LOCK UP - Kevin Sharp
Written by: Tom Wilson - Sense Music Media
One of my favourite interviewees of 2020, you never know quite what you’re going to end up talking about when you catch Kevin Sharp over his morning coffee. Ensconced in his Atlanta home, he’d much rather be in his element – onstage, barefoot, wearing a cowboy hat and sounding like the Tasmanian Devil after a case of Red Bull. Dry, eloquent and verbose, I realised that forty-five minutes had passed and we had barely touched on the topic of conversation, being the latest offering from grind all-stars LOCK UP …
Last time we spoke, things were pretty intense in Atlanta. [There had been a police shooting and Black Lives Matter riots around Kevin’s neighbourhood.] How’s the vibe now? Is it any different? [Last time] You’d just borrowed a gun off someone.
Yeah, it’s still here. I’ve never really cared for guns, but what I’ve learned in the last couple of years is that you never know. All I need is enough bullets to get to my neighbour’s house. She is a well-armed, wild and crazy seventy-year-old lesbian … When the zombies come, and I’m not ruling that out – that’s the only thing we haven’t seen lately.
When in doubt, run to the survivalist lesbian with the 12-gauge. [Laughs]
[She has] Large, large calibre weapons! [Laughs] She’s a hoot!
That’s what you need to survive in suburban Atlanta…
People always say that “the liberals are trying to take your guns away.” I don’t know about that, man. All the liberals I know here in Atlanta are well-armed.
Really?
Yeah. I think that’s just marketing, man. I think Americans just love guns. It doesn’t matter if you’re blue or red. They just throw that out, like the whole socialist verbiage. It’s just a trigger word, you know? “They’re trying to take your guns! Socialism! You can’t take away my social security!” You do realise that’s a socialist program, right? OK.
The American right definitely like to pick and choose what they follow.
The new comedy is “The vaccine? Not my body!” OK, how about abortion? “Nah, not you!” I think it’s human nature to want to believe in whatever. The thing is, with media or social media, there is always something out there to justify your opinion. It becomes law. Nobody has any respect for anyone else’s individual thinking. Everyone has bought into some kind of red or blue ideology, depending on what kind of media source they feed off of … Everyone’s ideals are moulded to the situation. There is nothing cohesive about their thinking. It’s just according to what they want to believe. “Abortion bad! However, vaccine bad!” Whatever your opinion is, it’s your opinion man, and guess what? Other people have opinions too. This zero tolerance thing is not effective. It’s why politics are absolutely stupid. I find it amazing how your average person buys wholeheartedly into politics, when I don’t know a politician who would give a shit if you lived or breathed. They’re all dirtbags. They just preach whatever. There is the CNN dialogue, and there’s the FOX dialogue … You get all these people on FOX News preaching, “What about the vaccine? Why must I take it?” But FOX has a vaccine mandate amongst their staff. Everyone at FOX News has to be vaccinated, yet they sit there and preach anti-vax shit … It has nothing to do with message.
Have you been able to play any gigs, or go to any shows?
I want to do gigs more than anything in the world, but I have so many friends who jumped out, and they just got ate up immediately with this shit, and sent home. The whole industry is based on us going out and doing shows so they can sell records. They don’t really know how to sell records outside of that. The agents, the managers, the labels, they just want you out. And you’re out there with the virus while they’re safe in their offices … “Just go out there and make us some money and shut the fuck up.” I want to go do it, but the only way I know how to do it is being in people’s faces, and eating their faces, and fucking cramming a microphone down their throat, you know? Those are the gigs that I want to do … I just looked at Shane [Embury]’s protocol on this NAPALM DEATH tour where they’re out with GWAR. It’s a travelling bubble, and everyone’s kind of watching how MEGADETH did their tour with LAMB OF GOD, and how people are safely doing it. It would blow your mind. People just want to go and see gigs, but people don’t realise what’s involved with it now. It’s insane. It’s a totally different ball game, and it may not un-fuck itself. It could just be that this is the new way. Like back when the World Trade went down, and everyone had to start taking their shoes off at the airport. This may just be the way it is. Shane just sent me a picture of him on the plane saying “this sucks”.
