Gallows: A Hardcore Banquet

“It blows my mind that we've got this far. I consider it to be pretty much like a stolen lottery ticket."

The antidote to limp, "girly" rock music

Brash, volatile and holding a barrel of four-letter retorts to the establishment, Gallows are not here to make friends and blend into the fold. Bastions of core in the age of limp rock, the band stand steadfast and stubborn against the industry tide that strives to turn everything and everyone into identikit stars and musical commodities of the laissez faire. They will do it their way, or none at all. The feast is all yours to enjoy.

Judging by what you read about Gallows, a lot of which is attributed as coming direct from the big gob of frontman Frank Carter, you’d guess the band were on the brink of splitting up, and have been for a while. There’s one quote in particular, supposedly given to the NME, that gets repeated and repeated and repeated. It concerns Frank’s love of tattooing and how that trumps his affection for music. “Gallows is not my life,” he was reported as saying. “It's a hobby I get paid for. I'm a tattoo artist - that will always be my life and job. Being in a band is something I do for fun. I quit the band four times before we signed to a major label. Gallows won't last five years."

In the headlines

And then, in the NME published the week this interview took place, there was another quote, attributed to Laurent ‘Lags’ Barnard, chief Gallows axeman: “’We went to the studio, Frank went back to tattooing.’” That was the headline. The standfirst? “As Gallows gear up for the Reading and Leeds Festivals, the band deny singer’s hobby will delay their second album.”

Half an hour into talking to Frank and his brother Steph (Gallows’ other guitarist) in the front room of their beloved mum’s house in Hemel Hempstead, where they still live, and both those quotes are beginning to sit rather oddly. Frank is on fire. The following Monday, the band are due to start recording sessions for their new album. He talks with raw and genuine passion about the songs they’ve written, and he’s chomping at the bit to begin. “All we have are demos at the moment,” he says, “but I'm really, really excited to actually record them. There are all these tiny things that my ears are picking up on, and I know that when we get into the studio we're gonna be making a conscious effort to make those things their own sound, and that's what I'm most looking forward to - being there throughout the whole process and smashing things around and seeing what happens."

“This is the biggest deal ever: most people just don't get to write and record a second album, not people at this level.”

Everything we've done has been completely unprecedented. There just aren't any other hardcore bands, or whatever, in our position. I wake up and I go, 'What the fuck is going on?' I'm talking to you and I don't know what the fuck is going on. It blows my mind that we've got this far. I consider it to be pretty much like a stolen lottery ticket."

Three or four more quotes like that and I have to stop him. “Hang on, Frank,” I say, “I’m struggling. You seem focussed, you seem driven, you seem fervent... and that’s just not the impression that a lot of people have of you.”

Tumbleweed rolls gently through that small front room. Steph drops his head. Frank sucks his teeth. And he then bellows: "That fucking tattoo thing was a misquote from one of the first interviews I ever did with them and they did it again this week. Lags was quoted as saying that the four of them went into the studio and I went back to tattooing. That's just not true. There's four other people in this band and do I honestly come across as the kind of guy who's going to leave them in the shit? I fucking hope not. If I was going to do that, I wouldn't have taken the opportunity in the first place; I wouldn't have joined the band. How many times do I have to clarify that?"

There is, of course, a danger that a man can protest too much. In this one-hour conversion, Frank doesn’t. At all. "I was a tattooer first, so I would rather be a tattooer who is in a band, because that will be my career at the end,” he happily says, but there is no point where his sheer dedication to the band can be questioned. The new album will be out in February 2009. As a parting question I ask whether they’re prepared to hit the road for 18 months, like they did after Warners picked up their debut and re-released it. “We want to do 24 months,” says Frank. “People really fucking need to hear these new songs.”

Tattooing, it seems, is on indefinite hiatus.

How it all began

The Gallows story is quite a story already. The two brothers and their three pals (Lags, Stu Gili-Ross on bass and drummer Lee Barratt) formed in Hemel Hempstead in 2005, recorded an album, Orchestra of Wolves, for just over a thousand quid, and found a label – Nottingham-based hardcore/punk/metal indie, In At The Deep End Records – to put it out. A good start, they may have thought, and then all hell quickly broke loose. US punk legend Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion heard the album, and offered to release it on Epitaph in America. Constant championing by the press in the UK (particularly, it should be noted, by the NME) and a series of incendiary live shows later and the band suddenly found themselves in the unusual surroundings of a boardroom at Warner Brothers HQ in London. An alleged four-album (perhaps two, depending on who you ask) £1m deal is inked, and Warners re-master and re-issue the same record with a bonus CD of radio sessions and the like. An 18-month tour begins.

Orchestra of Wolves is an astonishing record, and not just because it was cut for almost nothing. What Gallows have is

"A celebrity to me means fucking Big Brother and shit like that. I will never be part of that, because I just don't fucking care."

songs that are noisy as fuck, of course, but superbly structured and realised. At the root of them is a one-plus-one-equals-ten writing partnership of Lags, who’s the main music man, and Frank, who comes up with the lyrics. Together they created an album, backed by a watertight band, that transcended genre; something that spoke to far too many people to linger only in the hardcore scene. And there terrorising people at their live shows was a small ginger nut with insane tattoos; a born star, even though you’d be hard pressed to get him to admit it. "I'm not a celebrity and I never will be,” he says. “A celebrity to me means fucking Big Brother and shit like that. I will never be part of that, because I just don't fucking care. Those people have to have people call them to tell them where they have to be. It’s total bullshit."

