By Andrew Bansal
NWOBHM legends Raven are ready to release their thirteenth full-length studio album called ‘ExtermiNation’ via SPV/Steamhammer, and boasting a hearty 15-song serving of pure old-school delight, it’s their crowning achievement. The trio of John Gallagher (bass/vocals), Mark Gallagher (guitar) and Joe Hasselvander (drums) have carried the torch for the genre authentically for what seems like an eternity, and based on the strength of their new material and modern-day live show, it is fair to say that they will indeed rock until they drop. I recently had the pleaure of speaking with John Gallagher for an in-depth chat about the new album, their adventures in Europe and South America, the Kickstarter campaign, acoustic kitchen jams, future plans and more. Enjoy the conversation below.
John, it’s good to have you again on Metal Assault. Your new album ‘ExtermiNation’ is finally ready for release. It’s been such a labor of love for you, isn’t it? You spent a good amount of time writing these songs and then you had to do a crowdfunding campaign to complete it. It must be a good feeling to see its release.
Yep! We’re the proud fathers awaiting the birth. It’s true, it’s true. We’re all set and it’s coming out on April 28th. It’s everything it was supposed to be and more, and it’s really good to know that. We sat down a year-and-a-half ago and said, “Ok, what are we doing with this next record?” And here we have it now in our hand and it’s good!
We were just talking about the shows that you did in Europe and South America. How was that run, following the massive US run that we did together last year?
Oh it was great to get out. In South America, we had never played Colombia before, so that was kind of nuts. The show was in a relatively small club in a town called Pereira which was the hottest gig we have ever played, bar none, period, finality. It was almost impossible to have the strength of stand up, it was that hot. And then the following gig was in Bogota, in the capital. There were about 2500 to 3000 people, excellent, crazy, crazy crowd. And they were so young. There was nobody older than 25. They were all wearing the denim jackets with all the patches and stuff. It was like a deja vu from the Netherlands back in 1981 or something, you know. They are so passionate and so nuts about the music, it’s a lot of fun. So we did that, we were in a hotel a day or two later, and there was a 6.2 earthquake. We were up on the ninth floor (laughs). Boy, you’d never see people run downstairs so fast in all of your life. As you can imagine, the building codes over there are not so stringent. Most of the buildings look like they are made out of cardboard boxes. But the hotel was one of the stronger ones and luckily enough, no damage, nothing happened there at all. It was all about a 100 miles away in the epicenter where everything was flattened. So, somehow we got away with that. The only thing that was damaged was our underwear (laughs). Then following that we went to Brazil, which we’d played before but never played in Rio, and that gig was really cool. And then we got ourselves back home for a bit and then went out to Europe. We headlined a couple of festivals and in between played in Helsinki, Finland which we hadn’t done before. It was really nuts. We finished the gig, and you’ve seen us, guitars flying, drums all over the floor. We’re done, back in the dressing room, toweling off or whatever, and the crowd was just going nuts. They wouldn’t stop, for 15 minutes. So we had to go back out and put all this shit back together to play the encore (laughs), which we did and they loved it. So that was pretty cool.
I’m glad the guitar and bass were at least in one piece for you to be able to do that.
Yeah, but as you’ve seen, that’s not always the case. We were lucky with that. And then of course the last gig we played on this Europe tour was the festival in Holland, and it was great seeing the Night Demon guys and with our old friends in Satan, Tyson Dog and Tokyo Blade it was like a high-school reunion. It was a lot of fun.
It’s interesting you mentioning that people at your shows in South America are mostly young because when you play in North America it’s the opposite. You mostly get the people who’ve been supporting you since the 80s. It’s a different demographic.
Yeah, it’s a bit more of a mix here. For a long while, in the late 90s and early 2000s, we were out of commission due to Mark’s accident, but after that we’ve definitely had a lot of younger fans coming to the gigs, which really wasn’t the case before. It was mostly the 30-plus crowd in the early days. But now we’re seeing a lot of young guys .. and girls! A lot of girls are out too, which is really cool. You’ve seen it. We play certain places and it’s still the old guard. But things are definitely looking up and there’s a new generation of fans which is awesome.
Coming back to the new album, I love the fact that you’ve put 15 tracks on there. It shows that you didn’t really have any throwaway music and you were confident in your material.
Oh yeah, absolutely. These were not ‘tryout’ songs like some bands do and you never hear them again. We had already recorded the songs, they were done, and they were going to be on the album. When we went out to play live, we decided to play a couple of new songs, create some interest and see what people think. The reaction, of course, was awesome. Everyone said they loved the new songs. They knew the titles and were singing along, and we had the same reaction when we played in Europe. We had it in South America too, but they were happy to see us, period. But the Europeans have seen us a few times and the new songs really stick out. We look forward to sliding a few more in there for the next set of dates that we’ll be doing.
That’s great. And obviously the live show you do is so visual and full of energy, because of that I think sometimes people don’t focus as much on your musicianship. But on the album you aim to capture that more, and it comes from the production which highlights all the layers in the music.
