CARCASS' WALKER: 'I'm As Guilty As NEIL PEART For Swallowing A Dictionary Or A Thesaurus When It's Necessary'

Greg Prato of Songfacts recently conducted an interview with bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker of reactivated British extreme metal pioneers CARCASS. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Songfacts: How different was it working on "Surgical Steel" than CARCASS' earliest albums?

Jeff Walker: We're a heavy metal band. So the first thing you use to construct a song is, someone comes up with some riffs. And that's what we did: we put the riffs to the rhythm. Sometimes an individual might walk in with an idea: "Here's a riff, here is how I think it should go tempo wise." But in our band, at least with the drummer Dan Wilding, occasionally we'll pipe up and say, "Well, how about we try it like this?" And we'll turn the riff on its head. So there's no real set way of working; it's whatever you think and whatever suits the song or the riff. If there were three individuals in the rehearsal room and someone had an idea, we tried it, and if it sounded good, we kept it. If it sucked, then we threw it out the window. But it's just business as usual for CARCASS — we've always worked the same way. For example, Bill [Steer] the guitarist, with a couple of songs in the past, he's basically written the whole piece from start to finish, and then I put the lyrics on later. With other songs, they're a bit more... I wouldn't say struggle, but there was a bit more fine tuning. So whatever works. It's not one individual sits at home with a drum machine writing pieces and coming in and dictating to the rest of the band. There's a real group effort.

Songfacts: Is it ever tricky coming up with such complex lyrics? I remember once reading an interview with Neil Peart from RUSH and he says that he works with a rhyming thesaurus.

Jeff: That's almost the same as myself. You come up with an idea or a concept for a song and you write as much as you can and then you come back to it later. With CARCASS, we always try to avoid the obvious. We try to avoid clichés. We try to avoid things that people have said before, unless it's a quote, where we'll corrupt them. We're basically trying to avoid the obvious, and that goes for the music for the most part, as well. I'm as guilty as Neil Peart for swallowing a dictionary or a thesaurus when it's necessary. I'm not that well educated and my English isn't that fantastic. A lot of ideas come, to be honest, when I've had a few drinks. Or maybe you're reading a book or you're watching TV and then you scribble something down — "sound bites," I like to call them — then come back to them and try and fit them into a song somehow. It probably makes interesting reading. It looks a lot more clever than it actually is. I never write a song from start to finish in one sitting. I mean, it's like the music — it gets crafted over time and you're always changing things. And you can always make words sound stronger and better. They're always being fine tuned. Even in the studio at the last minute, when I was putting the vocals down, I'd be changing things because I'd found a way to make the word have more impact. Ultimately, you can express yourself very simply, but anyone can do that. It's more interesting to try to articulate what you're saying, use archaic words or words that aren't that common. There are a lot of old words that we use in English whose meaning is from medieval times and the actual meaning of the word is a lot more horrific, in a way. We use the word "shambles," which means a mess. But it actually means the streets of butchers and slaughterhouses. So it's a really innocent word, but when you look at the history of it, it's quite a dark word.

Songfacts: Do you agree with the popular perception that CARCASS created the genre "melodic death metal"?

Jeff: No. I think it's bollocks. We've always had melody. What I'm trying to get my head around, does that mean that we introduced traditional THIN LIZZY/IRON MAIDEN harmonies? Okay, we did. But we never introduced melody into death metal. The band DEATH had melody in them, and MORBID ANGEL had melody, MACABRE. It's just bullshit to attribute it to us. I guess what people mean is because of that period, '93 and then '94, what followed us from Gothenburg, people are trying to put the blame on us for all that. But we're no more responsible for inventing "melodeath," or whatever the hell it's called, as we are for inventing goregrind or grindcore. We've always been, for want of a better word, a death metal band. We've just noticed it still, that's all. And sometimes due to our terrible productions, we've been the cause of some kind of new musical movement. What we will take credit for is downtuning to B, because no other band was doing that before us. Obviously, baritone guitars existed, and maybe Leadbelly, the blues guitarist, accidentally tuned to B, but we never copied anybody. We made a deliberate decision to downtune our guitars to B in 1987. And if you listen to any metal band now, they're all tuned to B and they've got 7-string guitars. And we never get the credit. Post KORN, [producer] Ross Robinson was a big CARCASS fan. Look at all the bands he produced.

Read the entire interview at Songfacts.