*In last week’s Wigan Music Reviews Archive post, we featured a profile of grindcore merchants Heaven Bleeds which first featured in the Winter 2005 edition of The LINC magazine. We’ve also found the full, uncut transcript of our original interview with the band which is posted below in full.
How did you all meet?
Dan [guitar]: We originally met in February this year, we all came together from different bands. The line up as it is now is from March, but the original line-up that recorded “Angels Cry” is from February.
Matt [vocals]: That was our first track. It wasn’t too good but we thought it was at the time. After that we lost our original drummer. Matt knew another drummer which was this guy (Points to Keith)
Dan: We’re basically a culmination of different bands that’ve come together over the last three years. I found was in a band, found a different band, found Matt, he found Keith, and that’s it.
Keith [drums]: Me and Matt were in a band together before. Well, we tried to, we never actually did anything, but since then we’ve always kept in contact.
Dan: I think that’s the main point with us though. We’ve all been in bands that have just kind of fallen apart…
Matt: Well, not in Keith’s case. In his case we just stole him.
Keith, why did you decide to leave your old band and join Heaven Bleeds?
Keith: It’s more my style of music basically.
So what sort of stuff where you playing before?
Matt: ahem-emo-ahem.
Keith: It was actually kind of hardcore stuff, but the sort of stuff we play as Heaven Bleeds is definitely more to my style of drumming.
What inspires you to play this sort of music and form a band like Heaven Bleeds?
Dan: I just listen to a lot of extreme music and that just makes me want to pick up a guitar and play the sort of music that I like. Once I could play it, then I just wanted to make my own version of it, and push it as extreme as it could go.
Matt: I just wanted to be in an extreme band like this because I’m an angry little man!
Dan: Yeah, Matt’s got ‘Little Man Syndrome’! I’ve got ‘Can’t Stop Shredding Syndrome’ and Keith’s got ‘I Don’t Wanna Be Emo Syndrome’, so we all came together through our syndromes and… No, seriously, everybody got into Slipknot first, you know, ‘cos they’re heavy. Then I got into bands like Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, and all that. I started learning all their songs, then that made me want to push it further and do my own thing. Then it was just a case of finding somebody who could sing to it and somebody who could drum to it.
Matt: So I came along, and then we poached Keith. Well, we didn’t poach him, we stood on his doorstep at half ten just like ‘join us! Join us!’
Dan: Yeah (To Keith) you had the measles at the time didn’t you?
Keith: The mumps.
Matt: Yeah, so he was quarantined and we turned up at his house when he had the mumps with a CD of my guitar riffs and just said ‘Drum to this.’
Dan: Yeah, his mum said he couldn’t come down, so we just thought if he couldn’t come to us, we’d go to him. This was after we’d just split with our last drummer and the band had fallen apart. We picked it up, dusted it off and said to Keith ‘Look, you’re drumming for us.’
Matt: The original thing Keith said to us was: ‘look, I’ll come down, do some drumming for you, maybe record until you find a proper drummer.’ We were just like ‘yeah, whatever.’
Dan: At that point though, our original drummer knew he was out. We were trying to write the next song on from ‘Angel’s Cry’, but we’d been kicked out of our rehearsal space by the old men at the labour club where we practised. Matt knew Keith’s band.
Keith: We did a joint practice one night, these guys paid half, my old band paid half and we had half a session each. Dan was playing the same song over and over again trying to get his drummer to play it, but it wasn’t working. We had the two kits set up, so I just started playing along, and Dan turned to me and said ‘Have you got any ideas’, and we started playing together. Our old drummer just threw a hissy fit and stormed off.
So have you had any teething problems since you got together then?
Matt: Well, there’s lovers tiffs between these two, but that’s it.
Keith: Us two? You two!
Dan: Yeah, Matt, it’s definitely between us two. If you talk about Heaven Bleeds now, I don’t think there’s been any teething problems really.
Matt: Other than finding a place to practice AND THAT.
