slow and Siege when they played fast. It was the perfect combination.
That was also the night I met Mick Harris, Napalm Death’s drummer at the time and a friend for more than 35 years now. Mickey’s always been a really hyper, in-your-face character, and at The Mermaid he came out of the blue and jumped on me. He must have been intrigued by the way I looked – nobody else there was wearing a bleached denim jacket with ‘Thrash ’Til Death’ on the back.
Mickey Harris and I became really good friends really quickly. I was 18 and still living in Broseley, so I’d travel down to Birmingham and stay at Mickey’s parents’ house, where we’d play records and tape trade and just talk about music.
At the time, I was working in a place called Hornsey Gates, a steel- works, and I hated it. They’d already threatened to fire me because I took off to go and see Celtic Frost in London one day without telling anybody. I tried my best to buckle down, but it just wasn’t happening. Eventually I said, “Fuck it, I’m not doing this anymore.” I told my dad I was jacking it in. He said, “Why are you quitting?”
I said: “Because I’m going to hang out with Mickey Harris in Birmingham. It sounds like more fun to me.”
So I quit. I packed in work and went on the dole and spent my days hanging out at Mickey’s mom’s house, just goofing around. Mickey is one of the funniest and most eccentric characters I know. He was a total livewire, especially back then. I was at his mom’s house once when he was ironing his clothes. Something went wrong with the ironing and he suddenly started swinging the iron around like a lasso. And then he let go of it and it went flying down the garden and hit the garage. He turned to me and said, “Shane, we’ve got to get the 35 bus into town.”
“Why, Mickey?”
“I gotta buy my mom a new iron.”
Mickey was a real piss-taker as well. It used to wind some people up, but I didn’t mind it, at least most of the time. He would always take the piss out of my hair, my appearance – it was like being back at school. There was a kids’ TV show in the 70s called Double Deckers, and one of the characters was this large kid called Doughnut. Mickey would call me “Doughnut”. I can laugh about it now, but it got to me sometimes.
Occasionally I’d snap. I’m not a violent person, but I’d threaten him. I remember once he said something and I left a really angry message on his voicemail. I can’t remember what it was, but it was enough to wind me up. I was probably a bit sensitive back then. I think maybe I still am.
But mostly me and Mickey had a mad friendship, and it was through him that I got to know the rest of Napalm Death. I’d go to see them practice, and I ended up sitting in on the recording of their debut album, Scum – or at least the first side of it.
Scum is a weird album, in that the original Side A and Side B were recorded by two different line-ups nearly a year apart. The reason for this was that the A-side was originally supposed to have been part of a split LP with a band called Atavistic released on Manic Ears Records, but for some reason that didn’t happen. Napalm ended up recording it and sitting on it for months.
The line-up on Side A of Scum was Justin Broadrick, who had invited me and Mitch to see them play at The Mermaid, on guitar and vocals, Nik Bullen, who had founded Napalm Death in the early 80s, on bass, and Mickey on drums. Mickey was still in the band when they recorded Side B of Scum in 1987, but Justin and Nik had gone by that point. They’d been replaced by singer Lee Dorrian, guitarist Bill Steer and bassist Jim Whitely, who I’d end up replacing the following year.
I remember the session for the A-side of Scum vividly. It was an overnight session at Rich Bitch studio in Birmingham. Digby Pearson, who ran Earache Records, was there, along with some of the guys from the band Head Of David – who Justin Broadrick left Napalm shortly afterwards to join.
They started recording at 9 or 10 at night and went through to 6 o’clock in the morning. At one point Mickey and Nik got into an argument about something or other. Mickey liked an argument, and Nik was quite stubborn. I remember telling Justin his second guitar track was out of tune, but they weren’t having it: “No, it sounds cool.” I was right though.
I already knew some of the songs that appeared on the first side of Scum just from being around Napalm. They were originally a lot slower, but Mickey joined the band and sped everything up. ‘You Suffer’ is one of the most famous Napalm Death songs, partly because it’s only 1.3 seconds long. The lyric is just: “You suffer/But why?” But before they recorded it, it was longer: “You suffer/But why?/Because you’re fucking stupid.” It was still only six or seven seconds, but I guess they felt even that was too long.
The song ‘Scum’ has changed a bit too. It begins with a bass intro, which is the version everybody knows. But it originally started all at once – guitars and bass. For some reason they decided to cut the guitar out.
