Barney Greenway from NAPALM DEATH serves up some realness.
MY LOCAL SCENE TAUGHT ME I COULD BE A MUSICIAN He fronts Napalm Death and he’s still fighting the good fights three decades in. Don’t call his band political, though. Wait, what?! MAKE ART THAT REPRESENTS YOU
AS THE FRONTMAN of Brummie grindcore pioneers Napalm Death, Mark ‘Barney’ Greenway has become one of the most important and recognisable voices in the world of extreme music. Since joining Napalm in 1989, Barney has watched his band grow from noisy underground curios to a genuine cult phenomenon, his frenzied vocal style and impassioned political stance a key factor in their success. We spoke to him to find out what he’s learned in his years of service.
ALL HAIL LEMMY
“Motörhead were the first band that encapsulated everything that music could be for me. They didn’t toe the line with anything, they always did what they did. There was a bit of music snobbery at that time about how well you could play, and they just didn’t care about that at all; they just played as raucously and as fast as they could. They were a 360 experience for me. I had never loved anyone as much as I loved Motörhead at the time. They were head and shoulders above everybody.”
“I used to go to a lot of gigs, but when I started going to shows at [Birmingham venue] The Mermaid, and a few other places, and cottoned on to bands like Napalm in those early shows, I really felt like I could be part of something. All of the bands I saw back then had a real ‘If you can do it, do it’ feel about them, and that DIY energy was inspiring to me. I did a few knockabout bands, nothing really serious but a bit of laugh, but it showed me that I could at least do something.”
BE A MUSICIAN, NOT A ROCK STAR
“I find it uncomfortable to be put on a pedestal. There are times when people get really complimentary about Napalm, and
I find that really embarrassing for me. We’re just people who are good at this thing, we have great chemistry as a band and we can do what we want to do, and do it well. When I get singled out for stuff, I always feel it should be the band that get pushed forward, not me.
It’s never been about me, it’s about the ideas getting pushed across. If the ideas don’t get considered then what I do is irrelevant.”
“Napalm have always tried to live and die by our convictions; we’ve always made our own decisions, and if there is an increase in our record sales or popularity then so be it, but it can’t change our attitude to how we approach our music. Bands back in the day would talk about ‘cracking America’ and then write these watered down, half-arsed albums, shooting themselves in the foot. The irony is that you try and do something more palatable and you end up worse off than you were in the first place, doing what you were good at. Play to your strengths; people want what you are, not an approximation of what you are.”
ALWAYS USE NUANCE
“When people shout ‘Fascist!’ at conservative, right wing people, they need to know exactly what they are saying. Fascism is predicated by extreme violence and actual ethnic cleansing. There is a difference between a fascist and someone that is conservative, right wing with views that I might find quite unsavoury. But they are two different things: one is putting someone up against the wall because they are a Romany Gypsy or a homosexual or a Jew and shooting them, the other is extolling the virtues of ‘family values’… which I think is a load of cobblers, but there you go.”
NO MATTER HOW UGLY IT CAN GET, FREE SPEECH SHOULD BE DEFENDED
“I’d love to be able to give you a straight answer to ‘cancel culture’, but I can’t. Put it this way: I’d never own a Screwdriver album or a Burzum album, because in those instances you are potentially funding neo-fascist people, so there is an end product that, I’d argue, you should not fund. The boycott is a powerful tool. There are degrees of this; there may be people who spout conservative values that I personally don’t agree with, but I don’t see that as a reason to call for a boycott. I don’t like censorship, I really struggle with it, because I think it’s one of the last things we have left and I’m not sure how comfortable I feel about pulling the rug on that. There are plenty of bands who I would happily discourage people from buying records from, but I’m not a dictator, I’m an advocate of freedom, and freedom for all.”
DON’T JUST PLAY TO THE CONVERTED
“What’s the point of just preaching to the converted? You’ve already achieved a level of awareness at that point. If your goal really is to liberate all then you need to go and put yourself in difficult situations, otherwise you’re not really achieving what you could. If people really want to take exception to what I’m saying onstage then that’s fine, I’m happy to have these conversations and deal with them accordingly. It’s a mental challenge if people are throwing things at you verbally – back in the 90s in the USA it was trendy to be part of the Aryan Nation, and we often saw people in the crowd Sieg-heiling us.
I’d often go straight to physical confrontation back then. I try not to do that now as it really won’t change or solve anything.”
NAPALM ARE AN APOLITICAL BAND
“I’ve said a few times before that I consider Napalm an apolitical band – people can be quite shocked by that. Obviously, I come far more from the left, but I believe that equality and dignity for all people transcends any political movement. If politics doesn’t strive to give people dignity and a good quality of life then it’s just tokenism, and who needs more of that? This band stands for dignity for all beings and the liberation of all sentient beings. That goes way beyond any kind of political manifesto.”
“PEOPLE WERE SIEG-HEILING US”
PRIVATISATION IS JUST ORGANISED CRIME
“I’ve never agreed with private intervention into health or education because, for one, health should just be a basic human right.
Everybody across the world should have access to free health services – it’s one of the things I’m biggest on. I truly do not agree with putting people’s lives at risk with private money and private speculators. I completely disagree with it, the two are not compatible.”
VEGANISM IS A MORAL CHOICE
“I was 14 years old when I turned vegetarian. My school were very keen to show us the realities of the world and they showed us a film of an abattoir. It horrified me so much, I thought it was one of the most depressing things I’d ever seen, and I just said, ‘I don’t want to be any part of this.’ I went home and told my parents and they didn’t immediately understand, but over time I eradicated the meat from my diet, and then leather and then about 10 years ago I went vegan. It’s a life thing for me, I don’t just hang a coat on it, it’s understanding that all sentient beings deserve a life. I think human beings somehow think animals are just their objects to do with as they wish. I completely disagree: they were here before us, and to treat them the way people do, I find it inhumane. I don’t wanna support the meat or the dairy industry.”
THERE IS PLENTY FOR ME WHEN NAPALM ENDS
“All things come to end, we just keep on ploughing along and doing what we do. Who knows how long it will last for? But there is an academic path for me to take when it ends. I’m really interested in history, especially Soviet history: the aesthetics, the psychology, all the different things, especially East Germany, right on the frontline of the East/west divide. I’ve always had this thing about maybe going into history as a researcher or a lecturer.”
IT WAS NAPALM DEATH OR NOTHING
“I was never a ‘musician’s musician’. Some people might laugh at the idea that I’m a musician at all, so I never had aspiration to be a musical touchstone. All I ever wanted was to make Napalm Death the best that they could ever be. To be honest, of all the bands that came along when I was looking into joining a band, I only ever would have joined Napalm Death. I only ever wanted to do a band that had a particular purpose. Napalm have a purpose lyrically, musically... If it wasn’t that then I just don’t think I’d have bothered. Napalm being as confrontational and freespirited as they are is everything to me.”
“BANDS WRITE HALFARSED ALBUMS TO ‘CRACK AMERICA’”
NEW NAPALM DEATH ALBUM THROES OF JOY IN THE JAWS OF DEFEATISM IS OUT SEPTEMBER 18 VIA CENTURY MEDIA