Dan: Musically, we’re all on the same page. Like Sunday, we went into the studio and came out with a whole new song straight off the bat and finished.
Matt: I think the main problem we’ve got now is getting gigs and finding the right audience for what we do.
Dan: That’s it. I mean, there’s loads of good scenes around the country for what we do, and we’ve had good gigs in Liverpool and that, but we really just wanna play Wigan! We’ve had one Wigan gig so far and that was a Battle Of The Bands.
How come you can’t get more gigs in your hometown?
Dan: Well I mean Club Nirvana’s become like a really premiere site now hasn’t it? There’s a good chance we’re getting on there in December, fingers crossed. It’s just really hard work getting a gig in Wigan.
Matt: Unless you’re in with the ‘Collective, then it’s really hard to get a gig because they book them just with kind of Wigan bands who are normally indie bands and not like us.
Dan: I actually can’t think of one Wigan band, bar Narcosis who I actually enjoy listening to. Strain have got it, but it’s just not as extreme as I really like.
Matt: At the end of the day we’re just fast, loud and aggressive and those are the sort of bands we should be getting booked with. We just wanna make noise really.
What happened at Top Spot?
Keith: We were totally mis-billed.
Matt: Definitely mis-billed.
Dan: We destroyed it, really destroyed it. The microphone ended up in the crowd at one point.
Matt: We thought it was gonna be a good gig though because there were barriers up, so we just thought ‘right, we’re gonna go for it’, and we did, but there was nobody there!
Dan: Well, there was about 30, 40 people.
Keith: They couldn’t mic my kit up because there wasn’t enough mics.
Dan: You do have a mammoth kit. Keith’s like the Tommy Lee of death metal; we just need the revolving cage and stuff now. But anyway, what was the question again?
Topspot…
Dan: Oh yeah. We got put on with a band called Throttle, who were really good for what they were, but it just wasn’t the kind of band we should’ve been on with.
Matt: What we’d love to do is get a gig in Wigan and bring some bands with us, show Wigan that death metal does have somewhere to go.
Dan: We’re death-grind actually. We haven’t given ourselves that slogan, somebody else did, but we’ll go for it.
Matt: I think we’ve actually invented a new genre!
Dan: Yeah, anyway. I don’t think we were what they were expecting. Especially with the stage show as well. We really do put on a show and just go mental. People just watch us and go “What the hell is that?”
Matt: We’d love to play there again, but only if we get on the right bill.
Do you find that a lot then? Is it hard playing the sort of music you play to get gigs?
Dan: Yeah, definitely. People are used to the same old same old. I’m not saying that what we do is brand new, but we put a new spin on it.
Matt: There’s a bar in Manchester where we play, and we’ve played there four times now, so you’d think they’d get used to us and what we sound like. Instead though we keep getting put on with indie bands, emo bands, hardcore bands. We’ve never been on with bands who are like us that that would make for a better gig.
Dan: I just don’t think people know what to expect when they see us live, we’re loud and fast and we just throw ourselves all over the place.
Matt: That was best, we played a gig somewhere and the owners told us ‘stay behind the speakers, don’t come forward’. And we were just like ‘yeah? Watch this!’ and went all over the place, straight into the crowd.
Dan: They’ve asked us back though.
You all seem like really calm, ‘nice’ lads, but yet you play this really aggressive, angry sort of music. When you get on stage as Heaven Bleeds is that like some sort of release?
Matt: I think so. I mean, I go from being ‘normal’ to this angry little…thing!
Dan: He’s like the missing dwarf from Snow White. There was angry dwarf, and grumpy dwarf, and then there was ‘Black Metal Dwarf’!
Matt: It kind of hurts after a gig because you’re throwing yourself about the place and getting so worked up in your performance.
Dan: You feel almost cleansed afterwards though, you just feel far more relaxed. It’s like, we’ll play a gig, and then apart from Keith, who’s just so cheery afterwards, we stay away from each other for about half an hour.
Why is that?