I had a copy of the A-side of Scum way before it became an album, and I used to tape-trade it with my friends. They’d hear it and go, “Fucking hell, who’s this?” People hadn’t really heard anything like it before – this mash-up of crustpunk and filthy metal that would come to be known as “grindcore”.
Even now, Napalm Death get called a “grindcore band”. I don’t hate that description, but there’s so much more to what we do than that. Plus people misunderstand what “grindcore” really meant.
I might be wrong about this, but my memory is that Mickey Harris invented the term “grindcore”. Mickey had a funny way of saying if he liked something. He’d go, “This kills”, or “This grinds”. He’s got his own dictionary, and sometimes I have no idea what he’s talking about. Mickey came up with the word “grindcore” to describe music that had this heavy, distorted, pulsing bass. Stuff like Swans on their early records – it sounds like someone’s taking a bonesaw to your skull. It was never about how fast you played. When I hear people go, “Grind is about speed, it’s about politics”, I think, “No, you’re missing the point.”
Back then, I was still just some kid in the crowd at these shows anyway. The Mermaid, where I saw Napalm for the first time, was the scene of some amazing gigs. The biggest band I saw playing there was DRI. One of the craziest shows was Extreme Noise Terror, who had come up from Ipswich on a coach with loads of their mates. I remember standing there with Mickey, watching all these punks piling off the bus with all kinds of mohicans. It was like the Addams Family on crack. As it happens, one of Extreme Noise Terror’s singers, Phil Vane, would join Napalm in the 90s for a very short time.
After shows at The Mermaid, we used to go back to Jim Whitely’s flat – the guy who ended up playing bass on the B-side of the Scum album. He’d have 20 or 30 people crammed in there, all in different states of inebriation. It was always a trek to get back to his place. Nobody had any money for cabs, so we’d have to walk, and it was miles away. That’s being young for you. The funny thing about The Mermaid was that despite my initial fears that first time I went, I never had any grief from the punks. I was still rocking the metal look, with my cut-off denim over a leather jacket, with all the under- ground band name patches on the back. It was great to see people getting on with each other.
When I got to play The Mermaid with Napalm Death the crowd had changed a bit – it wasn’t just punks, there were a few more metal- heads in there, too. Things were starting to cross over. The punks loved metal bands like Celtic Frost because they heard bands like Discharge in their music. And the tape-trading scene meant that metal kids were opening themselves up to punk and hardcore bands. Napalm Death were right in the middle of all that. It was a mas- sively exciting time. And it would get even more exciting for me, because I was about to join the band.
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EYE WITNESS: MARTIN NESBITT (Former Earache Records employee)
Martin Nesbitt was living in America when Digby “Dig” Pearson called him at the end of 1988 to say he’d just released Napalm Death’s second album, From Enslavement To Obliteration, on his label Earache and things were going crazy.
Earache’s earliest releases, including Napalm Death’s debut album Scum, had created a buzz in underground circles but From Enslavement To Obliteration, together with the patronage of John Peel and an appearance on the cover of the NME, had kicked things to the next level.
“Dig told me that the album was at Number One in the inde- pendent charts and everything had just gone nuts,” says Nesbitt. “He said, ‘If you come back, can you help me do Earache?’”
The label Nesbitt had moved to the US to work for had just gone bust, so he had nothing to lose. He booked a return flight to the UK and began working with Pearson at Earache, where he would watch the fortunes of both Napalm Death and the label itself rocket over the next few years.
The two men knew each other from Nottingham’s underground music scene, and lived a few streets away from each other just out- side the city centre. “I’d known Dig for a long time, you’d see him at gigs,” says Nesbitt. “He was part of that scene. Bands would come over from America and stay at his house.”
Before his six-month sojourn to the US in 1988, Nesbitt had been involved with Nottingham indie label Ron Johnson Records, worked in a local record store, and worked with a club called The Garage that regularly put on indie bands who he says were, “Darlings of the NME. And in most cases, hardly anybody came to see them.”
The small Nottingham scene meant that Nesbitt knew most of the local bands. It was via his friendship with one of those groups, Heresy, that he became aware of the crustpunk scene. Mixing the raw energy and attitude of hardcore punk with the political messaging of anarcho-punk godfathers Crass, crustpunk was a regional movement centred around second-tier British cities like Bristol, Bradford, Ipswich, and Nottingham, consisting of bands such as Chaos UK, Extreme Noise Terror, Concrete Sox and Napalm Death.
