CARCASS - Torn Arteries
Death. Outrage. Friends.
Written by: Tom Wilson – Sense Music Media
Known for courting controversy in the late 80s with their grisly artwork lifted straight from medical textbooks – which now, 33 years later, I still hesitate to include in this piece – British extreme metal veterans CARCASS have been carving up gruesome slabs of goregrind and death metal since the mid-80s. I dragged founding member, bassist and snarler-in-chief Jeff Walker out of bed to talk about death, moral outrage, and the time they got name-dropped on Friends.
You mentioned that you are going to the hospital. What have you done to yourself?
I fell off my bike a couple of months ago, and I thought I’d cracked a rib, but I had an x-ray, and they reckon it’s fine, but for some bizarre reason the doctor wants to do another one. There’s some kind of dark cloud on a lung. I don’t think it’s anything. I feel fine. Whatever. That seems to be the thing with doctors and hospitals; they love wasting their own time and then complaining that they have no money.
CARCASS are famous for exploring themes of death and decomposition. How did your exploration of this subject matter affect you? And did it make you think of your own mortality?
I mean, personally I’ve always had a laissez-faire relationship with those things. There’s a lot of comedy involved – a lot of black comedy involved in what we’re doing, as far as I’m concerned. The problem is, as you get older, it starts to dawn on you that these things are a bit more real! [Laughs] It’s always been a comical outlook on things, but I’ll be turning 53 next year … When you’re young, you’re looking into the future. When you get to this age, you start to see that your future [isn’t very long]. You start to count things down, you know? You could get depressed and all that kind of thing, but I mean, I don’t. To answer your question, I don’t think it’s really had that much of an impact. I mean, CARCASS is an expression of who we are, not the other way around, you know?
A lot of the artwork in [the band’s] earlier days definitely had a shock value factor to it. I was reading some quotes of you from the early days, saying that you wanted to get censored right away, and you accidentally made a career out of it. I think it would be fair to say that it was a lot easier to offend people in the 80s and 90s then it would be today. To what extent do you think that’s accurate?
Yeah, I mean, the graphics on the Reek… album were hidden away in medical books. They weren’t there for mass consumption by the population. Everything is at your fingertips on the internet now. Everything is in your face … All we did was liberate those images from medical books and put them on a plate for people to see. Was it easier to shock? Yeah. Times were a lot more conservative back then. I seem to remember there was some bullshit in the Australian parliament mentioned about CARCASS … I think some MP raised the question about the album covers or something, [regarding] censorship. Yeah, very strange times. In some ways, maybe we’re heading back to that nowadays. We’re not necessarily living in the most liberal of times. With the internet, everything is at your disposal, isn’t it? It’s one of those things. We’re in the 21st century, so everything’s been done!
CARCASS - Reek of Putrification (1988)
We had those great moral panics around metal in the 80s and 90s. Now, it seems to me – and it may be because I’m not necessarily looking for it – that the great enemy that conservatives are up in arms about isn’t the satanic panic or evil death metal. Now, it’s “LIL NAS X is dancing naked as a gay man!” It feels like people are getting offended by different things.
Are they getting offended though? I mean, it’s just the media whipping up a small little outrage. Maybe there’s just no more centralised media anymore for metal. There’s not many metal magazines or video programs. It’s very disseminated. There are a lot of mediums, like the thing you’re doing, and the rest of these interviews that I’m doing this morning, but you don’t have any of these big metal or rock magazines. Things have been very spread out. People have becoming compartmentalised and marginalised into what they like. Things have spread off into different camps, you know? We had one rock magazine, and if you got an extreme black metal band into that magazine, they were then exposed to normal BON JOVI fans or whatever, and that might shock those people, but it doesn’t happen anymore. People, if they’re into a certain type of music or band, they stay within the limits of liking that band, and they’re not really exposed to anything else anymore. People have their interests, and they just stick to that.
