Photo by Karin Hunt / Written by Perran Helyes
One of the true great cult bands of the last two decades of heavy rock history, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats have built up a catalogue of the most idiosyncratic paeans to horror and the macabre, melding psych rock and doom metal together in delightfully seductive and wicked forms. They are the result of a nightmare universe in which Black Sabbath and only the most murderous parts of The Beatles produced a slathering offspring crawling from the womb, ritual knife in hand.
Their 2024 Nell' Ora Blu album was the strangest, most individualistic pursuit of their career. A nearly one hour and twenty minute long giallo movie in audio form, recruiting beloved actors from the 1970s Italian murder-mystery subgenre's heyday to assume their trademark roles and evoking so naturally the kinds of music that scored these blood-bathed cult classics, it was the kind of undertaking so specific in its audience who understand and appreciate the reference points that it'd risk massive audience alienation. Instead, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats' single-minded dedication to such a niche and specific goal gave an even greater boon to their reputation as one of the modern underground's most maverick bands, and considering the depth of that project they haven't waited long to follow it up.
The newest album in Shapes of Midnight sees the band returning to snappier, riffier, and more conventionally catchy fare, but rather than a simple press of the reset button after such a left of centre record in Nell' Ora Blu it sees them really embed some of these new textural achievements into the engine of their sound. With a concept loosely paralleling Edgar Allen Poe's 1842 short story 'The Masque of the Red Death' (itself adapted into classic movies such as the 1964 version directed by Roger Corman starring Vincent Price), wherein the wealthy Prince Prospero and his noble elites sequester themselves away in his abbey to avoid the plague ravaging the poor outside their walls until eventually Death comes knocking for them too, it's also one of their most thematically pointed and purposeful, as frontman and founding songwriter Kevin Starrs takes us inside.
Considering the very particular and huge undertaking that your last 'Nell' Ora Blu' was, the kind you might forgive an artist taking a well-earned break after, it might be a surprise to see another album come so quick. Was it a case for you of just striking while the inspiration was still with you?
Starrs - I was working on a lot of these songs as we were recording 'Nell' Ora Blu', so it was a case of doing one of these albums and then picking up a guitar and working on another. 'Nell' Ora Blu' obviously had its own challenges which made things take so long, added onto the fact that we had the COVID lockdowns as well. We all live in different countries so it was really difficult for a band like us. Two guys were living in North America, I’m over here in the UK, and everything was spread out for a couple of years. We did the 'Nell' Ora Blu' tour and we just wanted to get moving then with the next album.
With 'Nell' Ora Blu' being this totally singular album in your canon with this very specific approach of what you were creating musically there, was it freeing to get back to raw, raggedy rock 'n' roll band Uncle Acid and not the elaborate score style?
Starrs - I think it was. At the time it was freeing for me to do the 'Nell' Ora Blu' stuff because it was so different for me, but it took more and more time having to deal with actors and agents and all of the boring stuff that dragged it out. Creatively it was quite a freeing project, but it is nice to then go back to doing something you’re used to, working on guitar music as that’s my main area of expertise.
You were able to perform a handful of limited shows for 'Nell' Ora Blu' with the larger instrumental set-up in theatre settings. Was that rewarding or a learning experience to be able to do something so ambitious like that?
Starrs - I really, really enjoyed doing it. It was quite difficult with a lot of challenges involved in putting together something like that. We were all on in-ear monitors and having to play to a click-track so all the dialogue could come in at the right place, when we never use a click-track live, so things like that took a bit of getting used to. We were swapping instruments all the time and everything had to be quick and moving and very structured, but it was rewarding once we started getting the performances to a really good level.
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The new album then 'Shapes of Midnight' was recorded at Abbey Road. As a haven for old prestigious equipment, with microphones on this album the same as those used by the likes of The Beatles and Pink Floyd, were you particularly excitable about that?
Starrs - That was one of the attractions for us, the quality of the equipment that they have there that you can’t get anywhere else like the EMI desks that were exclusively for Abbey Road. I’ve always wanted to record on one of those and the microphones are these just incredible 50s German microphones. The main thing was the history of the place. The amount of great records that have been recorded there, that was something I wanted to just feel a part and see how that feeling was. I had a whole list of specific microphones I wanted to use because I knew they were used on various Beatles songs, and whatever we wanted to use they let us. Once you get over the initial shock of being in there though you have to push it to the side because we’re here to do a job, we’ve only got three days, let’s just get on with it and do it.
