Distorted Tapes meets... God Damn

God Damn (L-R): Ash, Thom and Dave

Somewhere in deepest, darkest, Wolverhampton,

in a decaying warehouse overlooking a canal, three young men have spent the last year meddling with the dark art of pedal boards and cheap lager, honing their art to brutal perfection. God Damn fuse together metal and the blues to create a sonic assault which not only plays homage to the Black Country’s roots as the spiritual home of metal, but has delivered a much needed shot in the arm for the Midlands music scene.

Formed in summer 2010, the Black Country three-piece, comprised of Thomas Edward and Dave Copson on guitars/vocals and Ash Weaver on drums, have already played with a host of the UK undergrounds such as The JCQ, Kong, The Chapman Family and Gay for Johnny Depp. Distorted Tapes was fortunate enough to be invited into the world of God Damn and ask them a few questions, as well as record an exclusive live video (see bottom of page)…

For those who haven’t heard your music yet, could you describe your sound in three words?

D: Turgid?
T: Loud? No, that’s really crap. Relentless?
D: I don’t know… Octave? Blues…

T: How about Black Country Metal. Black cus it’s gothy, Country because it’s bluesy – we’ve got a harmonica in there…

D: …and you’ve got the double meaning in there too, because we’re from the Black Country.

How did God Damn form?
D: Thom and Ash previously played in a band called Your Biggest Fanclub. I’d known Thom for years anyway from when he used to come and watch one of my old bands, and it just got to a point where YBF weren’t doing much and I hadn’t played seriously for a few years and listening to the sort of bands coming out about a year ago, I thought the rock scene was coming back. It’s like the electro, danceable sort of indie had run its course and people were starting to look for something a bit different, and it seems that big heavy guitar sound was coming back.

A: It was more of a side project to begin with, more experimental.

T: We wanted to be brasher and more like Kong really!

D: We threw some ideas down like playing in masks or wearing ridiculous clothes or whatever, we weren’t sure what it was going to sound like. It could have been one minute long mad screaming, but it wasn’t until we started writing songs we realised we had something going on.

T: There’s a way me and Dave write songs anyway when we work together…

D: I don’t think either of us had played in a band with another guitarist before, I’d always been the sole guitarist and so had Thom.

T: When we got together we both had song ideas – it’s not like this band has a frontman. I know we did a video and it seemed like I was more the frontman because the camera was on me first but Ash drums like he’s a frontman, it’s what I’ve always liked about Ash’s drumming. I’d like to think that there’s not one person in the band you wouldn’t want to watch as they’ve all got a big part to play.

D: Our eventual aim is to have Ash as forward as us – just leave a little room for us to move across the stage!

Was it quite early on you decided to not draft in a bassist?

T: A bass player would have just been a spare part, and if we had a bass in there it would have ruined the sounds that we were creating.

D: We never said straight off we’re not going to have a bassist. I used to do the octave pedal thing in a two-piece band so it was quite natural that we needed some low-end but we left it open – if we need to get one, we’ll get one – but from about the third or fourth practice we were thinking we didn’t really need to.

T: There wasn’t any thinking of it as a gimmick, it’s just the way we write songs. 

D: No, it’s not like we’re all ‘Hey, we haven’t got a bass player’, but then it’s not that much of a unique thing. We are more likely to get in a Hammond organ, more analogue sounding stuff, perhaps some rickety old piano sounds.

T: But I think we’ll only do that when we’ve run out of ideas, and we haven’t run out yet, we’ve kinda got too many ideas and that’s why we decided to get an album’s worth of material down because there will become a point where we stop playing them and we don’t want to forget them.

So what was the plan with the albums worth of tracks you’ve recorded so far?

T: We’re still waiting for some of the songs to be mixed, but we thought about releasing it as an album for free, but we’re not really sure what to do with it at the moment.

D: There’s nothing set in stone…

T: …but we all agree we want as many people to hear it as possible.

D: You probably won’t find it on iTunes, we’d much rather give out a load of CDs with 3 or 4 tracks on at shows than sell it and sell 2 or 3 copies at the very most.

