Magazine: Flogging Molly - Part 1 - 'Speed of Darkness'

Flogging Molly - “Speed of Darkness”
 

Flogging Molly’s latest studio album “Speed of Darkness” was released in May 2011.  Described by the band as “the album we had to write” it is a commentary on the world we live in, the economic crisis and the wronged working classes.  The sound is pure, raw, angry Flogging Molly tempered with the gentle sound of a most beautiful love song featuring the rarely heard Bridget Regan.
Grapevine Live sent photographer Tony Bell along to talk to the band’s banjo player, Bob Schmidt, backstage before their show at the UEA in Norwich.
 

Tony:  “Speed of Darkness” – it’s a bit different, isn’t it?
Bob: For me no, for me every album is the same and every album is different, it’s still us doing what we do it just changes as you get older and you let more and more tastes and influences in.
Tony: It seems to be a lot more political – is that a fair comment?
Bob: You know, I hear a lot of people say that, for me I feel it’s more social than political.  We are not really talking about politics we are talking about the effect of politics on people and what it does to people’s lives and to people’s morale .  We are not making any political stand left, right or centre.
Tony:  The fact that it was recorded in Asheville, North Carolina – Obama heartland, is not a political statement then, it just happens to be where the recording studio is?
Bob: Yes with us, when we record we have to find somewhere where we can sleep and live and record at the same time and in the states, indeed all over the world those places are becoming few and farther between.  We recorded a few of the songs on the album in El Paso, Texas – four hundred yards from the border with Ciudad Juraez, Mexico but that wasn’t a statement on the drug trafficking between America & Mexico either.  You go where you can with the best stuff you can get.
Tony: That will teach us to read some deep seated political message into recording locations!
Bob: Well, I gotta say that when we were there, there’s a rib joint – that’s a barbque joint and apparently the Obamas had been there but that was the only mention of them the entire time we were there!
Tony: Some of the promotional images for the album were shot in the derelict Michigan Central Railway Station. (http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/
Bob: It is a brilliant location. When we were doing the photo shoot they let us in, we were wandering around and two of the guys were going up stairwells and when you get to a couple of floors up there are some pretty hard cats hanging out.  Unofficially it has a… transient population! 
It’s beautiful, inside it is massive, and its vast, the wind just whips through it, there are massive graffiti murals on parts of it.  From just the architectural standpoint of what it used to be and you can imagine what it would have been like with the bustle of it going on – and it’s got this phenomenal  graffiti so it’s got like this whole other dimension and then it’s just.. its rubble now and you just look at it and you go wow! 
It’s a statement on the decay of Detroit.  The city make money out of renting it out for film shoots – any sort of nuclear decay movie!
Tony: Back to the album then, I was surprised to hear Bridget take the lead on “A Prayer for Me in Silence”
Bob: Yeah she’s been reluctant to sing for a long time and then when we did Factory Girls we obviously couldn’t tow Lucinda Williams around on tour with us for five years or however long it’s been so Bridget started to do the vocal part on that and I think that made her a lot more comfortable with singing in front of people and singing in general.
When this came along, we were rehearsing and it was all Dave and then Dave got an idea right before we went into the studio, that because the lyrics were so kind of…  not crude, but they were really rough lyrics that it would be interesting to have it in a girls voice. 
In a lot of the same way that Kirsty McCall sings “Fairy Tale of New York” – she’s singing a really rough, streetwise part but there is something about having a girls voice singing that is a great juxtaposition and I think it was that kind of thing between rough, streetwise lyrics and the angelic voice.  And of course it’s them, Dave and Bridget, and they are married and it just all makes sense.
Tony:  “The Cradle of Humankind” is another slow song – not one I’d imagine you’ll be playing live? Bob: No, we’ve not quite figured out a way to get the piano thing going live.  And also it’s a big chunk of time to devote in a set to something.  I like it, for me it’s almost like our stab at, attempting old Queen type of stuff, letting it build into this more dramatic thing.  It has a very operatic kind of feel to it.  It’s also just something we’ve wanted to do for a long time to have something that would build very slowly and very simply.
Tony: You’ve gone all country with “Present State of Grace”!
Bob: Yeah – a little bit!  We really struggled in rehearsals to arrange it and get it so that it wasn’t like this… thud. 
Some songs are so simple and so easy that they need very little preparation and doing. Then you start to second guess it and think, like, it’s too simple, it’s just boring and no one’s going to listen to it or whatever. But we are really attached to the lyric content and we liked the feeling of the song but we just wanted it to do something – there was a lot of consternation about it going into the studio because we never found that place where it sat. 
Then we got into the studio and Dave and Dennis sat in the studio live and played it through from beginning to end and we are like – that’s it.  So everyone got in the room and played it beginning to end, we all laughed and listened to it and that was it. We just done the hand claps and foot stomps as an over dub and that was the song as it stood.  That was what it needed: to be so simple.
Tony: For me “Oliver Boy” is the cracking track on the album, singing about historical Irish subjugation under Oliver Cromwell right up to modern day Palestine when “Oliver Boy” becomes “All of our boys”
Bob: Or indeed anywhere there is war based on ethnic hate or religious hate or whatever.  “All of our Boys” was an idea that came about after the fact – Dave had written the words and… it’s very in the spirit of Oliver’s Army by Elvis Costello. 
Yeah it was Cromwell that did it then but there is a Cromwell in every era, in every country, there is some guy who’s got it in for some other country that he just wants to obliterate.  And we still listen to these guys regardless of the lessons of history when we see they are completely, absolutely & utterly wrong.  And that’s where the “All of our Boys” comes from – it’s our kids and their kids who end up paying the price for some guy who’s just vindictive.
Tony: “Rise Up” brings us right back to good old fashioned protest songs. Were you tempted to break into a chorus of “We shall overcome”?
Bob: Yeah we had thought about doing it like that but it was too... not cheesy but too much of a give a way, it was too easy to do, not cheesy .
Tony: Today anyone can download single tracks from an album, does this destroy the integrity of a recording?
Bob: We still write records.  We write in the context of an entire piece of compositional work, we sequence in so that it has a story, an ebb and flow and it takes you on a ride.  To us that’s what music meant to us growing up and that’s what we want to convey to other people but I’m not going to get mad if anybody only likes one song, that’s fine.  Maybe that song, later on, will inspire them to get the rest of the stuff.
Music fans are fans of music, there has always been singles buyers from the days of The Beatles so nothings really changed it just the scale of it has changed and the availability – nobody ever bought a Pink Floyd single.  But there are always music fans that will buy a record, put the needle down or switch the CD player on and put the headphones on and take the ride.  The only hard thing in this realm of the single digital downloads is still having the ability to experience that ride themselves or to know that that experience exists. 
So while people are still talking about it and saying to kids go sit in your room for an hour and listen, that’s what I do with my daughter, you want to listen to this, go listen to all of it, she’s only three and she can’t do it but she’ll get a fair amount through and she’ll know that the experience exists growing up and she’ll become curious about it – but that’s what music has always been.  Parents handed things down to their kids, they tell the parents that their taste sucks, then ten years later they say wow our parents were really on the bean with that.

Tony Bell's Part 2 on GrapevineLive's Online Magazine soon

Photography by Tony Bell - www.tonybellphotography.com