“You’d get people coming up from Bristol to check out the bands in Nottingham and vice versa,” says Nesbitt. “I was blown away by the fact that this scene was totally unmanufactured, in complete contrast to whatever the NME would be losing their shit about in any given week. I started putting those kind of gigs on myself. Dig or the guys from Heresy would tell me about bands like DRI and Gang Green: ‘This band is great, you’ve got to put them on.’”
Digby Pearson’s involvement with the music industry – or at least its fringes – began in 1985 with the release of a five-track flexi- disc compilation titled ‘Anglican Scrape Attic’. He launched Earache soon afterwards, partly as a way of claiming social security benefits without having to traipse to the unemployment office to sign on every fortnight. Napalm Death’s Scum album, which came out in July 1987, would be the label’s third release.
Three months later, on 1 October 1987, Martin Nesbitt booked hardcore trailblazers DRI to play a show at The Garage in Nottingham, supported by Heresy and Holy Terror. Opening the four-band bill were Napalm Death, with the recently recruited Shane Embury on bass.
“Shane’s friend, Mitch Dickinson, had joined Heresy around that time,” says Nesbitt. “Those two were so close. Shane came along with Mitch. ‘Who’s that bloke with Mitch? Oh, it’s Shane. He’s in a band too.’”
By the time Nesbitt had returned from America and was working with Pearson at Earache, Napalm Death had gone from being a fourth-on-the-bill curiosity to headliners in their own right. One of the first shows Nesbitt worked on was a prestigious gig at London’s ULU venue, which was filmed for a BBC Arena documentary.
“Those gigs were chaotic,” he says. “One thing that blew me away was that it was kind of innocent. It never seemed like they were deliberately thinking, ‘We want to be the world’s most extreme band.’ They just fell into that extremity. It was a reflection of all the stuff they were listening to at the time being brought together in one place.”
Pearson and Nesbitt initially worked out of the former’s spare bedroom, before moving to an office in the centre of Nottingham. Nesbitt’s exact role was undefined. “There were no official job titles, we were making it up as we went along,” he says. “Dig wasn’t very sociable, and I was more outgoing, so I ended up doing more of the stuff where I had to talk to people. I had a big record collection and Napalm would spend a lot of time around our house listening to music. They were getting into John Peel and starting to realize that there was a world of music out there beyond punk and metal.”
That appetite for new music would be shared. Shane, Mitch Dickinson and Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris would con- stantly talk up the latest underground band they were getting excited by on the tape-trading circuit. Several of those bands would end up signing to Earache.
“Dig wouldn’t have signed a lot of the bands they did if they hadn’t been around,” says Nesbitt. “It went from Shane and Mickey raving about Repulsion or Entombed to Dig checking them out and signing them.”
The success of Napalm Death, as well as the likes of Morbid Angel and Carcass, helped raise Earache’s profile, turning the label that had started in Digby Pearson’s spare bedroom into an unlikely independent powerhouse. “The label was on fire,” says Nesbitt. “The bands were getting loads of press and selling loads of records. Most of them would end up falling out with Dig, but it was great at the time.” Earache had become an unlikely brand in itself, even though no one at the time would have used that word. Inevitably, some of the label’s bigger bands would jockey for position in the label hierarchy. “The difference between Napalm Death and Carcass and some of the American bands was that the British lot were less careerist,” says Nesbitt. “Most of the British bands had no manager in their early days. There was all this buzz around them, but they were sleeping on people’s floors after gigs.”
In July 1989, Nesbitt accompanied Napalm Death on their first tour to Japan. “Shane and Mick Harris were close on that tour, even though Shane seemed to be the butt of a lot of Mick’s jokes,” he says. “Those two loved the attention but Lee and Bill didn’t like it so much. There seemed to be a bit of friction there. Halfway through that tour, Bill and Lee told me they were leaving. I think they were fed up of how popular Napalm Death were getting. I remember during the last show on the Japanese tour, Lee said, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’, which is what Johnny Rotten said at the last ever Sex Pistols gig.”
Nesbitt would work at Earache until 1992. “Me and Dig had a big fallout and I got fired,” he says. “To this day, I don’t know why.” He subsequently began managing Carcass, the band Bill Steer had left Napalm Death to focus on full time. A few years later, Shane approached Nesbitt with a question. “Shane asked me if I fancied managing Napalm Death after their first manager,” says Nesbitt. “I said no. It sounded too chaotic.”
The two men have remained friends long after their respective connections with Earache ended. “How has he changed?” wonders Nesbitt, “I don’t think he has. He’s a family man now, but he’s still got that love of music he had when I first met him. That’s something he’ll never lose.”
Enjoy and more next time!