An Interview with Mark ‘Barney’ Greenway

Written by: Tom Wilson - Sense Music Media

Mark“Barney” Greenway is on his living room couch wearing an orange MELVINS shirt. Vocalist for NAPALM DEATH, the biggest band of the world’s angriest musical genre, he is disarmingly polite and generous with his time, as evidenced by the sheer number of interviews he has done in the last few weeks. His willingness to chat to all comers – big and small, established and emerging – probably has a lot to do with playing in a genre that is so alien to the mainstream. Though NAPALM DEATH may catch flak from purists whenever they deviate from the grindcore sound they helped pioneer with their 1987 debut Scum, they are still a long way from recording their Black Album. Easy listening they ain’t. Agitated music for agitated people, grind is a dissonant, abrasive hybrid of extreme metal and hardcore punk – music born out of dissatisfaction and protest. NAPALM DEATH’s lyrics have always promoted social justice and humanitarian causes. As you are about to read, Barney is a guy who cares a lot, about a lot. But there has been a lot to take in this year, and it can crush you if you let it.

The Interview

What is he doing to take care of his mental health in 2020?

“Well, I’m in a very privileged position; I live near the coast. The beauty of the coast cannot be overstated. For me, living by the sea for the past five years has not lost any of its shine. Even on the worst weather days when we have sea storms, the sheer beauty of the coastline, for me, holds incredible appeal. These kind of things in life that people maybe take for granted, I don’t. I recognise the beauty in that stuff. I’ve got a bicycle, I go out every morning at 6 A.M., and I do a nice endurance ride to start the day, six days a week. That really gets things going. It really sets you up for the day. That really helps me a lot.”

Putting aside for a minute the frankly remarkable mental image of Barney in bike shorts, this kind of regime makes sense. Onstage, Greenway is a force of nature – somehow combining the hyperactivity of a toddler on too much sugar with the voice of a junkyard dog. His energy output is all the more impressive when you realise that he is somehow fifty-one. Clearly, he is aging in Paul Rudd years. Where is the fountain of youth? And is he planning on sharing it with the rest of the class?

Barney laughs. “I’ve been deliberately conscious of taking care of myself, you know? It’s not to satisfy some societal view of the perfect person. It’s nothing to do with that … In as much as I can control it – if I’ve got any power over it, and I don’t get some horrible disease – I’d like to preserve my life as much as I can. I want to be healthy, I want to be active, I want to do the things that I want to do, and I don’t want to have any part in preventing myself from leading an active life. I look after myself, I have a healthy vegan diet, I get exercise regularly, and that’s just it. There’s no secret to it. Calories in, calories out, exercise, that’s it.”

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Five years ago, Greenway moved out of Birmingham, trading the Brummie life for the seaside town of Lancing. A hub of manufacturing and industry, Birmingham was a rough place to grow up for people of his generation. Being part of the working class under Margaret Thatcher was not a fun time. “[Birmingham] went through a lot of periods of deprivation,” he explained. “It has areas there which were very deprived, which I thought was scandalous, because people were kind of left to rot, you know? Wherever you are in the world, I have a big problem with that.”

Living amongst the have-nots had a huge influence on Barney’s values. “I think that when people are cut adrift, I don’t think that’s humane. If human beings actually mean anything, I just think that’s not the way to go about things.”

When Thatcher died of a stroke in 2013 at the age of 87, people held street parties. Revellers walked the streets in Brixton with signs like “Rejoice!” and chanting “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.” This level of vitriol didn’t come as a surprise to Greenway. “She was very cunning in a lot of ways. She deliberately went after more Labour-leaning … more traditionally “socialist” areas. She went after them, and really tore the guts out of them with her national policies. It was not appreciated. She was the enemy of the trade unions. The trade unions weren’t going to back down, so they took her on head-on. She used some very nasty tactics. She really encouraged the police force to be very aggressive to people who opposed her policies. Hence you see the footage of police going into battle with miners and stuff. Pretty wild times!”

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In 2015, a photo of a little boy shocked the world. Lying face-down in the surf on a pebbly beach in Turkey, the lifeless body of a toddler in a red shirt and shorts was immediately seared into the public consciousness. His name was Alan Kurdi. He was three years old. He and his brother were part of a dozen refugees who had drowned while trying to get to Greece, having fled their home city of Kobani in northern Syria, which was under attack by Islamic State. In death, Alan became the face of the refugee crisis.

Five years later, NAPALM DEATH have paid tribute to it with A Bellyful of Salt and Spleen. Animation the colour of sea-spray, it depicts a desperate group boarding an inflatable boat and undertaking a fateful voyage to escape a war. The weather turns, a storm erupts, and they are swallowed by the ocean. Their bodies wash ashore as oblivious revellers drink and take selfies on the beach. A dripping, enraged Barney watches on in horror. Made with Sam Edwards & Khaled Lowe of A-Side Films, it is visceral, haunting stuff, and is one of the best tracks NAPALM DEATH has ever done. How long has he wanted to tackle this topic?

“Well it’s always on my mind, to be honest. Given the album generally was very much around the subject of marginalisation of peoples, and dehumanisation of peoples, even on a governmental level at this point … I mean, this stuff is current – it’s going on right now. And the language about refugees – the fact that they are spoken of like pieces of trash, basically … These are fellow human beings, and what they fundamentally aspire to are the same levels of dignity that we have – those of us who haven’t got to worry about where our next meal is coming from, or whether a bomb is going to drop on our heads. That’s all they’re seeking.”