A: It’s cool to gain interest that way.

I suppose because you’re writing new material at quite a pace, by the time you’ll have a product to put out a lot of those recordings are older songs, so this way you are giving fans the opportunity to keep up with you…

T: I don’t think we would hesitate to play any of our older songs in our set, but we do try and keep quite fresh and maybe if we had played those songs all the time we would have tired of them.

D: We’ve tried to intentionally to make each song a little bit different, perhaps poppier or heavier.

You recently posted a track called ‘Half Soaked Shuffle’ and I certainly felt that compared to previous material it was much more poppy, perhaps not in the traditional sense, but in accessibility. What were your aims with that track?

T: I actually think it’s more heavily produced than any of the others, and sounds much heavier but it’s the fact that it is a shuffle and the chords are the same all the way through. I wrote that song and it is like something I could have done in another band, but it works in this one and it’s still a God Damn song – I think it shows a different side to us.

D: We’ve got another recording on the way, a re-recording of ‘Harmonica Song’ from way back, but done entirely acoustic. Ash did some nice percussion and obviously we had the harmonica so hopefully that will sit quite nicely with the rest of the recordings.

It’s interesting that you’ve done that, as I feel that because of that bluesy, rock ‘n’ roll vibe a lot of your songs have you have the freedom to strip them right back and they’ll still work…

T: Live, we are unlikely to pull out the bongos, but y’know what, if we did a big headline set we’d have a fucking choir and stuff like that, chellos and things. It’s a conscious thing and an unconscious thing – we write songs but they all end up being different anyway. Well, it might be conscious that we think maybe we need a particular sounding song in the set but we won’t forcefully write a song.

D: I tend to look at things in the way of what do we need as opposed to throwing a load of random ideas out there. The song ‘Way Down’ was the product of us thinking we needed a song with a straight up, stomping sort of beat, to balance out our more down-tempo songs like ‘Wigger’, it’s more of a kinda way of thinking about it in the context of what we’ve got and what else do we need.

T: We end up having so many ideas that we can pick stuff like that. Me and Dave tend to write pretty quickly and go through spates of each of us writing, the other taking over when the other hits a dry patch, but we have had times when we’ve both had loads of ideas and we mix these ideas for songs together.

One thing that separates God Damn from a lot of other bands out there at the moment is that you are quite creative when it comes to making videos. Why did you decide to take this homemade approach to making your own music videos and do you think it has made your music more accessible to potential fans?

T: It was really just something we decided to do with our spare time. Some people don’t appreciate the DIY vibe, some people really like it. Personally, I’m really into the audio-visual element they bring to our music.

D: It’s nice to have something to look at, even if it’s not the band and just images the band have picked.

T: You kinda get a jist of the band. We want to keep it real – there’s a danger with this band that we could get branded as a sleazey rock ‘n’ roll band but if anything we’re Black Country hillbillies!

D: The surprising thing I’ve noticed from our videos is when Thom did the Bullseye video for ‘Way Down’ the amount of people who said “that new song you’ve got is class,” but that track had been on our SoundCloud for months, and it’s only down to the video that they’ve got around to hearing it.

T: People have such short attention spans, take for example the intro to ‘Half Soaked Shuffle’ – I think some people listening to the first few bars may be completely put off as it’s quite proggy, but then it turns into a pop song – people give it a few seconds and then move on, and we do live in that kind of world where people have a short attention span when it comes to music.

D: It’s because there’s just so much music out there – it’s not that people are less interested there’s just so much music! Gone are the days of reading about a band and it would be months before you actually heard them, trying to listen to a song over a dial-up internet connection, and then going and buying the CD as a result of hearing that one song.

T: And then you would read everything you could about that band. Maybe it’s something about being younger, but I remember I would buy a CD and read all the liner notes, all the credits…

A: …and that’s what has changed – there’s so much accessible music it’s not special anymore.


Considering the short amount of time you’ve been together, in the space of a year you have already managed to rack up an impressive list of bands you have played with. What’s been your favourite show you’ve played to date?

