Gary Holt (Exodus)
October 2007
There's a new album with yet another change in the line-up. Tom has left Exodus two years ago due to medical reasons but now he's back...
Tom was undergoing some anxiety issues and it got worse and worse and sometimes you just have to put your health first so you can get on the road of recovery. With being two years away he got through the problems, so he was healthy and ready to go. Him and I was speaking regularly this year and the end of last year when we got back from Europe. We agreed to get together and jam and see how that goes, so I brought the guitar equipment up to the mountains where he lives and we've got a jam and it was like he never left.
So you were sure that he'll return to the band once getting back to full fitness...
It's something that was always discussed. Paul knew it as well that if Tom regain his health we would give him his job back. We weren't sure when it's gonna happen. But Paul was absolutely great and we love Paul, he's awesome. He understood it was best for the band and everything worked out great for everybody and now Paul has reunited with Forbidden for some shows.
It's not the first time Tom was leaving the band. What was the reason in the past?
The other time it was in 1989 and he was suffering from the same health issues. He's actually come to terms with some things. When you are young and go through anxiety issues you don't quite often understand that that's what it is even when it has physical symptoms. But now he's come to terms with what exactly it is now and you have to do that first before you really recover.
How did the recording and touring go with Paul? Did he fit well in?
Oh, that was all awesome. I mean Paul is a great and funny guy and he's a lot like us. We're just like put our hand up like "We don't give a fuck. What the hell is going on next?" (Laughs) Paul is just a crushing drummer and a guy as good as him is never gonna have a problem finding a great band to be in. We had a lot of fun together.
Did you have a stand out show with him on the last tour?
Graspop Festival last summer. It was great. We always enjoy festivals and Graspop has always been great to us but this particular year was special. I mean we always get a great audience there but this time 10 minutes before we went on stage the sky just opened up and it started raining so fucking hard. And we were in one of those gigantic tents so every single person in that festival they're just trying to fight their way into that tent to get out of the rain. So it couldn't have been more packed. It was great.
As for the other members Rob and Lee are relatively new to Exodus as well. How did they settle?
Great. If you look at Shovel Headed Kill Machine Lee joined the band the day we went into the recording studio. He just came in and did his solos and at the same time he was preparing for a Heathen tour in Europe and teaching the new guitar player all the Heathen songs. So he didn't have time to be involved in many things but this time just having two years spent together with him and the entire band is like completely on the same page and going to the whole rehearsal process together was like awesome.
Does this mean he contributed even more to the new album?
He contributed less on paper if you look at the credits than he really did. He wrote almost all the music to Children of a Worthless God and a big part of some of his contribution is sometimes suggesting things to me. And he also wrote some stuff that we have saved for the next album and he's working on 2-3 more, so he's gonna have a lot of stuff on the next one.
Did you have the same approach to the songwriting?
I still sit down by myself first with the guitar and my shitty piece of crap 15 year old 4-track and just working on coming up with riffs. The big difference between this album and the last two was that even if I did write all the songs I let the rest of them band giving their input and sometimes their ideas worked out well.
How would you compare the music of Exhibit A to Kill Machine?
Shovel Headed Kill Machine feels like a machine gun and this new one is sometimes like a machine gun and sometimes like a bunker buster dropping big ass bombs on your ass. It's darker, there are more tempos. Most of the songs on the album are fast at some point but most of them also have a lot of time changes. It changes a lot. There's a lot of variety.
Was it your intention to write the album in this specific direction?
It was just natural. I never set out to write an album in a certain way. I didn't plan to write songs that are an average of eight minutes long with riffs and crazy epics. It just the way it happened. We're just doing what we felt doing at the time.
Nuclear Blast says it's the best Exodus album to date. Do you agree?
I would say it's the best thing we've ever done since Bonded By Blood. Bonded By Blood will always be our greatest album. I will never put that record down as it was just too important of a record for the band.
Apart from Bonded By Blood, do you always see your newest album as the best one?
Yeah, I always say that it's the best one. (Laughs) Whether people agree or not it's like when we do a new album we try to make the best Exodus album we've ever had. It seems like most people tend to agree that we're moving the right direction and getting better with every album. I just tell people that I think that after all these years we're finally starting to get really good at this. We have a lot of experience within this band and we use it to the best of our advantage to improve. We're still shooting for the fucking sky. (Laughs)
Were there any Exodus albums that you weren't happy with after the actual release?
Looking back I used to think that it was Impact is Imminant but now that album grew on me a lot. I love the album but I think it was just way too ahead of its time. It's a brutal album and I think it would be a very solid release now in this era. I think Force of Habit, which I thought was a better album at the time, it's a great guitar players record. I think that has some good stuff but some mistakles too. There are two cover songs that didn't need to be there and having Zetro we're trying to turn to melodic vocals.