Dan: I think it’s because we work ourselves up so much when we’re up there, we just need to be on our own and ease off. It’s like coming down. I mean, we love being on stage, we are so in our element.
Matt: One of the best moments for all of us was when we played Chicago Rock (At the aforementioned Battle Of The Bands). We just stopped in the middle of the set and all we could hear was people shouting ‘Heaven Bleeds! Heaven Bleeds!’ That was such a buzz!
So if you have to ‘come down’ from a gig, do you have to work yourself up into that state to go and perform?
Dan: No, no. As soon as I hit that guitar at the start of the first song, that’s it I’m off. As soon as the music starts we all just go mental.
Matt: That’s it. I mean, I’ve turned up for practice in a bad mood and just said ‘Not today, I’m not singing. I’m not doing it.’ And then as soon as I hear it, I’m off.
Dan: I think that’s why we play so well, because we’re just so switched on to what we’re doing. I mean, I don’t sleep the night before a gig, I can’t, I’m just too excited.
Keith: You wake up in the middle of the night don’t you like, ‘I’ll pick up my guitar and practice that, just one more time’.
Dan: Yeah yeah, that’s definitely it. I end up knocking something over when my sleep and it wakes me up, then I’m like “Oh no,” ‘cos I can hear a riff in that. So I try and go back to sleep and convince myself I’ll remember it in the morning. Instead though I end up sat up till like, four in the morning writing a new song.
Matt: We never ever switch this off. We’d never consider this to be a ‘garage band’; we’re totally serious about what we’re doing. It’ll be like, we’ll see somebody stood on a street corner who looks even remotely like they’re into metal, and we rush up to them with a flyer for our next gig.
Dan: We’ve had our problems, but we just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. We’ll never stop working for this band and trying to get as far on as we can.
Keith: It’s the same with the music though. We’ll push each other in practice to go faster and faster.
Dan: It’s good though because there’s a fine line between it being too fast so that you can’t tell what’s going on and it being fast but you can still appreciate it.
Matt: It is really intense though, sometimes we get so angry with what we’re doing because it’s not coming out right that sometimes we wonder if the band will even stay together.
Is that personal animosity, or just the nature of the beast?
Matt: It’s nothing personal no, it’s just because of how into what we’re doing we all are.
You get to the end of a song and then ten minutes later you’re all chilled out again.
Dan: We’ve got a song called ‘Fury’ that is perfectly titled because from the second it opens its just full on.
Keith: We just all go for it, start a song, and then race each other to get to the end.
Dan: We must be doing something right though to look at how far we’ve come in the last eight months. We can’t be rubbish if we’ve come this far. To get into Terrorizer, and to have US labels looking at us and stuff.
Matt: We were all just so, so happy to be in that magazine, for them to contact us first and everything.
Matt: Dan nearly had a guitar endorsement.
Dan: Yeah, I was contacted by Halo guitars, but it’s not really what I wanted because I’m not really a fan of their guitars. But Metal Blade Records are looking at us; they’ve asked us for a CD.
So what’s the highest point you want to get to?
Dan: There isn’t one. Contentment is the death of dreams. We thought our early stuff was good, but then looking at it, we’re just like ‘that could be better, that could be faster.
We want to reach high in the sense that we want to be signed to a good label, with somebody who can look after us, but we’ll always push it and move on.
Do you think it is possible for bands like yourselves to achieve the same success as more ‘mainstream’ metal bands like Trivium, Slipknot et all?
DAN: Maybe not to the extent of those bands no, I mean, you look at Trivium, it’s just stupid how big they’ve got to, not many bands can do that. Extreme and death metal bands can make it big though. Earache Records, they had Napalm Death originally, and now they’ve got The Haunted. You can’t consider those bands ‘mainstream’ but they do have a large following. You look at bands like Cannibal Corpse who are on Metal Blade, yet they have a huge following. I think what you’ve gotta do though, is just put in the ground work [to get people to support you] which is what we’re doing.
KEITH: At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who we’re signed to or how many fans we have as long as we keep pushing the music, getting heavier and heavier, faster and faster.