T: We needed that year to find our sound, iron out certain things live. We could have pushed it and really fell on our faces, but we’ve taken the time to sculpt our sound and I feel we are now ready to get out there, but back to the question…

D: I think it might be quite personal to each of us, but I think mine was The Haygate (Telford) gig with Fever Fever , it was so good.

T: We didn’t have any expectations for it, and it was just really good. We hadn’t practiced for 3 weeks.

A: I had been on holiday and I literally got back and played the gig, so it was very raw.

T: I think we had a lot of extra energy too, because when you haven’t practiced you’re a lot more alert.

A: Mine is probably the Slade Rooms in Wolverhampton about 4 or 5 months ago, we were just on it.

D: That Slade Rooms gig was really good because I think that was the point where we realised we should start pushing ourselves. We’d done a few gigs that were good, and one or two that hadn’t gone so well, but I remember after that show saying to Ash that we had hit it on the head that night.

T: I’m going to say the show we did at Wolves Art Gallery as part of the Home of Metal exhibition. There were about 250 people through the door that night, and because of the dynamics of the room we were really loud. I got a bit drunk on the free booze, but we played two sets – one with the poppier, bluesy songs, and then another with the more hardcore ones.

A: We had a good gig in Stoke, and the Firefly in Worcester…

T: Ah, shit yeah! I’m going to change and say the Firefly show, good vibes, and good people. I love it when you can actually see people nodding their heads and really digging it. I always worry that I’m really fucking deluded; is this just music? Am I embarrassing myself? But when you see people enjoying themselves it’s great. They’re enjoying themselves, I’m enjoying myself and you think you’re the dog’s bollocks!


Have you got any recommendations for bands Distorted Tapes readers should be checking out?

T: There’s a Wolverhampton band called Greaseater.

D: They are really bloody good. We put them on a couple of weeks back with A Pig Called Eggs, and they are the best thing I’ve seen from Wolverhampton.

T: I think they’ve just really found their sound, but they’re so fucking crisp. I thought they were going to be sloppy or scuzzy sounding but they were just savage, it was like Jesus Lizard… they were as heavy as Blacklisters but they just didn’t look it! Next one…

All: Blacklisters!

T: The Midnight Lycan Party, they’ve got some really great songs. They’re from Stoke and have a horror punk vibe. Fever Fever are really nice too, can’t not mention them.

D: Bad Apes are getting quite good now. They’re only like 19, and at first they were instrumental, still quite heavy but more post-rock, but they’ve developed this trashy rock sound and put some vocals in there.

T: The nice thing about being in this band that I’ve never experienced before is that people are saying they want to be in band like ours. I think locally we’ve made it okay to play this kind of music.

D: With bands we’ve played with, we’ll play with them again a few months later and they’ll have added a few extra little riffs in there. Lady Fortune have got heavier, as have Façade – considering they were like Fleetwood Mac it seems Sinead (Duffy, vocalist of Façade) has had her way with them and they’re much heavier.

T: Who else?

A: &U&I, but I don’t think they’d ever recommend us…

T: You can put that in the interview, because they won’t read it!

A: And my favourite band of the moment, Brontide, they’re decent lads, and an amazing band.

D: For anyone who’s younger and only got into heavier music recently, I’d recommend bands like Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, Modey Lemon, Death From Above 1979…

T: …Kyuss, Mclusky, all the bands we started out listening to back in the early noughties.


So what does the rest of 2011 hold for God Damn?

T: We won’t be saying no to any gigs, and I’d like to tour at some point.

D: Just get all our songs out there. I don’t know if we’re going to give the whole lot away, or if we’ll release it as an album, we need to sit down and think on that.

T: It would be nice to get some more good support slots, get some dates together and get to play other parts of the country like Leeds, Manchester, Brighton, just play to more people and hopefully win them over. That’s what any band would want, right?

Watch an exclusive live version of 'Will You Be My Friend' recorded for Distorted Tapes below. For more information, like God Damn on Facebook.