NAPALM DEATH Frontman Discusses Pleasures Of Soft Rock

January 28, 2009

Vocalist Mark "Barney" Greenway of British grindcore pioneers NAPALM DEATH recently spoke to Toby Cook of The Quietus about the pleasures of soft rock, why it won't be playing at his funeral and what pisses him off about the genre's modern pretenders. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Greenway: Yes, I like soft rock. I make no bones about it and I'm certainly not in the closet with it; if someone asks me, I'll tell them. It's not usually something that comes up in conversation because for the main part my sphere of influence, and what I like, is about as noisy as it can get. But I'm just a music fan, really; I like all kinds of things. In my formative years, I was perhaps a bit more blinkered, but as I've got on, I've come to appreciate different things — I even like ambient music, and all sorts of music even more gentle than soft rock. If you ask anyone out there that says they are a music fan, I don't think anyone would say that they entirely love just one thing all of the time. The exception would be when you're younger — then you're a bit more like, 'Nah, that's shit' or 'Yeah that's great.'

"Soft rock encompasses a wide spectrum of artists. I think you could call RADIOHEAD soft rock, and MUSE also. MUSE I really like, and a lot of their stuff is soft rock, I mean, what else can you call it? I know you can split stuff into sub-genres, but some of it is really, really melodically intense and so there's a whole, huge spectrum of soft rock and it all comes down to definition and perception. This is why I'm always loathed to pigeonhole things — I hate splitting hairs with genres because I don't think it serves a purpose, I think it can get pretty pointless after while. For example, I often have debates with people about what is grindcore, what is this, what is that and you know what? It's fucking irrelevant. When I go in to make an album I want it to sound like NAPALM — I want it to be uncompromising and spontaneous and outside of that anything else kind of pales into insignificance, really."

Read the entire interview from The Quietus.

Austrian heavy 'zine Stormbringer.at conducted an interview with Mark "Barney" Greenway when he traveled with the "Persistence Tour" for a few days at the end of 2008. Watch the 16-minute chat below.

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