DAN: We’ve been to the lowest point we can get, but we’ve also been to the highest point so far, and we don’t mind going in between those two points because it keeps our feet on the ground. I don’t think we’ll ever take our feet off the ground or get our heads in the clouds because we all genuinely want to work hard, and it’s starting to pay off.
MATT: You’ve seen how many fans we’ve got on Myspace.
DAN: Yeah, something like 1000 and something. That’s through hours of coffee and late nights staying up and getting people to listen to our music.
How does it feel to be in Terrorizer?
DAN: It’s amazing. That magazine is out in Canada, America, all of Europe, Australia and some other places. Smiths in Wigan have sold out!
KEITH: I bought at least three copies!
MATT: Just think all those magazines though, that’s a lot, a lot of people who’ll hear our music.
We were speaking about Trivium before…
DAN: Yeah, we nearly had the chance to play with them.
Really?
DAN: Yeah, what it was, I was down in Newport and had some CDs on me and went to a club called TJs. Trivium were supposed to be playing there, and I set up a meeting with one of the promoters. I gave him the CD and he liked it and was trying to put us on. It turned out though that sadly RoadRunner [Records] had a policy that barred smaller bands from playing.
We almost got a gig with Cradle Of Filth at the Academy, but that fell through as well.
KEITH: Johnny Truant like us.
DAN: Yeah, Johnny Truant know us. I went watching Raging Speedhorn, and I talk to Jay [Thompson, Raging Speedhorn guitarist] on the Internet. He quite likes us, and he’s buying a Terrorizer because of us. But yeah, anyway, Johnny Truant were supporting Raging Speedhorn, and I was speaking to one of them later and I was like ‘Yeah, I’m in Heaven Bleeds’ and he’d heard our stuff and was quite into it. We’re definitely starting to get somewhere.
So what’s the ideal gig for Heaven Bleeds?
MATT: One with lots of people. Napalm Death, Circle Of Dead Children [Also playing], in Donnington.
DAN: Right, let’s do this: Donnington Festival is pure death metal, and it’s got Circle Of Dead Children, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse…
KEITH: Heaven Bleeds…
DAN: Obviously, erm..The Haunted…
KEITH: Green Day.
[Laughter]
DAN: Yeah, they’d be the piñata. Then we’d have Johnny Truant, Raging Speedhorn, Dillinger Escape Plan… To be honest though, I think a great gig would just be one where there’s a fantastic turn out.
MATT: With people who are into it. Even a tiny place like this [The Tudor] would be great if it was packed out with people who loved it and more bands like us.
DAN: We’re playing a Zombiefest on The 4th November in Bolton and that’s gonna be packed out.
What kind of themes do you write your songs about?
MATT: Most of the time I don’t even know myself! Generally though, the first song we wrote, I have no idea where that came from. I stayed awake for three days coming up with something and it just came out. Then we did ‘Edge Of Reason’, which was because we were getting to that point in the band where I just didn’t have a clue what was going on any more it was going that fast.
‘Last hour’ is a joke name because that’s only a 12-second song.
DAN: A lot of what Matt writes matches the music perfectly. It’s just all weird and with a twist. That’s why I would’ve loved to have played the John Peel events, because he was the one who really pushed Napalm Death. John Peel supported the underground scene so much. It annoys me that all the John Peel events were made up of indie bands. I really don’t remember Peel pushing indie bands too much because it was already out there. I know he had a hand in the dance scenes because he was always at Creamfields, but if John Peel hadn’t lived Napalm Death wouldn’t be where they’re at today. If John Peel hadn’t pushed Napalm Death, Napalm Death wouldn’t have influenced me, and we wouldn’t be at the stage we’re at.
MATT: That’s what we want really, just a chance to see what we can do.
DAN: Not to see what we can do, we know what we can do. We want to show you what we can do. We just want people to give us the time of day, which is going to happen. But anyway, just thought I’d get that off my chest, the John Peel thing annoyed me.