Back to the new album... What is the Atrocity Exhibition?
It's just been inspired by centuries of bloodbath and horror commited in the name of organised religion. To me Christianity is just that. It's an exhibition of atrocities. Being back to the crusades and on, people were just massacred in the name of this mythical creature. It's like a 100,000 years from now people look back and everybody was slaughtering half the world in the name of Big Bird (from Sesame Street) or some shit, who is a more real character than Jesus Christ. It's like Barney the Dinosaur or the fucking Loch Ness monster. (Laughs) I've seen neither of them.
So you gathered most of the songs around this concept?
It's not really a concept albums but they are like common themes to the album. Atrocity Exhibition and Iconoclasm deal with organised religion. "Children of a Worthless God" is about the radical Islam. And "As It Was, As It Soon Shall Be" is about the whole nightmare shithole mass in Iraq and this revolution anarchy that turned into an eye for an eye society.
So, you're not closing your mouth...
Ah, hell no, never! I don't know how. (Laughs)
I still remember you got very strong criticism for Scar Spangled Banner, one of the greatest Exodus songs ever in my opinion. Did you ever regret writing that song?
No, never. I never regretted it. Now in 2007 if you look back even my republican friends they understand that I was right but in 2003 to criticise the government everybody considered you like unpatriotic, which is bullshit. Since when somebody ever been not a patriot if they disagreed with somebody? Just because you say that our governemnt is a bunch of idiots? And now even republicans are saying that George Bush is an idiot (Laughs) and it means that I was right. They can just kiss my ass if they didn't like it. On this album when we're talking about the war in Iraq we're not condemn it like a bunch of liberals. I state it from my point of view, which has always been, that I've never gave a shit about liberating anybody in Iraq. It doesn't concern me, Saddam could gas the whole fucking country, I don't care.
You wrote that song four years ago and your troops are still there and there's no sign of moving out...
We're never going to get out. There will also be American force in Iraq. There's just no way we're ever gonna be able to hand it over to them because you have too many worrying factions fighting for control. It's not one group of people and it has nothing to do with Islam or anything like that. You have the Shi'a and Sunnis and they hate each other and they're all countrymen. That'd be like Northern Californians going to war with Southern Californians. (Laughs) It's like we fucking live in the same state but we hate each other. That's not the case here but over there it is.
And soon Bush is moving in into Iran...
Oh yeah, no doubt that he wants to but it can be a hard task now because no one believe anything he says now after all the lies that we're told to get a war with Iraq in the first place. I'm very conservative on some of my views and I don't think Iran should get their hands on any fucking sort of nuclear weapons but I don't know if they have one. As for George Bush, he just wants to fucking bomb people. (Laughs)
Where there's an Exhibit A there should be an Exhibit B as well...
It just started as an idea because when doing this album we run into a problem, but a good one, and that was that we had way too much music and great songs. None of them were like bonus tracks worthy so we decided to keep them for the next album. And I suddenly decided to make it a two part album and hopefully go back in the studio at the end of the year and work on some more songs and you'll have the second one out maybe about a year after this one.
Are you keeping the same direction for the second part?
You know, it's all heavy. (Laughs) The four we have stand absolutely on their own with anything off this album. And the rest of the songs that we are working on riffs right now... it's gonna be crushing. What direction will they go in the end is kinda hard to say. Will it be epics, will it be more short fast songs, I don't know. Right now I'm writing more fast shit.
What songs off Exhibit A do you think would work out the best in live situations?
Shit, I don't know, we've only played two of them live. That was "Funeral Hymn" and "Bedlam 1-2-3" and the crowd went crazy. I just can't wait to get out here in a couple of weeks on our South American tour and start playing a bunch of them.
And what is your favourite song on the album?
It changes all the time although I haven't listened to them in a couple of months. I don't listen to our own shit all the time. But just humming on in my head lately is "Children of a Worthless God".
Do you also have plans coming back to Europe with the upcoming tour?
Yeah, we're working on Europe for next year, probably around March when we finish the US tour. We're planning to do a headline tour but nothing is confirmed yet. We aren't sure what we're gonna do. There's a couple of different ideas floating around now.
Is there any band that you would support anytime?
Obviously Slayer. (Laughs) That'd be a perfect match. In Europe the options are greater because you can tour with bands that aren't necessarily musically like you and the crowd get into it and dig it anyway. Over here in America they don't try to mix it up much. I think in Europe we could play with anybody from In Flames to Dimmu Borgir and do just fine. Over here maybe we might scare some of the younger kids, I don't know. (Laughs)
You played in Hungary last year. Did you enjoy that gig?
It was a great show. Nothing spectacular memory-wise. The last time was really good but the time before that when we played on that boat that was awesome because we really went walking into town and did some shopping and cruising around so we actually got to see a lot of the city and it was amazing.