What I find interesting about metal is that it’s a relatively young genre. A lot of its elder statesmen – Ozzy etc – are still with us. I don’t know how much contemporary music you expose yourself to, but what direction do you see it going?
You say it’s young, but that’s fifty years! [Laughs]
Yeah, but people are still with us. The early days of rock music can be traced back to the 50s. I feel like [metal] is younger than other genres.
Well maybe it’s burnt itself out like a star or something. Things always have recycled. People are just putting a new cherry on top of what we’re doing. There’s nothing completely original about CARCASS, and there’s nothing original about most bands … A lot of the time, it’s just repackaging what’s been done before for a newer generation. Every generation wants their own version of whatever … There’s probably kids under twenty now that like some band that sounds like BLACK SABBATH, but they probably don’t like BLACK SABBATH because they look like their granddads, you know? People want to listen to and relate to people their own age. I don’t think a lot of young people want to be relating to Ozzy, you know what I mean? The guy’s in his seventies or whatever. And there’s probably a lot of people who don’t want to relate to CARCASS. They probably see us as a bunch of old blokes, you know? I can totally understand that, because I had the same attitude when I was a teenager. You want your own thing, and you want to relate to people your own age.
Torn Arteries was written pre-COVID and was shelved when the pandemic happened. In the last year and a half, how have you been keeping busy? How much writing have you been doing?
I haven’t been doing any writing whatsoever. I haven’t been doing anything. I’ve just been pottering around, doing a lot more walking and cycling. Yeah, I’ve not been doing anything really. Again, the older you get, time just flies by, you know? There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day anymore. The older you get, distances get smaller, time gets shorter. I’ve got nothing amazing to tell you about what I’ve been doing. It’s really flown by, you know?
Does it get easier to relax and not take life so seriously as you get older? Or do you think it has the opposite effect?
No, I’ve never taken life seriously ever. That’s the secret.
NAPALM DEATH - Scum (1987)
Artwork by: Jeff Walker
How did you first start getting into graphic design back in the early days?
I wouldn’t say I got into graphic design … It was just something I always did. When I was asked to draw anything, for a band or whatever, I just did it, you know? Luckily some of those bands got record deals, or got to release a record. It’s like a DIY thing, you know? I’m still interested now, but mostly I’ll delegate to someone else and get them to do it, because they’re going to be more computer literate and quicker than me anyway. Maybe I’m a real artist now! If you [haven’t] noticed, all these so-called artists … all they ever do is get someone else to make the damn things for them anyway. Come up with an idea and get some poor schmuck to make it, you know? To me, they’re the real artisans – the people making it.
As someone who’s sitting here talking to you while wearing a NAPALM DEATH shirt, I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask one question about the Scum artwork. How would you describe the process of that? Was that using photocopies? Pens?
Just stippling – ink on paper. Just lots of tiny dots. Very time consuming, very meticulous. It took a long time to do. That’s the thing, nowadays, with technology – you could do something like that very quick. Just throw some photos into Photoshop and apply a filter and there you go. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it’s great that you can do that, but it’s not the same. But who the hell has the time to do what I did? [Laughs]
CARCASS got name-dropped on Friends, which I thought was quite bizarre.
Yeah, it’s a weird one, that, because I’ve never been able to get to the bottom of it. I sent a message on Facebook to a producer of Friends, and they got back to me, but he told me he wasn’t producing Friends by the time of that series, so I hit a brick wall, you know? So I’ve no idea why we were mentioned. Maybe it was a scriptwriter who liked the band? Or part of me is thinking that it was a very cynical move by the record label, because we were on Columbia Records, which was owned by Sony at the time, and Sony owned a TV channel, I think … so maybe it was product placement? I don’t know.
Torn Arteries is out 17th September on Nuclear Blast.
More from CARCASS…
Pictured: Jeff Walker, Bill Steer, Daniel Wilding + Tom Draper - CARCASS
Photo by: Hannah Verbeuren