Despite their rapid rise to fame, the Carter brothers remain steadfastly down-to-earth. In this conversation, motor-mouth Frank does most of the talking, but Steph interjects with often hilarious asides. This summer, Gallows supported Rage Against The Machine in Italy. “It was weird, man,” says Steph. “First time we've ever played in Italy and we were playing to 25,000 people in a fucking football stadium. We got on stage and go, 'We're Gallows,' and it took a lot of people a lot of time to get used to us. It's the first time I've ever played a show and someone's thrown a sandwich at me. I was just standing there and next thing I know I've got a picnic at my feet. But it turned out well in the end - it was hard but it was good. By the end of the set, they came round."

Garth Richardson

Rage Against The Machine respect Gallows and so does Garth Richardson, who produced Rage’s seminal debut album. It’s Garth that the band are going into the studio with to record their new album, and he might just be in for a shock. "Everyone is assuming we’re going to go in and do what most young bands do,” explains Frank, “and that's go in with a producer and let it happen; let the album work itself out. But that's not what we want; we just want someone who’s 100 per cent efficient at recording our sound, and there's no better person than Garth. He's recorded some of the greatest sounding records ever and that's all we want from him; to do that for us. Even the record label are saying things like, 'Garth will help you put things in the right place,' and we're like, 'Everything is already in the right place.’ He can suggest what he wants: he already has the demos and I'm sure he has his own ideas, but we're gonna scrap them. That said, there's no other person who has his kind of understanding about our band, so we're really looking forward to working with him."

"We wrote the most violent, anthemic record we could."

And about those demos, Frank adds: “I love them. Hand on my heart, I think they're the best songs we've done. And I know they are because I know how much we threw out – as many as 15 to 20 tracks. If anything, and we'll stand true when it's released, this record is 10 times heavier than the last one. It's fully immense. We went into rehearsals and it could have gone two ways: we could have written a pop record and been the next Fall Out Boy - well, we couldn't have because we're not American and we're proud of our roots - or we could have written a crushing, disgusting filth-fest and that's what we did: we wrote the most violent, anthemic record we could.”

Orchestra of Wolves

Lyrically, Orchestra of Wolves is a personal record; socio-political on a very local level. It takes on the divorce of Frank and Steph’s mum and dad, street violence in their hometown, date rape, even getting your teeth fixed. But what now? Gallows have hardly been home these last two years. Has Frank stayed local again, or is he addressing the larger picture of what’s been happening in his life since they cut their debut?

"Not necessarily what's been happening to us,” he says, “but it's definitely about that bigger picture and that's because of human development. I've grown as a person and it would be really ignorant and stupid of me to have gone off and written another record about myself. I'm a firm believer, because I think music transcends all barriers, and I've begun to understand the actual effect it has on people and their lives. We never set out to be a political band, but we've become one. You do that just by talking about your surroundings. So, whereas the first record was very personal to us, the new record is very personal to us as part of a generation in this country and what's going to happen."

Examples, please.

"Well, the whole record... I don't know how much I can give away, because we're trying to keep it under wraps, but the album is a very damning social-political commentary on the country and the artwork ties in with that - where we're at now and how far we've come. Nothing is black and white - there's a massive grey area. We're trying to progress and it's not really happening. There's a lot of symbolism in there and a lot of metaphors... I wish I was clever enough to actually write it as it is, but there’s a lot of songs on there about religion, which is kind of weird, because I'm not a religious person, although I was brought up in quite a strict religious family. I went to all-Catholic schools and I did that for my mum and for my gran until I was old enough to appreciate what it was all about and, more importantly, our priest raped someone. When shit like that happens, it throws everything into disarray and it makes you think."

What about war? Do you address that?

"Nah. Last time I wrote about something I hadn't experienced first hand, it didn't work out. I'd rather be a fact writer than a fiction writer. There are a lot of bands at the moment that are like, 'This is about war, this is what's going on in our world,' but they're fucking shit and they're writing absolute fucking dog shit. They don't know anything about it, and neither do I. But there are songs on the record about kids stabbing each other for no reason. That's a kind of war. There's no war on the streets like the media tries to make out, but there are some personal wars going on out there. I know that for sure."

It sounds intriguing, but Frank won’t be pushed to reveal more.

"As far as I'm concerned, the apocalypse has begun. Whether you're from a religious background or not, you don't have to look far to see what's going on”

“It doesn't affect me directly, but it does affect me in the balance." And to think they say Frank Carter is a spoilt mummy’s boy who can’t handle being in a successful band. Today, he was a picture of devotion; a man who seems to know his mind and understands the responsibility he has. Indeed, he’s won himself a platform and he’s fully prepared to step onto it. “With the first record, it was never about that - it was us singing about us,” he says. “This time round, it's like, 'Fucking hell, we all need to wake up.' I don't think I can make a change - I have no delusions - but I do think that if I don't say something now, I'll look back on it and regret it. I do have a platform and I do have an opportunity and a lot of people would kill for it, so I may as well use it and do the best thing I can, which is condemn everything."