The album result does have a real crisp production sound, perhaps not as shadowy and reverby as your oldest material.
Starrs - That’s something I wanted to because you can’t just keep doing the same things all the time. Some of the fans will be annoyed that it’s not as dirty as some of the other records, but we’ve got those, so it’s good to keep trying different approaches to mixing and to production. When you’re using those microphones they’re so beautiful that you don’t want to destroy the signal. You want to capture the room that you’re playing in, capture the inflections of the room and the ambience of the room. There’s no point interfering with that.
You have a new addition to the band also in Rachel Burnett on keyboards and saxophones, and the 80s synth choices you're using such as on 'Psycho on the Loose' or the Thin Lizzy-ish saxophone hook in 'I Won't Sleep ('Til You're Gone)' have a pretty pronounced role this time. How much fun are you having with that new element to play with?
Starrs - We wanted to take that on from the 'Nell' Ora Blu' stuff, because she joined us on that tour. It was good to know that we could then go forward and add more synths, and so we brought all those analogue synths back, brought the saxophone back in, and it also opens up songs in our back catalogues that have keyboards that we haven’t really been able to do properly. We’ve never had a band member playing it on stage so it’s nice to be able to do some of the older stuff that has the keys. We’ve always tried to do this with all of the albums, where you pick up something from a certain album and move it on to the next one where you learn something else and take that on and so forth, and I think that’s especially what we’ve done. It’s a culmination of everything that we’ve learned all rolled up into one album.
One thing that's so immediately identifiable about Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats is your acid-drenched distorted falsetto singing style. After so many years doing that now without ever really deviating from it, how naturally does that voice and those melodies come to you?
Starrs - It wasn’t originally by choice, as I wanted to be just a guitar player. I’d write the songs and thought I’d have someone else come in and steal the show, but we could never find the right person. In some ways it’s worked out for the best because I had to step up and become the frontperson, and the voice just appeared in this way. The falsetto is probably easier to do than some of the lower stuff which I struggle with actually. You can look after the falsetto voice a little bit better. Thinking about someone like Neil Young over the years, his voice is still strong. We supported King Diamond and I could not believe how good his voice was. I asked him “Do you warm up before you go on?” and he replied “Absolutely not!” It probably wouldn’t work doing this with a more conventional singer. Usually we just use a little bit of reverb, a bit of flanging or a chorus effect, and then everything being double or triple-tracked so you’ve got multiple layers of vocals that beef it up.
This album's conceptual anchoring on Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death' is an intriguing one, as there's something about that story despite its great vintage spookiness that continues to have something super contemporary about it, with its despotic ruler up on high in his castle. What drew you to that this time?
Starrs - In the end it was kind of an unintentional influence on the album, where I had come up with this story about a village and a mansion overlooking the village where all the wealthy people would live and on the outside there’s this whole hellscape going on of death and destruction, and then I realised that actually I had basically just done 'The Masque of the Red Death' and it had already been written! A hundred odd years later, it was still relevant to today as well.
Reading into the album, it's of course couched in all of the creepy horror-adjacent language Uncle Acid always use, but there's something that feels particularly angry about this album and its lyrics.
Starrs - I think it was. Usually that’s how I start writing, where I’ll read something or see something on the news that will really trigger me and I’ll get really angry about it, some kind of injustice or something that I think is really unfair. This one I think is maybe a bit more aggressive in that way. Musically it is a bit more guitar-driven so it has heavier aggression in terms of the way it’s presented.
The final track 'Sleep No More' feels particularly stark and even political, with references to an ongoing genocide. Are those allusions specific and purposeful, considering what we currently see in places like Palestine?
Starrs - Yes, it is that and a combination of other things that just really upset me. That end bit is one of my favourite parts of the whole album. I wasn’t even thinking about what I was writing, it just all came out without much consideration and then you look back and go “I wonder what that was about?” There’s a line in there “we'll pump our rivers clean, the way they should have always been”, and that is about private water companies in the UK pumping shit into our rivers. That sort of thing sets me off completely, and that thought leading us into wanting to dump a bunch of shit into their open grave once they pass away. It becomes spoken word and ghostly at the end but to almost represent the ghosts of the dead coming back to have their vengeance on all of these people. Death gets all of us in the end, regardless of wealth or status or anything like that.
