JUNE: NAPALM DEATH

Napalm Death and friends brought the heavy to Worthy Farm

It’s been another incredible year for extreme music. With the critical and commercial leaps made by some of metal’s most wonderfully savage, brutal and expansive bands, it just goes to show that music that used to live solely in the underground is getting reappraised in all corners. The most unusual corner this year was Glastonbury, undoubtedly the world’s largest music festival, which had kept metal at armslength for too long – until The Earache Express rolled into town.

Suddenly, Napalm Death, the Dead Kennedys and Wormrot found themselves rubbing shoulders with Ed Sheeran, Radiohead and Bee Gee Barry Gibb.

“I never fail to be surprised by these quirky little things,” says Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway today. “And Glastonbury was just another one of them in the career of Napalm. We kind of look at ourselves and go, ‘Why us?’. When it was first mentioned, we thought it would never happen, but it really worked out!”

Barney is also quick to point out that Napalm Death weren’t as surprising an addition as one might have imagined.

“The part of the festival we did was still very much rooted in the kind of Glastonbury that I used to go to a couple of decades ago,” he says. “It was very pure and organically driven. It was different to what I expected – funnily enough, a couple of the guys working on it had a few mutual friends of mine. It just goes to show you can be pleasantly surprised still!”

Barney is quick to shoot down the suggestion that the bands were there as some sort of ironic comedy act – those playing Earache Records’ Tube carriage stage were as serious as those on the Pyramid Stage.

“Napalm Death is Napalm Death,” he shrugs.

“We never descend into parody, we’ll never do something for a tacky marketing opportunity. We went into it full pelt, a speed attack – I had no intentions of toning it down, and people seemed to genuinely enjoy it at face value.”

With Napalm Death and Earache Records’ somewhat turbulent past, Barney also saw it as a chance to extend an olive branch to a label he believes is rightfully regarded as one of extreme metal’s most important.

“Sooner or later, you’ve got to let it go, or you end up really bitter and twisted,” Barney says. “But it’s done now, and we’ve reached a point where we can deal with each other. Digby [Pearson, Earache founder] was there and it was all very cordial.”

Before the festival, Barney made a bizarre appearance on BBC Radio 2, teaching former Labour leader Ed Miliband how to sing their classic song, You Suffer.

“I actually quizzed him about Napalm off air,” chuckles Barney, “and he got all the answers right. He knew things about the band only a fan could know, so fair play to him for that. But the main thing was they wanted Ed to do the vocals, and I wasn’t keen, to the point where I nearly refused to do it, because it just seemed so trite – do you know how many times I get asked to do that? But, looking back, it’s so spur-of-the-moment and awkward that I do appreciate the humour in it.”

“Ed Miliband knEw things about napalM dEath that only a fan would know!”