I mention that, as a father to two young kids, who was fortunate enough to grow up in Australia, I can’t imagine how bad life would have to be to buy my way onto a rickety boat to escape to another country.

“This is the thing; sometimes I think people fail to turn the situation around and put the boot on the other foot, as we say, and imagine … If it was their family, would they not expect to be treated with dignity and acceptance? … I find the conditions around the border system, and the limits on migration, to be anachronistic, and I think that, at some point, this has to change. We can’t go on like this. We can’t go on fundamentally excluding peoples from parts of the planet, making parts of the planet exclusive to a certain percentage of the human population, and everyone else can go screw themselves. It’s not a way forward to me. I don’t think that’s a leftist position – I think that’s just recognising humanity.”

The closing track to the crushing new album Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism, Bellyful… is a slow, lumbering epic in the vein of GODFLESH or SWANS, Barney singing in an almost Gregorian baritone over rumbling bass and scraping, clanging percussion. The drumming sounds raw, coarse … rusty, almost …

“When the album was being recorded, where the studio is, there are a couple of quite small fabrication places, like factories … Shane spotted some old oil drums and cans and some industrial screws – these big, thick things … He grabbed them and basically built a drumkit out of them. They just bashed the fuck out of it, and just recorded what came out. In all fairness, this is not new; bands like EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN … they were the band that used things like angle grinders and recorded them. They were the pioneers of that kind of stuff. You know what, Tom? Anything that’s out of the ordinary that I can do to enhance NAPALM DEATH, I will do. I don’t give a fuck how unconventional it [is, or] how it’s viewed by purists,” he says with a smile, “I will do it.”

How dare he? Doesn’t he know that NAPALM DEATH were just supposed to make Scum over and over again?

“I don’t want to patronise people like that, because I absolutely respect people’s viewpoints on that. How I feel as a member of NAPALM DEATH is that, after fifteen albums, it’s actually the easy way out to just make a carbon copy of an earlier album, whichever one you want to bring up. I mean, what’s the point? That’s a lack of creative input. I don’t want to do that. NAPALM is not about the easy way out – it’s about challenge.”

When guitarist Mitch Harris announced in 2014 that he was taking a leave of absence to focus on his family, the band enlisted John Cooke of CORRUPT MORAL ALTAR and VENOMOUS CONCEPT as a touring guitarist. Having formerly worked for NAPALM as a driver and behind their merch desk, amongst other things, the dreadlocked axeman has been onstage with the band for more than five years. It has to be asked – why isn’t he in the press shots? “John effectively is our live guitarist. That’s what he is. He didn’t really have anything to do with the album – the compositional side of the album. Mitch, feasibly, is not in the band right now. I mean, he hasn’t played with us for five years. He didn’t write any stuff on the album, although he did play on it … The core of the band, really, is me, Shane and Danny, hence the three people in the photos. That doesn’t mean to say that John is in any way undervalued for his contribution to the band, but he is the live guitarist, you know? The core writers in the band … is effectively me and Shane, but the core of the band is me, Shane and Danny … Shane wrote pretty much all the music. Actually, Mitch did contribute to a part or two on the album, but Shane wrote most of the music.”

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NAPALM DEATH infamously recorded a cover of DEAD KENNEDYS’ Nazi Punks Fuck Off in 1993. It has remained a staple of their live set to this day. For people too young to have gone to gigs in the 80s and 90s, it seems crazy that full-blown racist skinheads would have ever had a place in the punk scene. The stories Henry Rollins tells in Get in the Van about going the knuckle with fascists seem like another world. “Some of my first interesting scenarios along those lines were actually in the States. The early 90s, when we went there, it was almost like machismo mixed with a trend to be a white Aryan tough guy, going to gigs and displaying your dominance, you know what I mean? … We would have some very serious situations. I’m not going to glorify these things, because they were fucking miserable. There’s no romanticism about having to fight your way out of gigs because you’ve got people who are there to bully other people – to be really violent. On the other hand, we could see the way things were going. It was poisonous. As a member of NAPALM DEATH, I was not prepared to accept that stuff completely swamping the whole scene … In some areas [of the U.S.], it seemed like that was the completely dominant force, and that was just unacceptable, as far as I was concerned … It’s not bravado, it’s nothing like that, because I don’t wanna be involved in perpetuating violence, cycles of violence. I’m not interested in that. But it seemed like if we didn’t do something, very few other people were. At least it seemed that way to me.”

NAPALM DEATH has explored several different styles since its inception in 1981, shifting from grind to death to a more groove metal sound in the 90s. With 2000’s Enemy of the Music Business, the band left Earache and entered what I believe to be their most creatively vibrant period – one which continues to this day. Over the last twenty years, NAPALM DEATH have taken the grind blueprint and cross-pollenated it with a broad scope of influences from the realms of punk, metal and beyond, and employed a healthy disregard for what you might think they should sound like. Of the three singles released to promote Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism, two of them aren’t even grind. In 2020, they sound nothing like Scum, and they’re better for it.

They sound like NAPALM DEATH.

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