This album is being released on your label imprint Killer Candy, after a long portion of your career spent on Rise Above. What brought about that move?
Starrs - When we started 'Volume 1' and 'Blood Lust' we were self-releasing through Killer Candy, very much as a DIY band. We took that as far as we could when we didn’t have money to press vinyl or any kind of distribution, and luckily at that point was when Lee [Dorrian, from Rise Above] stepped in and offered to press 'Blood Lust' onto vinyl. Everything there was great and we had a really good relationship with Lee and Rise Above. The contract just came to an end and I knew that once that was done I wanted to go back to self-releasing. There’s something in me that always wants to keep that DIY thing going. The good thing about Rise Above was they never interfered with the music. It was always “do what you wanna do”, and I knew I wouldn’t find that in many other record labels. Most labels wouldn’t accept an album like 'Nell' Ora Blu' for a start, that would be thrown back in your face straight away. I didn’t want a situation where I was signing onto some other record label and they were going to interfere with the creativity, so it would be cool to back to just doing the DIY thing.
You also made headlines recently over your public spat with Gorillaz' Damon Albarn at Roskilde Festival, after your set was cut. As frustrating a scenario as that must have been, it must also have been quite surreal for you as a band from the underground to find yourself in confrontation with this superstar artist from a totally different world.
Starrs - It was bizarre! Obviously we never expected anything to come of it. We were just addressing our fans who were there and were wondering why we were dragged off and not allowed to come back on. We had fans that had been there all day just to see us, they were in the front row with their t-shirts on, and they were messaging us asking why we’d just stormed off. The explanation that the festival gave was that there were some technical issues, but I just felt like I had to tell them what actually happened. It’s just one of those things and it’s blown over, but I felt like we had to stick up for the small bands. We’re very quiet as people and we don’t really say anything on social media, but it was that sense of injustice coming out again. I’ve got nothing against the guy, it’s just one of those things.
This is your seventh full-length, and it lands also upon 15 years of 'Blood Lust', one of the classics of the so-called occult rock boom of the early 2010s. That was a time with so many great bands coming forth, but so many of its key stars such as The Devil's Blood, Purson, or In Solitude are long gone now, while you are one of the bands who have been able to endure and forge a career out of it. How do you feel looking back at that period and yourselves being one of the few to have some kind of longevity from it?
Starrs - It’s weird because I never really felt part of any kind of scene. It just seemed to be a crossing of paths at that one particular point in time. We made an album in 'Blood Lust' that was about the Witchfinder General, and that was something I was interested in because I thought there was some injustice there in the witch trials and it was local history for me. We wrote that album and all of a sudden there were all these other bands doing similar things. We went in a different direction then where we did 'Mind Control' which was more of a 60s California murder cult thing, and then 'The Night Creeper' which was more of a film noir, so we didn’t just stick and do the occult thing which maybe is what some of the bands did. I felt like it was important to not be constrained in any one particular theme. There were as you say though a lot of really good bands at that time, The Devil’s Blood for me probably the best out of all of them and of course it’s a shame what happened with them. But who knows, that sort of approach to music might come back again.
You're in this place where you exist between the rock mainstream where you've been able to go out and play with Black Sabbath or Ghost, but also as discussed earlier are still able to self-release your records and have never lost contact with that underground sensibility either.
Starrs - We were in a strange position and that in-between of things is what I have always felt. Maybe we’re a bit too melodic for the heavier crowd and a bit too heavy for the more melodic fan, but luckily we appeal to enough people that wanna come to the shows and wanna buy the albums, and it’s nice that we’ve been able to continue for so long when never for a minute did we even think we might get past 'Blood Lust'.
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Shapes of Midnight, the new album from Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats arrives September 18th via Killer Candy Records. Trekking in support of the release, Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats will be headlining across the United States.
A current list of tour dates can be found below. Get tickets - HERE
Order Shapes of Midnight - HERE