Think about it, man. Every country has their own way of doing things now, so go ahead and try and string together a European tour. Let me see how that works out for you, man. Because currently you have to have two days of negative tests before you enter this fucking place, and then four days later you have to test negative. Devin Townsend did this thing in the U.K., one of the festivals … He had to go over there for two weeks, and sit still for two weeks … I know that people just think that these things happen, but our game became incredibly complicated, man. My idea of touring is going out and visiting the friends that I’ve met over the years, and I hang out at the merch booth and sell t-shirts and tell jokes. I get up on stage and spit in people’s faces. That’s what I do, and currently that’s not on the menu … Mentally, that’s my therapy. I haven’t seen that animal in a minute, and I need to see that animal. I’ve recorded a lot of shit throughout this whole noise, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same as getting outside of your brain for a minute and be able to be the animal … You need a release from your life, man. Your life has been engulfed in flames. People need gigs more than anything right now, because they’ve all been locked up, and they don’t know what to do with themselves. People have been through the height of crisis – everybody I know.
The LOCK UP record really reflected the experiences we were going through, you know? Everyone was on fire. It was super scary then. We were sneaking out in the middle of the night and going to studios and recording things … Tomas’ engineer got sick in the middle of the recording, and it delayed the recording. Of course it’s reflective of what’s going on. It reminded me of going into former Yugoslavia back in the early 90s, and you could hear the gunfights and stuff like that. I don’t know. The world’s on fire, and here’s a record reflecting it … It’s an endless supply of material, man. I’ve done so many records in the last two years, and the material just keeps coming! [Laughs] I’ve got enough for handfuls of LOCK UP records.
On this LOCK UP record, you’ve just gone fuck it and got both vocalists, so it’s a two-pronged attack. What was it like writing for two?
Dude, it was interesting … I don’t know how many records me and Shane collectively have done … a lot, I would say. You try and find interesting ways of going about recording or doing things. This one was obviously weird, because everyone was in different worlds in a lockdown and stuff like that, so we weren’t able to be in the same room. But we’d already done [it] … We did a show one time in Gothenberg, Sweden, and Tomas came out and sang a song with me, and we just liked the dynamic of it. BRUTAL TRUTH had done tours with LOCK UP and stuff, so we all know each other from growing up in this, so when I joined LOCK UP, you start to look at the way Tomas phrases things. It was really interesting to me, adapting his style of writing or phrasing and that sort of thing. That’s how that came about. Just trying to combine the two elements together in a cohesive way. It was more challenging considering that we were stuck in different countries, so we wrote things back and forth, and we would try and interpret what the other one was doing, and it ended up being like, “Here are some words. Do it the way you do it.” It brought in this contrast with the vocal phrasing and tones and things like that. It was a super interesting way of working on records, you know? One of the songs, Dark Force of Conviction – if you listen to the phrasing, it’s super interesting the way it contrasts back and forth. It’s sort of a musical hot potato. I ended up tracking everything, and then taking the best elements out of whatever, and placing them next to or against each other. It was a different way of recording … But I don’t think any of that would have been possible had we not recorded a million records – being able to trust your ear, and interpret what the other one was intending.
I don’t know if I sent it to you, but I did my top ten list of songs from last year, and number one with a fucking bullet was VENOMOUS CONCEPT’s Lemonade. It is so simple, but it just makes me want to break things.
Yeah … it was a hot second. That record was written and recorded in four days, all of it. [Laughs] … When that song kicks off, it’s almost like it’s the start of the largest bar fight you’ve ever seen in your life, where it’s on. Bottles are flying, and fists are swinging!
The Dregs of Hades is out November 26th on Listenable