Gore is just the beginning
Desecration is a brutal death metal band from Wales. The band have been causing controversy since 1995 when their “Gore & Perversion” album was infamously seized and incinerated by the police due to its offensive content. The band was told to “tone right down”, but the band continued. Now, with over ten years of experience, six studio albums and countless live performances with the likes of Vader, Decapitated, Morbid Angel and Deicide. Their lyrics deal with “gore, violence, horror, porn, forensics, pathology, big tits, small asses”.
HMA: Hi Ollie, thanks for this interview and welcome to Heavy Music Artwork. I wanted to start straight with your profession as a mortician. Can you tell me what your job entails and what curiosities and human tragedies are you exposed to?
Desecration: I am a post mortem technician, so that is what I am involved in. I’ve been doing it a long time now. I am part of a team that deal with autopsies every day, all kinds of different deaths. Everyone knows what a post-mortem is, I take out organs and brains, and when they’ve been examined I put it all back together again. There’s a lot of other stuff involved though, lots of paperwork and office stuff goes with every post-mortem, so it’s not all hands on.
HMA: How did you get into it, presumably inspired by Carcass ‘Reek of Putrefaction’ medical musical grossness?
Desecration: Not from Carcass, although I was a fan back then. I was more into horror films, I loved the special effects as well as the grimness. I collected and traded old VHS nasties and even got involved in the trouble back then. I had my collection confiscated and some destroyed and going to court all that rubbish. The mortuary job came up while I was doing general science in college and I thought I could do it so I did.
HMA: Does the music help to cope with the job or is the way around?
Desecration: The job inspires me to write lyrics sometimes, but not always. It’s nothing to do with coping, I am a strong minded person. I write music and lyrics that fit together because that’s the type of music I happen to be in. I don’t work with any other metalheads so all day we listen to pop music etc.
HMA: In terms of finding your inspiration would you say that you have an advantage with your death metal pears?
Desecration: Somewhat, although writing so many songs it obviously becomes more difficult, we have like seven albums now, and I was never a good literature student. I don’t enjoy writing lyrics, I have ideas in my head all the time but putting them down on paper isn’t so easy for me.
HMA: What was the most disturbing or life change experience that made its way to the music?
Desecration: Hmm, I’m not sure there’s been a single incident haha. We have written a whole album on the decomposition of a corpse, which I think was a good move. It’s an album that stands out in the whole of the death metal genre, but it hasn’t ever had a good distribution, which has always been a problem for us. Our ‘Forensix’ album was also an album that the whole thing was written around this scientific field.
HMA: Why gore and the grotesque still instil inspiration and continues to feed the imagination of artists and art in general?
Desecration: It always will, just like any other subject. People will always write horror stories and make horror films. People will always have a morbid curiosity and want to be shocked. Desecration will never sing about flowers or politics or anything bar horrible stuff.
Interview by Alex Milazzo – Copyright 2015 © Heavy Music Artwork. All rights reserved.
