BURY TOMORROW
As brothers and bandmates, Dani and Davyd Winter-Bates have become the beating heart of Bury Tomorrow. But what would happen if we got them in a room to actually interview each other?
Dani and Dav Winter-Bates interview each other. How the hell are these guys even related?!
Bury Tomorrow’s 2018 is about to boot the hell off. Not only are England’s finest modern metalcore export spending their summer slaying Europe’s festival circuit before a winter UK headline run, they’ve also unleashed Black Flame, their heaviest and most accomplished album yet. Metal Hammer has travelled to the band’s hometown of Southampton to spend an afternoon with the brothers, bandmates and disparate personalities: quiet, enigmatic frontman Dani and loudmouth, life-loving bassist Dav. Our task? To watch them interview each other for the first time, and dissect the yin-and-yang brotherly relationship that sits at the heart of one of the British metal scene’s most vital bands.
DANI: WHAT’S YOUR EARLIEST MEMORY OF ME?
DAV: “I remember holding you in my arms the day you were brought back from the hospital. The day you escaped our mother I held you in my arms and I said: ‘This is my brother. I will love him for all my lifetime.’”
DANI: “Wow. I can’t really remember last week, so mine’s probably about five minutes ago. I’ve really bad recollection.”
DAV: WHAT’S MY BEST QUALITY?
DANI: “Probably just generally enjoying life; you’re positive about most things. You’re very real as a person. I suppose that’s a good way of putting it, because there’s nothing else going on in there… what you see is what you get, really!”
DAV: “I’m just an empty shell. Your best quality Dan, is… actually, this is really hard, you don’t actually have any do you?
You care a lot about everything you do and I think that’s sometimes really intense, but it’s also your endearing quality.
There isn’t anything that you don’t go 110% on. You are very committed.”
DANI: AND WHAT’S MY WORST?
DAV: “Your worst is that you take everything so fucking seriously. You don’t let go. I think people think I don’t take this band as seriously as I do, but I like that, I want people to see the band as nothing but fun. I’m not faking it. I’m genuinely having the time of my life.”
DANI: “I just want to be the best at everything I do. I don’t think failure is an option. If you’re going to do something, you might as well go full on with it.”
DAV: SO DOES MY SILLY SIDE EVER ANNOY YOU?
DANI: “Yes! [They both laugh].
Any member of the band will tell you that’s just a constant thing: me shaking my head. Being very outlandish and outspoken is just something that’s completely alien to me. It’s just completely not what I’m about.”
DAV: “Dawson [Kris, guitarist] absolutely loves it. He’ll whisper in my ear, ‘Make a weird noise. Annoy Dan!’ and I’ll just start cawing like a kind of weird crow and you’ll be like, ‘Dav, seriously?!’
[To Hammer] ‘Dav, seriously?!’ gets said a lot. He hates it when I burp as well. I hear him sigh and shake his head. Barney
Gumble is my spirit animal.”
DANI: “He makes a horrific meal out of burping.”
DANI: DOES MY SERIOUSNESS EVER ANNOY YOU?
DAV: “Every single day. I just wish at times you would let yourself, without a beer, live my life for one day. I’m exactly the same off the stage as I am onstage, and I wish you could experience unadulterated carefreeness. It’s nice not caring what anyone thinks of you. Because I don’t.
[To Hammer] This is a man who can be onstage in front of 30,000 people, but ask him to do a speech at a wedding and he’ll be jelly.”
DANI: “I verge on superintroverted. I find social situations very hard to deal with. I think the difference is my comfort zone. I’m all about being a frontman, all about my persona and being the best. I want to be as good as you can get. If I know I’m not that it’ll cripple me. [To Hammer] For Dav that’s incredibly easy and it must be frustrating for him to not understand how my brain works.”
DAV: HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMETHING I’VE SAID IN AN INTERVIEW AND CRINGED?
DANI: “There’s video evidence! We were doing a German interview… it’s already difficult because of the language barrier and it just descended so fast…”
DAV: “He asked me what I did and I told him I was an exotic dancer; then I stood up and took the mic and waggled it like it was an appendage and was slamming it on the table. This guy lost it.
You can see the moment on video where his soul exited his body.”
DANI: “I just kind of slid under the table.” DAV: “Yeah… I’m not really allowed to do interviews anymore.”
DANI: WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE LYRIC OF MINE?
DAV: “I actually really like the stuff you did on Repair The Lining [from debut 2009 album Portraits]. The whole song. I know that’s such an old song...”
DANI: “Jesus! come on, bro, I’ve done better songs than that.”