Just speaking a bit about influences. On your website, Keith has Travis Barker [The Transplants, ex- Blink 182] and Matt has Dexter Holland [The Offspring]. Both are a million miles away from the Heaven Bleeds sound. Do those influences fit into what you do at all?
MATT: They don’t really. Maybe a bit of Slipknot but… I think mainly it’s not influences in what I do with Heaven Bleeds, but influences as far as what got me into these types of music. I started with soft bands like The Offspring, and I really liked the way they did their lyrics. Then I got into heavier bands because I wanted things that were a bit more distorted and faster. Then with Corey Taylor [Slipknot] he’s a bit more tapped so I kind of related to that.
Then I met Dan and he’s like ‘Here’s Beserker, here’s Circle Of Dead Children, and now I’m into really deep and hard music.
DAN: I think what stops Heaven Bleeds from being boring is that we don’t have a collected influence, but more individual influences that help bring it all together. Like you mentioned Matt’s influences, then there’s me who’s just into the all-out ‘smash-grind’, then there’s Keith who’s a bit more ‘old skool’.
MATT: I think with Keith it’s good because he’s got the old school. Lars [Ulrich, Metallica] is a big hero of yours, isn’t he?
KEITH: Him and Dave Lombardo [Slayer] but then he’s really good at playing the death-grind stuff too.
What do you make of the current trends in music in general?
MATT: Death metal’s definitely on its way back.
DAN: I don’t think it ever went it kind of just became a sleeping dog..
MATT: It went underground. Very underground.
DAN: The thing is though with Napalm [Death], the way they’ve been put on a mainstream label like Century Media, and The Haunted have followed.
MATT: I mean, you had Slipknot, who were the first mainstream band of their type, but now you hear a bit more of things like The Haunted.
DAN: The Haunted were around before Slipknot.
MATT: No, but you see them more now thanks to what Slipknot have done. We’ve always stayed with the stuff that’s more underground though, and that’s where we get our sound from.
DAN: We’ve got a lot really harsh grind, but we’ve got a clean mix on it so that you can hear the click drums and stuff. You listen to ‘Scum’ by Napalm Death and that’s a really flat recording, but you listen to our stuff and it’s definitely influenced by them, but with more modern recording.
You mention Napalm Death quite a bit, would you say they’re the key influence on what you do?
DAN: Definitely. I mean, I write the stuff. I write all the guitar and then pass it on to these two to finish. So the whole song is based upon what I’ve done. So they key influence always starts with me.
MATT: For me, there’s a lot of the stuff from Slipknot that influences me, but the grind comes from Circle Of Dead Children with some really beasty vocals and stuff. But Napalm are definitely the gods.
DAN: They are. That’s what they’re dubbed – ‘The godfathers of grind.’
Have you picked up a good following then since you’ve been going?
DAN: Yeah, we must have. I mean, 1121 [On Myspace] last time I looked.
MATT: We do have some personal fans who we know, but they always bring more people who they know, so it keeps on spreading.
DAN: I know our name’s getting about though because my mate’s dad works at Preston Uni. and somebody mentioned us to him.
So if all those 1000 and odd Myspace friends read The LINC, what would you want to say to them?
MATT: Thanks for taking the time to listen to us.
DAN: And we hope you didn’t just add us to make your friends-list bigger! Seriously though, thanks for taking interest, come down and see us.
MATT: It’s not as if we just do our gig and disappear, we’ll be hanging about afterwards, come over and chat, we’d love to know what you thought.
DAN: Look out for a new recording around December time.
And to the people who haven’t already heard you?
MATT: Get listening!
DAN: If you see a flyer, come down and see us.
MATT: We’ll put on a good show for you, so just come down and check us out!
By Chris Skoyles
In the build-up to 2010’s Haigh Fest, The LINC Magazine made the rounds of Wigan Borough’s rehearsal rooms and gig venues, interviewing a number of the bands who would take to the stage at that years’ event. 
Wigan Music Archives 