Gold Key
Say what you want about these Floyd-loving punk/metalheads, just don’t use the word ‘prog’.
Even if you don’t know about Gold Key themselves yet, you might be aware of some of the members’ ‘day job’ bands: guitarist Laurent ‘Lags’ Barnard is the driving force behind hardcore punks Gallows, whom vocalist Steve Sears also produces, while bassist Jack Leach arrives via extreme math-metallers Sikth.
So for this heavily tattooed assemblage to record Hello Phantom, an album of intriguing yet ultimately accessible melodious rock – with audible traces of time spent listening to Pink Floyd, QOTSA, Muse, even Radiohead – you’d think it represents something of a left turn. Not so, apparently.
“I’ve always been into making music that keeps you on your toes, so it’s not really a change,” Sears insists. “I’m not interested in churning out the same records. Gallows could have made the last two albums just like people wanted them to sound, but they’ve never been into doing that. We’ve always wanted to push ourselves.
“So with Gold Key we made a conscious decision not to look at what our contemporaries in punk and hardcore were doing. Yeah, there are definitely some influences, like Pink Floyd. We’ve got acoustic songs that sound like Steely Dan, and people have thrown the ‘prog’ word around quite a lot. For me that’s tough, because from my background I still think of it as a bit of a dirty word.”
Apart from keeping his punk cred intact, an extra issue for Sears has come from stepping out from behind the mixing desk and getting in front of the mic. “That hasn’t affected mine and Lags’s relationship, cos we know how each other works,” he points out. “It’s more of a ball-ache for me. I’m now involved in every different part of the process! For a control freak, it sounds like a dream, but you lose vision, and it’s really hard to hold on to that initial feeling if you’re recording it, mixing it, mastering it, writing it, demoing it and singing it.”
Recording the album was quick. “We’d do a song a day – we would just work it out until we were happy with it,” Sears says.
More problematic have been preconceptions. The band were so apprehensive about being prejudged that they made their live debut at a festival in Tenerife, of all places.
“In the end that was an incredible experience, not least because it almost didn’t happen. A tropical storm was forecast that would have rained the whole thing off. So we all got really drunk, only to be told that the storm has passed and the gig was back on. By that point we were definitely more than half-cut. But maybe that was why it was such a good gig.”
‘Drink more and worry less’ would appear to the lesson to be drawn there. “We’ll just have to see if the fans of our other bands embrace it,” Sears concludes. “I just hope that people think it’s different and give it a chance.” WS
“We made a conscious decision not to look at what our contemporaries in punk and hardcore were doing.”