When we wrote the songs, right from the get-go they were definitely written in a specific way. You want to strip away anything that’s extraneous, you want to make sure that everything you have in the song is a highlight. Everything is a hook. That the vocals are melodic. The guitar parts have great riffs. The solos catch your ear. The drum parts have memorable stops and starts. The bass is solid and has some cool fills. We highlight the little parts that make us sound original. The song is king. We wanted an album that was cohesive and not just a pile-up of a bunch of different songs, but also was diverse. So you’re not listening to seven songs played in E at 120 beats per minute. It varies. There are different time signatures, different feels, but by and large, they are all heavy. It cuts across. And like you say, the live show is really what we’re all about, but when you close your eyes, this is what you get (laughs).
That’s a good way of saying it. So, the Kickstarter campaign was a success because that’s the whole reason you were able to complete this album to the best quality you wanted. But just for people who are may be not aware of how a successful Kickstarter campaign goes, what happens after you achieve your aim? How long does it take to get the money, how does it work and how much do they take?
The money pretty much comes straight through the Kickstarter. They take 10 per cent and then I believe there’s another 5 per cent taken out by Amazon or whoever the administrator is. We exceeded our goal, which is probably just as well, because we exceeded our budget when we ended up counting what we were doing. We didn’t want to have awards and stuff which were low-quality. The cost of all these things goes up and up, but there was enough there to cover what we had to do. And as you know but may be everyone else doesn’t, we did an exclusive album along with the ExtermiNation album for the backers, a cover album called ‘Party Killers’. It’s a set of cover songs that we rattled through when we were in the rehearsing stage for the record here in Richmond, Virginia. These are songs near and dear to our heart from our youth, stuff that inspired us. So you’ve got bands like Thin Lizzy, Status Quo, Slade, Sweet, Queen, David Bowie, and a variety of stuff. It’s a great companion disc to ExtermiNation.
So, this Party Killers album is only available to people who contributed to the Kickstarter?
Yes, it’s exclusive. We’ll resist the temptation to put it out for quite a while and then eventually we’ll bring it out, may be in a different format with additional tracks. But we have to keep the exclusivity for now because the fans deserve that. That’s what they bought into, and that’s what they’re going to get. It will make its way out eventually, but for now, if you contributed, you get the album and nobody else does.
Very cool. And the other aspect of these campaigns, where a lot of other bands fail, is actually fulfilling the obligations towards the contributors, in terms of shipping out the product. That was obviously an important part that you were able to fulfill.
Yeah, that’s as important as everything else. A good friend of ours, Josh Schwartz, who works with a local band in the DC area called A Sound Of Thunder, he was instrumental in this. He had done three or four crowdfunding campaigns already, seeing the ins and outs. We brainstormed for a while to come up with interesting awards and packages for this. And basically because we were working with a record company as opposed to most other crowdfunding campaigns which don’t, we kind of have to follow the release schedule from SPV. So, the stuff will be going out pretty much current with the album release date.
Talking of Party Killers, I think we were in a kitchen somewhere in New York and you were jamming on some new cover songs for Party Killers 2? What’s going on with that?
(Laughs) ‘Party Killers 2 – Blood On The Cake!’ Yeah, there’s an awful lot of songs, and it’s interesting picking the right songs because there’s a lot of really obvious ones that have already been covered by many people. But there are still some interesting, twisty songs floating around. We almost certainly will do it again because we had a lot of fun doing Party Killers, and I’m sure it won’t be recorded on an acoustic guitar in a kitchen (laughs). We still have to do that reggae version of “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” by Judas Priest though.
But isn’t that how most good ideas come, on an acoustic guitar in an unlikely setting like that?
Yeah! Even for ExtermiNation, we were nearly done, and Mark and I were sitting in the living room here with two acoustic guitars, and I just came up with the riff for “It’s Not What You Got”, Mark told me to keep playing it, we recorded it, and within five minutes we had a new song! And then a couple of other things, like the acoustic part called ‘Golden Dawn’ before the song ‘Silver Bullet’, I had bought a twelve-string acoustic a month or two before and that was the first thing to come out of it. When you get different guitars you’ve got different songs hidden in them. I picked the guitar up and that was the first thing I played. So I noted that down and it seemed like a great little intro that we would use on something and it turned out nice. And then, ‘River Of No Return’ was something I had on acoustic, me just entertaining myself, playing around and finger-picking all the parts in it. When we were putting stuff together, we were like, if this was arranged for the band, how would we do it? So we came up with the idea, and as you hear on the intro, all the parts are played on eight-string bass with chiming harmonics and all that stuff going on, that way Mark could make crazy noises in the background. It developed into something else which was really cool. So, inspiration is everywhere! Grab it while you can.
Lastly, what are your touring plans after the release of this album?
We are going to Japan in July, which will be awesome. It’ll be our third time over there and we are really looking forward to that. We come back and do at least two weeks of dates in the States. We’re filling in some of the holes there. Believe it or not, even with the length of our tours, there are always some places you don’t get to play. So we’re probably going up the East Coast, up into Canada and coming back down. So that’ll be the last two weeks in July, and then September-October we’re doing Europe. And then we’re still looking at other things. There’s the odd festival floating around, and then 2016 will be probably one of the cruises and then a whole bunch of European festivals, which due to issues with agencies never really came off this year. But at least the album will be out and people would want to hear those songs which will make a big difference for us. It’s similar to what happened to us in 2010. The previous record was out in 2009 and the momentum built up. So, it will work out good for us.
Related: Raven ‘ExtermiNation’ album review
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