DAV: “[To Hammer] Me and Dan had a family tragedy and I don’t listen to that song very often, but sometimes it’ll just catch me off guard. If that was me, I wouldn’t be able to sing that song. We don’t play it anymore, it’s one of those retired songs, but every time Dan did it back in the day, it hit home every single time.”
DAV: IF YOU HAD TO DESCRIBE ME IN THREE WORDS, WHAT WOULD THEY BE?
DANI: “confident. Verging on arrogance.” DAV: “That’s four words, Daniel.”
DANI: “OK: Verging. On. Arrogance.”
DANI: HAVE YOU EVER HAD THE DESIRE TO BE A FRONTMAN?
DAV: “I am a frontman! I don’t care if I have a bass. I am the Pete Wentz of Bury Tomorrow. I am fabulous. I am the unicorn of Bury Tomorrow and I’m not going to take any stick from anyone.”
DAV: WHAT’S MY WORST HABIT?
DANI: “Your noise. considering I’m the frontman of this band, there’s no noise I’ve ever made onstage that could compete with your snoring, burping or just general screaming.”
DAV: “I describe myself as gross in all aspects.”
DANI: HOW DO YOU THINK OUR PARENTS WOULD DESCRIBE US?
DAV: “like that movie Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. You may have come second, but you got all the good genes and I ended up with the dregs. We’re not just yin and yang in personality; you look like David Beckham and I look like Danny Devito.” DANI: “I’m not sure David Beckham was in Twins.” DAV: “They’re definitely proud of us, but they would describe us as being more different than they could ever imagine.”
DANI: “We’ve been in a band for a long time and I think they’re proud of that commitment.
We’ve put into that for 10 years, it’s a long time.”
DAV: WHY IS NOT DOING PAID MEET AND GREETS SO IMPORTANT TO YOU?
DANI: “I think it’s exploiting people. Our biggest issue with it is that you’re paying for someone’s time and for me the admission price on the ticket is enough. We’ve had such a strong standpoint on it to the point of sounding monotonous. We wouldn’t sign with a record label that did make us do it, if someone’s got a mindset that’s so far away from ours then we shouldn’t be going into business with them anyway. When we were on an American label they alluded to us doing it. It’s a money-maker.
It makes money, it makes sense.
We’re very lucky no one’s ever forced it upon us. I’ve heard of bands having it forced upon their tours and written into their contracts.”
DAV: “We all hate meet and greets.
We’ve had conversations with bands around us like,
‘That’s really shit, why are you doing that to people?’ A lot of bands we talk to say it’s the only way they can afford to do the tour, but what we would say is there are different ways around that. I would prefer it if bands needed an extra couple of grand to do a tour that they release an exclusive t-shirt or an exclusive print, something that gives someone worth.”
DANI: WHEN WERE YOU MOST WORRIED ABOUT ME?
DAV: [To Hammer] “cardiff, when Dan got arrested.
Dan got assaulted, handcuffs the works.”
DANI: “like, really assaulted. I got put in the back of a cop car. It was at an aftershow party and a bouncer took it upon himself… he put his hands on me, on my throat and it just went south from there. But straight away I was released because the bouncer said no charges.”
DAV: “I was just sat there going, ‘I’m going to have to ring my mum and dad to get bail. I don’t have any money on me. How am I gonna bail him out?!’”
DAV: WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR PROUDEST MOMENT AS MY BROTHER?
DANI: “Mine’s when you became a dad. I think you’ve ‘serious-ed’ up a lot as far as life goes because you’re not just thinking about yourself. [To Hammer] Especially to be someone like Dav who über loves the party, loves to have a good time and generally loves being a kid. When you have a kid, your kid should be the most important thing in your life, and that is a fraction of your brain that never had to be tampered with before.”
DAV: “Mine was you stepping out and being a frontman. You’d never had that much confidence to do anything like that and from the second you did it, it was like you were born to do it.”
DANI: DO YOU THINK WE’D BE FRIENDS IF WE WEREN’T BROTHERS?
DAV: “I look at some of your friends and I’m like, ‘I’m definitely better than them.’ I think I’d be in the top three of your friends. [To Hammer] I took Dan to his first gig. We went to see a band called Tsunami Bomb, a Goth punk band, like a femalefronted AFI. We always said,
‘let’s start in separate bands and whichever one makes it first, they’ve got to get the other one in the band.’ I came home from maybe the third or fourth [Bury Tomorrow] show and I said, ‘This is the band, mate. This is the one.’ From the second I joined officially, I knew this was going to be the one that did it. I knew this was going to be the one that does it and we need to put everything into this.”